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Title: The Wild Body. A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories.
Author: Lewis, Percy Wyndham (1882-1957)
Date of first publication: 1927
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928
Date first posted: 12 October 2011
Date last updated: 12 October 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #868

This ebook was produced by Barbara Watson
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

This ebook was produced from images generously made
available by the Internet Archive






                              THE WILD BODY




                            _By Wyndham Lewis_

                           TIME AND WESTERN MAN
                          THE ART OF BEING RULED
                            THE LION & THE FOX
                                   TARR

                             THE APES OF GOD
                             (in preparation)




                                   THE
                                WILD BODY


                           A SOLDIER OF HUMOUR
                            AND OTHER STORIES


                                    By
                              WYNDHAM LEWIS



                                New York
                       HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY




                           COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY
                    HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.




                       PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
                       QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
                              RAHWAY, N. J.




FOREWORD


This collection is composed either (1) of stories now entirely rewritten
within the last few months, or (2) of new stories written upon a theme
already sketched and in an earlier form already published, or (3) of
stories written within the last few months and now published for the
first time. Titles have in most cases been changed.

The last two stories (_Sigismund_, which appeared in _Art and Letters_,
1922, and _You Broke My Dream_) are of more recent date. The others now
form a series all belonging to an imaginary story-teller, whom I have
named Ker-Orr. They represent my entire literary output prior to the
war, with the exception of _The Enemy of the Stars_, a play which
appeared in the 1914 _Blast_, and a group of war-stories.

What I have done in this book is to take the original matter rather as a
theme for a new story. My reason for doing this was that the material,
when I took it up again with a view to republishing, seemed to me to
deserve the hand of a better artist than I was when I made those few
hasty notes of very early travel.

The first story of the series, _The Soldier of Humour_, appeared in its
original form in _The Little Review_ (an american publication) of
1917-18. In it the showman, Ker-Orr, is, we are to suppose, at a later
stage of his comic technique than in the accounts of his adventures in
Brittany. _Beau Sjour_ is the first hotel at which he stops. (This,
except for the note at the end, is a new story.) _Inferior Religions_,
which also was first printed in _The Little Review_ during the war, and
the notes attached to it, which are new material, will serve as a
commentary on the system of feeling developed in these tales, and as an
explanation, if that is needed, of the title I have chosen for the
collection, _The Wild Body_.

                                                      WYNDHAM LEWIS.

_July 6, 1927._




CONTENTS


FOREWORD                       _page_ v
A SOLDIER OF HUMOUR                   3
BEAU SEJOUR                          66
BESTRE                              114
THE CORNAC AND HIS WIFE             137
THE DEATH OF THE ANKOU              167
FRANCISCAN ADVENTURES               185
BROTCOTNAZ                          208
INFERIOR RELIGIONS                  233
THE MEANING OF THE WILD BODY        244

SIGISMUND                           255
YOU BROKE MY DREAM                  284





A SOLDIER OF HUMOUR
BEAU SEJOUR
BESTRE
THE CORNAC AND HIS WIFE
THE DEATH OF THE ANKOU
FRANCISCAN ADVENTURES
BROTCOTNAZ
INFERIOR RELIGIONS
THE MEANING OF THE WILD BODY




A SOLDIER OF HUMOUR


PART I

Spain is an overflow of sombreness. 'Africa commences at the Pyrenees.'
Spain is a check-board of Black and Goth, on which primitive gallic
chivalry played its most brilliant games. At the gates of Spain the
landscape gradually becomes comes historic with Roland. His fame dies as
difficultly as the flourish of the cor de chasse. It lives like a
superfine antelope in the gorges of the Pyrenees, becoming more and more
ethereal and gentle. Charlemagne moves Knights and Queens beneath that
tree; there is something eternal and rembrandtesque about his
proceedings. A stormy and threatening tide of history meets you at the
frontier.

Several summers ago I was cast by fate for a fierce and prolonged little
comedy--an essentially spanish comedy. It appropriately began at
Bayonne, where Spain, not Africa, begins.

I am a large blond clown, ever so vaguely reminiscent (in person) of
William Blake, and some great american boxer whose name I forget. I have
large strong teeth which I gnash and flash when I laugh. But usually a
look of settled and aggressive navet rests on my face. I know much
more about myself than people generally do. For instance I am aware
that I am a barbarian. By rights I should be paddling about in a
coracle. My body is large, white and savage. But all the fierceness has
become transformed into _laughter_. It still looks like a visi-gothic
fighting-machine, but it is in reality a _laughing_ machine. As I have
remarked, when I laugh I gnash my teeth, which is another brutal
survival and a thing laughter has taken over from war. Everywhere where
formerly I would fly at throats, I now howl with laughter. That is me.

So I have never forgotten that I am really a barbarian. I have clung
coldly to this consciousness. I realize, similarly, the uncivilized
nature of my laughter. It does not easily climb into the neat japanese
box, which is the cosa salada of the Spaniard, or become french esprit.
It sprawls into everything. It has become my life. The result is that I
am _never_ serious about anything. I simply cannot help converting
everything into burlesque patterns. And I admit that I am disposed to
forget that people are real--that they are, that is, not subjective
patterns belonging specifically to me, in the course of this joke-life,
which indeed has for its very principle a denial of the accepted actual.

My father is a family doctor on the Clyde. The Ker-Orrs have been
doctors usually. I have not seen him for some time: my mother, who is
separated from him, lives with a noted hungarian physician. She gives me
money that she gets from the physician, and it is she that I recognize
as my principal parent. It is owing to this conjunction of circumstances
that I am able to move about so much, and to feed the beast of humour
that is within me with such a variety of dishes.

My mother is short and dark: it is from my father that I have my
stature, and this strange northern appearance.

     _Vom Vater hab' ich die Statur_ . . .

It must be from my mother that I get the _Lust zu fabulieren_. I
experience no embarrassment in following the promptings of my fine
physique. My sense of humour in its mature phase has arisen in this very
acute consciousness of what is _me_. In playing that off against another
hostile _me_, that does not like the smell of mine, probably finds my
large teeth, height and so forth abominable, I am in a sense working off
my alarm at myself. So I move on a more primitive level than most men, I
expose my essential _me_ quite coolly, and all men shy a little. This
forked, strange-scented, blond-skinned gut-bag, with its two bright
rolling marbles with which it sees, bull's-eyes full of mockery and
madness, is my stalking-horse. I hang somewhere in its midst operating
it with detachment.

I snatch this great body out of their reach when they grow dangerously
enraged at the sight of it, and laugh at them. And what I would insist
upon is that at the bottom of the chemistry of my sense of humour is
some philosopher's stone. A primitive unity is there, to which, with my
laughter, I am appealing. Freud explains everything by _sex_: I explain
everything by _laughter_. So in these accounts of my adventures there is
no sex interest at all: only over and over again what is perhaps the
natural enemy of sex: so I must apologize. 'Sex' makes me yawn my head
off; but my eye sparkles at once if I catch sight of some stylistic
anomaly that will provide me with a new pattern for my grotesque
realism. The sex-specialist or the sex-snob hates what I like, and calls
his occupation the only _real_ one. No compromise, I fear, is possible
between him and me, and people will continue to call 'real' what
interests them most. I boldly pit my major interest against the
sex-appeal, which will restrict me to a masculine audience, but I shall
not complain whatever happens.

I am quite sure that many of the soldiers and adventurers of the Middle
Ages were really _Soldiers of Humour_, unrecognized and unclassified. I
know that many a duel has been fought in this solemn cause. A man of
this temper and category will, perhaps, carefully cherish a wide circle
of accessible enemies, that his sword may not rust. Any other quarrel
may be patched up. But what can be described as a _quarrel of humour_
divides men for ever. That is my english creed.

I could fill pages with descriptions of myself and my ways. But such
abstractions from the life lived are apt to be misleading, because most
men do not easily detach the principle from the living thing in that
manner, and so when handed the abstraction alone do not know what to do
with it, or they apply it wrongly. I exist with an equal ease in the
abstract world of principle and in the concrete world of fact. As I can
express myself equally well in either, I will stick to the latter here,
as then I am more likely to be understood. So I will show you myself in
action, manoeuvring in the heart of the reality. But before proceeding,
this qualification of the above account of myself is necessary: owing to
protracted foreign travel at an early age, following my mother's change
of husbands, I have known french very well since boyhood. Most other
Western languages I am fairly familiar with. This has a considerable
bearing on the reception accorded to me by the general run of people in
the countries where these scenes are laid.

                  *       *       *       *       *

There is some local genius or god of adventure haunting the soil of
Spain, of an especially active and resourceful type. I have seen people
that have personified him. In Spain it is safer to seek adventures than
to avoid them. That is at least the sensation you will have if you are
sensitive to this national principle, which is impregnated with _burla_,
or burlesque excitants. It certainly requires _horse-play_, and it is
even safer not to attempt to evade it. Should you refrain from charging
the windmills, they are capable of charging you, you come to understand:
in short, you will in the end wonder less at Don Quixote's behaviour.
But the deity of this volcanic soil has become civilized. My analysis of
myself would serve equally well for him in this respect. Your life is no
longer one of the materials he asks for to supply you with constant
entertainment, as the conjurer asks for the gentleman's silk hat. Not
your life,--but a rib or two, your comfort, or a five-pound note, are
all he politely begs or rudely snatches. With these he juggles and
conjures from morning till night, keeping you perpetually amused and on
the qui vive.

It might have been a friend, but as it happened it was the most
implacable enemy I have ever had that Providence provided me with, as
her agent and representative for this journey. The comedy I took part in
was a spanish one, then, at once piquant and elemental. But a Frenchman
filled the principal rle. When I add that this Frenchman was convinced
the greater part of the time that he was taking part in a tragedy, and
was perpetually on the point of transplanting my adventure bodily into
that other category, and that although his actions drew their vehemence
from the virgin source of a racial hatred, yet it was not as a Frenchman
or a Spaniard that he acted, then you will conceive what extremely
complex and unmanageable forces were about to be set in motion for my
edification.

What I have said about my barbarism and my laughter is a key to the
militant figure chosen at the head of this account. In those
modifications of the primitive such another extravagant warrior as Don
Quixote is produced, existing in a vortex of strenuous and burlesque
encounters. Mystical and humorous, astonished at everything at bottom
(the settled navet I have noted) he inclines to worship and deride, to
pursue like a riotous moth the comic and unconscious luminary he
discovers; to make war on it and to cherish it like a lover, at once.


PART II

It was about eleven o'clock at night when I reached Bayonne. I had
started from Paris the evening before. In the market square adjoining
the station the traveller is immediately solicited by a row of rather
obscene little hotels, crudely painted. Each frail structure shines and
sparkles with a hard, livid and disreputable electricity, every floor
illuminated. The blazonry of cheap ice-cream wells, under a striped
umbrella, is what they suggest: and as I stepped into this place all
that was not a small, sparkling, competitive universe, inviting the
stranger to pass into it, was spangled with the vivid spanish stars.
'Fonda del Universo,' 'Fonda del Mundo': Universal Inn and World Inn,
two of these places were called, I noticed. I was tired and not
particular as to which universe I entered. They all looked the same. To
keep up a show of discrimination I chose the second, not the first. I
advanced along a narrow passage-way and found myself suddenly in the
heart of the Fonda del Mundo. On the left lay the dining-room in which
sat two travellers. I was standing in the kitchen: this was a large
courtyard, the rest of the hotel and several houses at the back were
built round it. It had a glass roof on a level with the house proper,
which was of two storeys only.

A half-dozen stoves with sinks, each managed by a separate crew of grim,
oily workers, formed a semi-circle. Hands were as cheap, and every bit
as dirty, as dirt; you felt that the lowest scullery-maid could afford a
servant to do the roughest of her work, and that girl in turn another.
The abundance of cheap beings was of the same meridional order as the
wine and food. Instead of buying a wheelbarrow, would not you attach a
man to your business; instead of hiring a removing van, engage a gang of
carriers? In every way that man could replace the implement that here
would be done. An air of leisurely but continual activity pervaded this
precinct. Cooking on the grand scale was going forward. Later on I
learnt that this was a preparation for the market on the following day.
But to enter at eleven in the evening this large and apparently empty
building, as far as customers went, and find a methodically busy
population in its midst, cooking a nameless feast, was impressive. A
broad staircase was the only avenue in this building to the sleeping
apartments; a shining cut-glass door beneath it seemed the direction I
ought to take when I should have made up my mind to advance. This door,
the stairs, the bread given you at the table d'hte, all had the same
unsubstantial pretentiously new appearance.

So I stood unnoticed in an indifferent enigmatical universe, to which
yet I had no clue, my rug on my arm. I certainly had reached immediately
the most intimate centre of it, without ceremony. Perhaps there were
other entrances, which I had not observed? I was turning back when the
hostess appeared through the glass door--a very stout woman in a garment
like a dressing-gown. She had that air of sinking into herself as if
into a hot, enervating bath, with the sleepy, leaden intensity of
expression belonging to many Spaniards. Her face was so still and
impassible, that the ready and apt answers coming to your questions were
startling, her _si seors_ and _como nons_. However, I knew this kind of
patronne; and the air of dull resentment would mean nothing except that
I was indifferent to her. I was one of those troublesome people she only
had to see twice--when they arrived, and when they came to pay at the
end of their stay.

She turned to the busy scene at our right and poured out a few guttural
remarks (it was a spanish staff), all having some bearing on my fate,
some connected with my supper, the others with my sleeping accommodation
or luggage. They fell on the crowd of leisurely workers without ruffling
the surface. Gradually they reached their destination, however. First, I
noticed a significant stir and a dull flare rose in the murky
atmosphere, a stove lid had been slid back; great copper pans were
disturbed, their covers wrenched up: some morsel was to be fished out
for me, swimming in oil. Elsewhere a slim, handsome young witch left her
cauldron and passed me, going into the dining-room. I followed her, and
the hostess went back through the cut-glass door. It was behind that
that she lived.

The dining-room was compact with hard light. Nothing in its glare could
escape detection, so it symbolized _honesty_ on the one hand, and
_newness_ on the other. There was nothing at all you could not _see_,
and scrutinize, only too well. Everything within sight was totally
unconscious of its cheapness or of any limitation at all. Inspect me!
Inspect me!--exclaimed the coarse white linen upon the table, the
Condy's fluid in the decanter, the paper-bread, the hideous mouldings on
the wall.--I am the goods!

I took my seat at the long table. Of the two diners, only one was left.
I poured myself out a glass of the wine _ros_ of Nowhere, set it to my
lips, drank and shuddered. Two spoonfuls of a nameless soup, and the
edge of my appetite was, it seemed, for ever blunted. Bacallao, or cod,
that nightmare of the Spaniard of the Atlantic sea-board, followed. Its
white and tasteless leather remained on my plate, with the markings of
my white teeth all over it, like a cast of a dentist. I was really
hungry and the stew that came next found its way inside me in gluttonous
draughts. The preserved fruit in syrup was eaten too. Heladas came next,
no doubt frozen up from stinking water. Then I fell back in my chair, my
coffee in front of me, and stared round at the other occupant of the
dining-room. He stared blankly back at me. When I had turned my head
away, as though the words had been mechanically released in response to
my wish, he exclaimed:

'Il fait beau ce soir!'

I took no notice: but after a few moments I turned in his direction
again. He was staring at me without anything more than a little
surprise. Immediately his lips opened again, and he exclaimed
dogmatically, loudly (was I deaf, he had no doubt thought):

'Il fait beau ce soir!'

'Not at all. It's by no means a fine night. It's cold, and what's more
it's going to rain.'

I cannot say why I contradicted him in this fashion. Perhaps the
insolent and mystical gage of drollery his appearance generally flung
down was the cause. I had no reason for supposing that the weather at
Bayonne was anything but fine and settled.

I had made my rejoinder as though I were a Frenchman, and I concluded my
neighbour would take me for that.

He accepted my response quite stolidly. This initial rudeness of mine
would probably have had no effect whatever on him, had not a revelation
made shortly afterwards at once changed our relative positions, and
caused him to regard me with changed eyes. He then went back, remembered
this first incivility of mine, and took it, retrospectively, in a
different spirit to that shown contemporaneously. He now merely
enquired:

'You have come far?'

'From Paris,' I answered, my eyes fixed on a piece of cheese which the
high voltage of the electricity revealed in all its instability. I
reflected how bad the food was here compared to its spanish counterpart,
and wondered if I should have time to go into the town before my train
left. I then looked at my neighbour, and wondered what sort of stomach
he could have. He showed every sign of the extremest hardiness. He lay
back in his chair, his hat on the back of his head, finishing a bottle
of wine with bravado. His waistcoat was open, and this was the only
thing about him that did not denote the most facile of victories. This,
equivalent to rolling up the sleeves, might be accepted as showing that
he respected his enemy.

His straw hat served rather as a heavy coffee-coloured nimbus--such as
some browningesque florentine painter, the worse for drink, might have
placed behind the head of his saint. Above his veined and redly sunburnt
forehead gushed a ragged volute of dry black hair. His face had the
vexed wolfish look of the grimy commercial Midi. It was full of
character, certainly, but it had been niggled at and worked all over, at
once minutely and loosely, by a hundred little blows and chisellings of
fretful passion. His beard did not sprout with any shape or symmetry.
Yet in an odd and baffling way there was a breadth, a look of possible
largeness somewhere. You were forced at length to attribute it to just
that _blankness_ of expression I have mentioned. This sort of blank
intensity spoke of a possibility of real passion, of the sublime. (It
was this sublime quality that I was about to waken, and was going to
have an excellent opportunity of studying.)

He was dressed with sombre floridity. In his dark purple-slate suit with
thin crimson lines, in his dark red hat-band, in his rose-buff tie,
swarming with cerulean fire-flies, in his stormily flowered waistcoat,
you felt that his taste for the violent and sumptuous had everywhere
struggled to assert itself, and everywhere been overcome. But by what?
That was the important secret of this man's entire machine, a secret
unfolded by his subsequent conduct. Had I been of a superior penetration
the cut of his clothes in their awkward amplitude, with their unorthodox
shoulders and belling hams, might have given me the key. He was not a
commercial traveller. I was sure of that. For me, he issued from a void.
I rejected in turn his claim, on the strength of his appearance, to be a
small vineyard owner, a man in the automobile business and a _rentier_.
He was part of the mystery of this hotel; his loneliness, his aplomb,
his hardy appetite.

In the meantime his small sunken eyes were fixed on me imperturbably,
with the blankness of two metal discs.

'I was in Paris last week,' he suddenly announced. 'I don't like Paris.
Why should I?' I thought he was working up for something now. He had had
a good think. He took me for a Parisian, I supposed. 'They think they
are up-to-date. Go and get a parcel sent you from abroad, then go and
try and get it at the Station Dept. Only see how many hours you will
pass there trotting from one bureau clerk to another before they give it
you! Then go to a caf and ask for a drink!--Are you Parisian?' He asked
this in the same tone, the blankness slightly deepening.

'No, I'm English,' I answered.

He looked at me steadfastly. This evidently at first seemed to him
untrue. Then he suddenly appeared to accept it implicitly. His
incredulity and belief appeared to be one block of the same material, or
two sides of the same absolute coin. There was not room for a hair
between these two states. They were not two, but one.

Several minutes of dead silence elapsed. His eyes had never winked. His
changes had all occurred within one block of concrete undifferentiated
blankness. At this period you became aware of a change: but when you
looked at him he was completely uniform from moment to moment.

He now addressed me, to my surprise, in my own language. There was every
evidence that it had crossed the Atlantic at least once since it had
been in his possession; he had not inherited it, but acquired it with
the sweat of his brow, it was clear.

'Oh! you're English? It's fine day!'

Now, we are going to begin all over again! And we are going to start, as
before, with the weather. But I did not contradict him this time. My
opinion of the weather had in no way changed. But for some reason I
withdrew from my former perverse attitude.

'Yes,' I agreed.

Our eyes met, doubtfully. He had not forgotten my late incivility, and I
remembered it at the same time. He was silent again. Evidently he was
turning over dully in his mind the signification of this change on my
part. My changes I expect presented themselves as occurring in as
unruffled uniform a medium as his.

But there was a change now in him. I could both feel and see it. My weak
withdrawal, I thought, had been unfortunate. Remembering my wounding
obstinacy of five minutes before, a strong resentment took possession of
him, swelling his person as it entered. I watched it enter him. It was
as though the two sides of his sprawling portmanteau-body had tightened
up, and his eyes drew in till he squinted.

Almost threateningly, then, he continued,--heavily, pointedly, steadily,
as though to see if there were a spark of resistance anywhere left in
me, that would spit up, under his trampling words.

'I guess eet's darn fi' weather, and goin' to laast. A friend of mine,
who ees skeeper, sailing for Bilbao this afternoon, said that mighty
little sea was out zere, and all fine weather for his run. A skipper
ought' know, I guess, ought'n he? Zey know sight more about zee weader
than most. I guess zat's deir trade,--an't I right?'

Speaking the tongue of New York evidently injected him with a personal
emotion that would not have been suspected, even, in the Frenchman. The
strange blankness and impersonality had gone, or rather it had _woken
up_, if one may so describe this phenomenon. He now looked at me with
awakened eyes, coldly, judicially, fixedly. They were faceted eyes--the
eyes of the forty-eight States of the Union. Considering he had crushed
me enough, no doubt, he began talking about Paris, just as he had done
in french. The one thing linguistically he had brought away from the
United States intact was an american accent of almost alarming
perfection. Whatever word or phrase he knew, in however mutilated a
form, had this stamp of colloquialism and air of being the real thing.
He spoke english with a careless impudence at which I was not surprised;
but the powerful consciousness of the authentic nature of his _accent_
made him still more insolently heedless of the faults of his speech, it
seemed, and rendered him immune from all care as to the correctness of
the mere english. He was evidently to the full the american, or
anglo-saxon american, state of mind: a colossal disdain for everything
that does not possess in one way or another an american accent. My
english, grammatically regular though it was, lacking the american
accent was but a poor vehicle for thought compared with his most
blundering sentence.

Before going further I must make quite clear that I have no dislike of
the american way of accenting english. American possesses an indolent
vigour and dryness which is a most cunning arm when it snarls out its
ironies. That accent is the language of Mark Twain, and is the tongue,
at once nave and cynical, of a thousand inimitable humourists. To my
mind it is a better accent than the sentimental whimsicality of the
Irish.

An illusion of superiority, at the expense of citizens of other states,
the American shares with the Englishman. So the 'God's Own Country'
attitude of some Americans is more anglo-saxon than their blood. I have
met many outlandish Americans, from such unamerican cities as Odessa,
Trieste and Barcelona. America had done them little good, they tended
to become dreamers, drunken with geographical immensities and
opportunities they had never had. This man at once resembled and was
different from them. The reason for this difference, I concluded, was
explained when he informed me that he was a United States citizen. I
believed him on the spot, unreservedly. Some air of security in him that
only such a ratification can give convinced me.

He did not tell me at once. Between his commencing to speak in english
and his announcing his citizenship, came an indetermined phase in our
relations. During this phase he knew what he possessed, but he knew I
was not yet aware of it. This caused him to make some allowance; since,
undivulged, this fact was, for me at least, not yet a full fact. He was
constrained, but the situation had not yet, he felt, fully matured.

In the same order as in our conversation in french, we progressed then,
from the weather topic (a delicate subject with us) to Paris. Our
acquaintance was by this time--scarcely ten minutes had
elapsed--painfully ripe. I already felt instinctively that certain
subjects of conversation were to be avoided. I knew already what shade
of expression would cause suspicion, what hatred, and what snorting
disdain. He, for his part, evidently with the intention of eschewing a
subject fraught with dangers, did not once speak of England. It was as
though England were a subject that no one could expect him to keep his
temper about. Should any one, as I did, come from England, he would
naturally resent being reminded of it. The other, obviously, would be
seeking to take an unfair advantage of him. In fact for the moment the
assumption was--that was the only issue from this difficulty--that I was
an American.

'Guess you' goin' to Spain?' he said. 'Waal, Americans are not like'
very much in that country. That country, sir, is barb'rous; you _kant_
believe how behind in everything that country is! All you have to do is
to _look_ smart there to make money. No need to worry there. No, by
gosh! Just sit round and ye'll do bett' dan zee durn dagos!'

The american citizenship wiped out the repulsive fact of his southern
birth, otherwise, being a Gascon, he would have been almost a dago
himself.

'In Guadalquiveer--wall--kind of state-cap'tle, some manzanas, a bunch
shacks, get me?--waal----'

I make these sentences of my neighbour's much more lucid than they in
reality were. But he now plunged into this obscure and whirling idiom
with a story to tell. The story was drowned; but I gathered it told of
how, travelling in a motor car, he could find no petrol anywhere in a
town of some importance. He was so interested in the telling of this
story that I was thrown a little off my guard, and once or twice showed
that I did not quite follow him. I did not understand his english, that
is what unguardedly I showed. He finished his story rather abruptly.
There was a deep silence.--It was after this silence that he divulged
the fact of his american citizenship.

And now things began to wear at once an exceedingly gloomy and
unpromising look.

With the revelation of this staggering fact I lost at one blow all the
benefit of that convenient fiction in which we had temporarily
indulged--namely, that I was American. It was now incumbent upon him to
adopt an air of increased arrogance. The representative of the United
States--there was no evading it, that was the dignity that the
evulgation of his legal nationality imposed on him. All compromise, all
courteous resolve to ignore painful facts, was past. Things must stand
out in their true colours, and men too.

As a result of this heightened attitude, he appeared to doubt the
sincerity or exactitude of everything I said. His beard bristled round
his drawling mouth, his thumbs sought his arm-pits, his varnished
patterned shoes stood up erect and aggressive upon his heels. An
insidious attempt on my part to induct the conversation back into
french, unhappily detected, caused in him an alarming indignation. I was
curious to see the change that would occur in my companion if I could
trap him into using again his native speech. The sensation of the
humbler tongue upon his lips would have, I was sure, an immediate
effect. The perfidy of my intention only gradually dawned upon him. He
seemed taken aback. For a few minutes he was silent as though stunned.
The subtleties, the _ironies_ to which the American is exposed!

'Oui, c'est vrai,' I went on, taking a frowning, business-like air,
affecting a great absorption in the subject we were discussing, and to
have overlooked the fact that I had changed to french, 'les Espagnols
ont du chic  se chausser. D'ailleurs, c'est tout ce qu'ils savent, en
fait de toilette. C'est les Amricains surtout qui savent s'habiller!'

His eyes at this became terrible. He had seen through the _mange_, had
he not: and now _par surcrot de perfidie_, was I not _flattering_
him--flattering Americans; and above all, praising their way of
dressing! His cigar protruded from the right-hand corner of his mouth.
He now with a gnashing and rolling movement conveyed it, in a series of
revolutions, to the left-hand corner. He eyed me with a most unorthodox
fierceness. In the language of his adopted land, but with an imported
wildness in the dry figure that he must affect, he ground out, spitting
with it the moist dbris of the cigar:

'Yes, _sirr_, and that's more'n zee durn English do!'

No doubt, in his perfect americanism--and at this ticklish moment, his
impeccable accent threatened by an unscrupulous foe, who was attempting
to stifle it temporarily--a definite analogy arose in his mind. The
Redskin and his wiles, the hereditary and cunning foe of the american
citizen, came vividly perhaps to his mind. Yes, wiles of that familiar
sort were being used against him, Sioux-like, Blackfeet-like manoeuvres.
He must meet them as the american citizen had always met them. He had at
length overcome the Sioux and Cherokee. He turned on me a look as though
I had been unmasked, and his accent became more raucous and formidable.
The elemental that he contained and that often woke in him, I expect,
manifested itself in his american accent, the capital vessel of his
vitality.

After another significant pause he brusquely chose a new subject of
conversation. It was a subject upon which, it was evident, he was
persuaded that it would be quite impossible for us to agree. He took a
long draught of the powerful fluid served to each diner. I disagreed
with him at first out of politeness. But as he seemed resolved to work
himself up slowly into a national passion, I changed round, and agreed
with him. For a moment he glared at me. He felt at bay before this
dreadful subtlety to which his americanism exposed him: then he warily
changed his position in the argument, taking up the point of view he had
begun by attacking.

We changed about alternately for a while. It was a most diverting game.
At one time in taking my new stand, and asserting something, either I
had changed too quickly, or he had not done so quite quickly enough. At
all events, when he began speaking he found himself _agreeing_ with me.
This was a breathless moment. It was very close quarters indeed. I felt
as one does at a show, standing on the same chair with an
uncertain-tempered person. With an anxious swiftness I threw myself into
the opposite opinion. The situation, for that time at least, was saved.
A moment more, and we should have fallen on each other, or rather, he on
me.

He buried his face again in the sinister potion in front of him, and
consumed the last vestiges of the fearful food at his elbow. During
these happenings we had not been interrupted. A dark figure, that of a
Spaniard, I thought, had passed into the kitchen along the passage. From
within the muffled uproar of the machinery of the kitchen reached us
uninterruptedly.

He now with a snarling drawl engaged in a new discussion on another and
still more delicate subject. I renewed my tactics, he his. Subject after
subject was chosen. His volte-face, his change of attitude in the
argument, became less and less leisurely. But my skill in reversing
remained more than a match for his methods. At length, whatever I said
he said the opposite, brutally and at once. At last, pushing his chair
back violently with a frightful grating sound, and thrusting both his
hands in his pockets--at this supreme moment the sort of blank look came
back to his face again--he said slowly:

'Waal, zat may be so--you say so--waal! But what say you to England,
hein? England! England! England!'

At last it had come! He repeated 'England' as though that word in itself
were a question--an unanswerable question. 'England' was a form of
question that a man could only ask when every device of normal courtesy
had been exhausted. But it was a thing hanging over every Englishman, at
any moment he might be silenced with it.

'England! ha! England! England!' he repeated, as though hypnotized by
this word; as though pressing me harder and harder, and finally 'chawing
me up' with the mere utterance of it.

'Why, mon vieux!' I said suddenly, getting up, 'how about the South of
France, for that matter--the South of France! the South of France! The
bloody Midi, your home-land, you poor bum!' I gnashed my teeth as I said
this.

If I had said 'America,' he would have responded at once, no doubt. But
'the South of France!' A look of unspeakable vagueness came into his
face. The South of France! This was at once without meaning, a stab in
the back, an unfair blow, the sort of thing that was not said, some sort
of paralysing nonsense, that robbed a man of the power of speech. I
seemed to have drawn a chilly pall with glove-tight tightness suddenly
over the whole of his mind.

I fully expected to be forced to fight my way out of the salle  manger,
and was wondering whether his pugilistic methods would be those of
Chicago or Toulouse--whether he would skip round me, his fists working
like piston rods, or whether he would plunge his head into the pit of my
stomach, kick me on the chin and follow up with the 'coup de la
fourchette,' which consists in doubling up one's fist, but allowing the
index and little finger to protrude, so that they may enter the eyes on
either side of the bridge of the nose.

But I had laid him out quite flat. The situation was totally outside his
compass. And the word 'bum' lay like a load of dough upon his spirit. My
last word had been _american_! As I made for the door, he sat first
quite still. Then, slightly writhing on his chair, with a painful
slowness, his face passed through a few degrees of the compass in an
attempt to reach me in spite of the spell I had laid upon him. The fact
of my leaving the room seemed to find him still more unprepared. My
answer to his final apostrophe was a blow below the belt: I was
following it up by vanishing from the ring altogether, as though the
contest were over, while he lay paralysed in the centre of the picture.
It had never occurred to him, apparently, that I might perhaps get up
and leave the dining-room.--Sounds came from him, words too--hybrid
syllables lost on the borderland between french and english, which
appeared to signify protest, pure astonishment, alarmed question. But I
had disappeared. I got safely into the kitchen. I sank into that deep
hum of internal life, my eye glittering with the battle light of humour.

In the act of taking my candle from the hand of a chambermaid, I heard a
nasal roar behind me. I mounted the stairs three steps at a time, the
hotel boy at my heels, and the chambermaid breathlessly rushing up in
his rear. Swiftly ushered into my room, I thrust outside the panting
servants and locked and bolted the door.

Flinging myself on the bed, my blond poll rolling about in ecstasy upon
the pillow, I howled like an exultant wolf. This penetrating howl of my
kind--the humorous kind--shook the cardboard walls of the room, rattled
the stucco frames; but the tumult beneath of the hotel staff must have
prevented this sound from getting farther than the area of the bedrooms.
My orgasm left me weak, and I lay conventionally mopping my brow, and
affectedly gasping. Then, as usually happened with me, I began
sentimentally pitying my victim. Poor little chap! My conduct had been
unpardonable! I had brutalized this tender flower of the prairies of the
West! Why had I dragged in the 'bloody Midi' after all? It was too bad
altogether. I had certainly behaved very badly. I had a movement to go
down immediately and apologize to him, a tear of laughter still hanging
from a mournful lash.

My room was at the back. The window looked on to the kitchen; it was
just over the stairs leading to the bedrooms. I now got up, for I
imagined I heard some intemperate sound thrusting into the general mle
of mechanical noise. From the naturally unsavoury and depressing
porthole of my room, immediately above the main cauldrons, I was able, I
found, to observe my opponent in the murky half-court, half-kitchen,
beneath. There he was: by pointing my ear down I could catch sometimes
what he was saying. But I found that the noise I had attributed to him
had been my fancy only.

Inspected from this height he looked very different. I had not till then
seen him on his feet. His yankee clothes, evidently cut beneath his
direction by a gascon tailor, made him look as broad as he was long.
His violently animated leanness imparted a precarious and toppling
appearance to his architecture. He was performing a war-dance in this
soft national armour just at present, beneath the sodden eyes of the
proprietress. It had shuffling, vehement, jazz elements, aided by the
gesticulation of the Gaul. This did not seem the same man I had been
talking to before. He evidently, in this enchanted hotel, possessed a
variety of personalities. It was _not_ the same man. Somebody else had
leapt into his clothes--which hardly fitted the newcomer--and was
carrying on his quarrel. The original and more imposing man had
disappeared. I had slain him. This little fellow had taken up his
disorganized and overwrought life at that precise moment and place where
I had left him knocked out in the dining-room, at identically the same
pitch of passion, only with fresher nerves, and with the same racial
sentiments as the man he had succeeded.

He was talking in spanish--much more correctly than he did in english.
She listened with her leaden eyes crawling swiftly and sullenly over his
person, with an air of angrily and lazily making an inventory. In his
fiery attack on the depths of languor behind which her spirit lived, he
would occasionally turn and appeal to one of the nearest of the
servants, as though seeking corroboration of something. Of what crime
was I being accused? I muttered rapid prayers to the effect that that
sultry reserve of the proprietress might prove impregnable. Otherwise I
might be cast bodily out of the Fonda del Mundo, and, in my present
worn-out state, have to seek another and distant roof. I knew that I was
the object of his discourse. What effectively could be said about me on
so short an acquaintance? He would, though, certainly affirm that I was
a designing ruffian of some sort; such a person as no respectable hotel
would consent to harbour, or if it did, would do so at its peril.
Probably he might be saying it was my intention to hold up the hotel
later on, or he might have influence with the proprietress, be a regular
customer and old friend. He might only be saying, 'I object to that
person; I cannot express to you how I object to that person! I have
never objected to any one to the same fearful degree. All my organs boil
at the thought of him. I cannot explain to you how that island organism
tears my members this way and that. Out with this abomination! Oh! out
with it before I die at your feet from the fever of my _mauvais sang_!'

That personal appeal might prove effective. I went to bed with a feeling
of extreme insecurity. I thought that, if nothing else happened, he
might set fire to the hotel. But in spite of the dangers by which I was,
manifestly, beset in this ill-starred establishment, I slept soundly
enough. In the morning an overwhelming din shook me, and I rose with
the stink of southern food in my nose.

Breakfast passed off without incident. I concluded that the Complete
American was part of the night-time aspect of the Fonda del Mundo and
had no part in its more normal day-life.

The square was full of peasants, the men wearing dark blouses and the
bret basque. Several groups were sitting near me in the salle  manger.
An intricate arrangement of chairs and tables, like an extensive
man-trap, lay outside the hotel, extending a little distance into the
square. From time to time one or more clumsy peasant would appear to
become stuck or somehow involved in these iron contrivances. They would
then, with becoming fatalism, sit down and call for a drink. Such was
the impression conveyed, at least, by their embarrassed and reluctant
movements in choosing a seat. I watched several parties come into this
dangerous extension of the Fonda del Mundo. The proprietress would come
out occasionally and stare moodily at them. She never looked at me.

A train would shortly leave for the frontier. I bade farewell to the
patrona, and asked her if she could recommend me a hotel in Burgos or in
Pontaisandra. When I mentioned Pontaisandra, she said at once, 'You are
going to Pontaisandra?' With a sluggish ghost of a smile she turned to a
loitering servant and then said, 'Yes, you can go to the Burgaleza at
Pontaisandra. That is a good hotel.' They both showed a few ragged
discoloured teeth, only appearing in moments of crafty burlesque. The
night before I had told her that my destination was Pontaisandra, and
she had looked at me steadfastly and resentfully, as though I had said
that my destination was Paradise, and that I intended to occupy the seat
reserved for her. But that was the night before: and now Pontaisandra
appeared to mean something different to her. The episode of the
supper-room the night before I now regarded as an emanation of that
place. The Fonda del Mundo was a mysterious hotel, though in the day its
secrets seemed more obvious. I imagined it inhabited by solitary and
hallucinated beings, like my friend the Perfect American--or such as I
myself might have become. The large kitchen staff was occupied far into
the night in preparing a strange and excessive table d'hte. The
explanation of this afforded in the morning by the sight of the crowding
peasants did not efface that impression of midnight though it mitigated
it. Perhaps the dreams caused by its lunches, the visions conjured up by
its suppers, haunted the place. That was the spirit in which I
remembered my over-night affair.

When eventually I started for the frontier, hoping by the inhalation of
a picadura to dispose my tongue to the ordeal of framing passable
castilian, I did not realize that the american adventure was the
progenitor of other adventures; nor that the dreams of the Fonda del
Mundo were to go with me into the heart of Spain.


PART III

Burgos, I had intended, should be my first stopping place. But I decided
afterwards that San Sebastian and Leon would be better.

This four days' journeying was an _entr'acte_ filled with appropriate
music; the lugubrious and splendid landscapes of Castile, the extremely
self-conscious, pedantic and independent spirit of its inhabitants, met
with en route. Fate was marking time, merely. With the second day's
journey I changed trains and dined at Venta de Baos, the junction for
the line that branches off in the direction of Palencia, Leon and the
galician country.

While travelling, the spanish peasant has a marked preference for the
next compartment to his own. No sooner has the train started, than, one
after another, heads, arms, and shoulders appear above the wooden
partition. There are times when you have all the members of the
neighbouring compartment gazing with the melancholy stolidity of cattle
into your own. In the case of some theatrical savage of the Sierras, who
rears a dishevelled head before you in a pose of fierce abandon, and
hangs there smoking like a chimney, you know that it may be some
grandiose recoil of pride that prevents him from remaining in an
undignified position huddled in a narrow carriage. In other cases it is
probably a simple conviction that the occupants of other compartments
are likely to be more interesting.

The whole way from Venta de Baos to Palencia the carriage was dense
with people. Crowds of peasants poured into the train, loaded with their
heavy vivid horse-rugs, gaudy bundles and baskets; which profusion of
mere matter, combined with their exuberance, made the carriage appear
positively to swarm with animal life. They would crowd in at one little
station and out at another a short way along the line, where they were
met by hordes of their relations awaiting them. They would rush or swing
out of the door, charged with their property or recent purchases, and
catch the nearest man or woman of their blood in their arms, with a
turbulence that outdid our Northern people's most vehement occasions.
The waiting group became twice as vital as average mankind upon the
train's arrival, as though so much more blood had poured into their
veins. Gradually we got beyond the sphere of this Fiesta, and in the
small hours of the morning arrived at Leon.

Next day came the final stages of the journey to the Atlantic sea-board.
We arrived within sight of the town that evening, just as the sun was
setting. With its houses of green, rose, and white, in general effect a
faded bouquet, its tints a scarcely coloured reminiscence, it looked
like some oriental city represented in the nerveless tempera of an old
wall. Its bay stretched between hills for many miles to the ocean, which
lay beyond an island of scarcely visible rocks.

On the train drawing up in the central station, the shock troops
furnished by every little ragamuffin caf as well as stately hotel in
the town were hurled against us. I had mislaid the address given me at
Bayonne. I wished to find a hotel of medium luxury. The different
hotel-attendants called hotly out their prices at me. I selected one who
named a sum for board and lodging that only the frenzy of competition
could have fathered, I thought. Also the name of this hotel was, it
seemed to me, the one the patrona at Bayonne had mentioned. I had not
then learnt to connect Burgaleza with Burgos: this was my first long
visit to Spain. With this man I took a cab and was left seated in it at
the door of the station, while he went after the heavy luggage. Now one
by one, the hotel emissaries came up; their fury of a few minutes
before contrasted oddly with their present listless calm. Putting
themselves civilly at my disposition, they thrust forward
matter-of-factly the card of their establishment, adding that they were
sure that I would find out my mistake.

I now felt in a vague manner a tightening of the machinery of Fate--a
certain uneasiness and strangeness, in the march and succession of facts
and impressions, like a trembling of a decrepit motor-bus about to start
again. The interlude was over. After a long delay the hotel tout
returned and we started. My misgivings were of a practical order. The
price named was very low, too low perhaps. But I had found it a capital
plan on former occasions to go to a cheap hotel and pay a few pesetas
more a day for 'extras.' My palate was so conservative, that I found in
any case that my main fare lay outside the spanish menu. Extras are very
satisfactory. You always feel that a single individual has bent over the
extra and carefully cooked it, and that it has not been bought in too
wholesale a manner. I wished to live on extras--a privileged existence:
and extras are much the same in one place as another. So I reassured
myself.

The cabman and the hotel man were discussing some local event. But we
penetrated farther and farther into a dismal and shabby quarter of the
town. My misgivings began to revive. I asked the representative of the
Burgaleza if he were sure that his house was a clean and comfortable
house. He dismissed my doubtful glance with a gesture full of assurance.
'It's a splendid place! You wait and see; we shall be there directly,'
he added.

We suddenly emerged into a broad and imposing street, on one side of
which was a public garden, 'El Paseo,' I found out afterwards, the Town
Promenade. Gazing idly at a palatial white building with a hotel omnibus
drawn up before it, to my astonishment I found our driver also stopping
at its door. A few minutes later, still scarcely able to credit my eyes,
I got out and entered this palace, noticing 'Burgaleza' on the board of
the omnibus as I passed. I followed the tout, having glimpses in passing
of a superbly arrayed table with serviettes that were each a work of
art, that one of the splendid guests entertained at this establishment
(should I not be among them?) would soon haughtily pull to pieces to
wipe his mouth on--tables groaning beneath gilded baskets tottering with
a lavish variety of choice fruit. Then came a long hall, darkly
panelled, at the end of which I could see several white-capped men
shouting fiercely and clashing knives, women answering shrilly and
juggling with crashing dishes; a kitchen--the most diabolically noisy
and malodorous I had ever approached. We went straight on towards it.
Were we going through it? At the very threshold we stopped, and opening
the panel-like door in the wall, the porter disappeared with my
portmanteau, appearing again without my portmanteau, and hurried away.
At this moment my eye caught something else, a door ajar on the other
side of the passage and a heavy, wooden, clothless table, with several
squares of bread upon it, and a fork or two. In Spain there is a sort of
bread for the rich, and a forbidding juiceless papery bread for the
humble. The bread on that table was of the latter category, far more
like paper than that I had had at Bayonne.

Suddenly the truth flashed upon me. With a theatrical gesture I dashed
open again the panel and passed into the pitchy gloom within. I struck a
match. It was a cupboard, quite windowless, with just enough room for a
little bed; I was standing on my luggage. No doubt in the room across
the passage I should be given some cod soup, permanganate of potash and
artificial bread. Then, extremely tired after my journey, I should crawl
into my kennel, the pandemonium of the kitchen at my ear for several
hours.

In the central hall I found the smiling proprietor. He seemed to regard
his boarders generally as a gentle joke, and those who slept in the
cupboard near the kitchen a particularly good but rather low one. I
informed him that I would pay the regular sum for a day's board and
lodging, and said I must have another room. A valet accepted the
responsibility of seeing that I was given a bedroom. The landlord walked
slowly away, his iron-grey side-whiskers, with their traditional air of
respectability, giving a disguised look to his rogue's face. I was
transferred from one cupboard to another; or rather, I had exchanged a
cupboard for a wardrobe--reduced to just half its size by a thick layer
of skirts and cloaks, twenty deep, that protruded from all four walls.
But still the little open space left in the centre ensured a square foot
to wash and dress in, with a quite distinct square foot or two for
sleep. And it was upstairs.

A quarter of an hour later, wandering along a dark passage on the way
back to the hotel lounge, a door opened in a very violent and living way
that made me start and look up, and a short rectangular figure, the size
of a big square trunk, issued forth, just ahead of me. I recognized this
figure fragmentarily--first, with a cold shudder, I recognized an
excrescence of hair; then with a jump I recognized a hat held in its
hand; then, with an instinctive shrinking, I realized that I had seen
these flat traditional pseudo-american shoulders before. With a really
comprehensive throb of universal emotion, I then recognized the whole
man.

It was the implacable figure of my neighbour at dinner, of the Fonda del
Mundo.

He moved along before me with wary rigidity, exhibiting none of the
usual signs of recognition. He turned corners with difficulty, a rapid
lurch precipitating him into the new path indicated when he reached the
end of the wall. On the stairs he appeared to get stuck in much the way
that a large american trunk would, borne by a sweating porter. At last
he safely reached the hall. I was a yard or two behind him. He stopped
to light a cigar, still taking up an unconscionable amount of space. I
manoeuvred round him, and gained one of the doors of the salle  manger.
But as I came within his range of vision, I also became aware that my
presence in the house was not a surprise to this sandwich-man of Western
citizenship. His eye fastened upon me with ruthless bloodshot
indignation, an eye-blast as it were crystallized from the episode at
Bayonne. But he was so dead and inactive that he seemed a phantom of his
former self: and in all my subsequent dealings with him, this feeling of
having to deal with a ghost, although a particularly mischievous one,
persisted. If before my anger at the trick that had been played on me
had dictated a speedy change of lodging, now my anxiety to quit this
roof had, naturally, an overwhelming incentive.

After dinner I went forth boldly in search of the wonderful american
enemy. Surely I had been condemned, in some indirect way, by him, to the
cupboard beside the kitchen. No dungeon could have been worse. Had I
then known, as I learnt later, that he was the owner of this hotel, the
mediaeval analogy would have been still more complete. He now had me in
his castle.

I found him seated, in sinister conjunction with the proprietor or
manager, as I supposed he was, in the lobby of the hotel. He turned
slightly away as I came up to him, with a sulky indifference due to
self-restraint. Evidently the time for action was not ripe. There was no
pretence of not recognizing me. As though our conversation in the Fonda
del Mundo had taken place a half-hour before, we acknowledged in no way
a consciousness of the lapse of time, only of the shifted scene.

'Well, colonel,' I said, adopting an allocution of the United States,
'taking the air?'

He went on smoking.

'This is a nice little town.'

'Vous vous plaisez ici, monsieur? C'est bien!' he replied in french, as
though I were not worthy even to _hear_ his american accent, and that,
if any communication was to be held with me, french must serve.

'I shall make a stay of some weeks here,' I said, with indulgent
defiance.

'Oui?'

'But not in this hotel.'

He got up with something of his Bayonne look about him.

'No, I shouldn't. You might not find it a very comfortable hotel,' he
said vehemently in his mother-tongue.

He walked away hurriedly, as a powder magazine might walk away from a
fuse, if it did not, for some reason, want to blow up just then.

That was our last encounter that day. The upstairs and less dreadful
dungeon with its layer of clothes would have been an admirable place for
a murder. Not a sound would have penetrated its woollen masses and the
thick spanish walls enclosing it. But the next morning I was still
alive. I set out after breakfast to look for new quarters. My practised
eye had soon measured the inconsistencies of most of the Pensions of the
town. But a place in the Calle Real suited me all right, and I decided
to stop there for the time. There too the room was only a cupboard. But
it was a human cupboard and not a clothes cupboard. It was one of the
four tributaries of the dining-room. My bedroom door was just beside my
place at table--I had simply to step out of bed in the right direction,
and there was the morning coffee. The extracting of my baggage from the
Burgaleza was easy enough, except that I was charged a heavy toll. I
protested with the manager for some time, but he smiled and smiled.
'Those are our charges!' He shrugged his shoulders, dismissed the
matter, and smiled absent-mindedly when I renewed my objections. As at
Bayonne, there was no sign of the enemy in the morning. But I was not so
sure this time that I had seen the last of him.

That evening I came amongst my new fellow-pensionnaires for the first
time. This place had recommended itself to me, partly because the
boarders would probably speak castilian, and so be practice for me. They
were mostly not Gallegos, at least, who are the Bretons of Spain, and
afford other Spaniards much amusement by their way of expressing
themselves. My presence caused no stir whatever. Just as a stone dropped
in a small pond which has long been untouched, and has an opaque coat of
green decay, slips dully to the bottom, cutting a neat little hole on
the surface, so I took my place at the bottom of the table. But as the
pond will send up its personal odour at this intrusion, so these people
revealed something of themselves in the first few minutes, in an
illusive and immobile way. They must all have lived in that Pension
together for an inconceivable length of time. My neighbour, however,
promised to be a little El Dorado of spanish; a small mine of gossip,
grammatical rules and willingness to impart these riches. I struck a
deep shaft of friendship into him at once and began work without delay.
Coming from Madrid, this ore was at least 30 carat, thoroughly thetaed
and castilian stuff that he talked. What I gave him in exchange was
insignificant. He knew several phrases in french and english, such as
'If you please,' and 'fine day'; I merely confirmed him in these. Every
day he would hesitatingly say them over, and I would assent, 'quite
right,' and 'very well pronounced.' He was a tall, bearded man, head of
the orchestra of the principal Caf in the town. Two large cuffs lay on
either side of his plate during meals, the size of serviettes. Out of
them his hands emerged without in any way disturbing them, and served
him with his food as far as they could. But he had to remain with his
mouth quite near his plate, for the cuffs would not move a hair's
breadth. This somewhat annoyed me, as it muffled a little the steady
flow of spanish, and even sometimes was a cause of considerable waste.
Once or twice without success I attempted to move the cuff on my side
away from the plate. Their ascendancy over him and their indolence was
profound.

But I was not content merely to work him for his mother-tongue inertly,
as it were. I wished to see it in use: to watch this stream of castilian
working the mill of general conversation, for instance. Although willing
enough for himself, he had no chance in this Pension. On the third day,
however, he invited me to come round to the Caf after dinner and hear
him play. Our dinners overlapped, he leaving early. So the meal over, I
strolled round, alone.

The Caf Pelayo was the only really parisian establishment in the town.
It was the only one where the Madrilenos and the other Spaniards proper,
resident in Pontaisandra, went regularly. I entered, peering round in a
business-like way at its monotonously mirrored walls and gilded ceiling.
I took up an advantageous position, and settled down to study the idiom.

In a lull of the music, my chef d'orchestre came over to me, and
presented me to a large group of people, friends of his. It was an easy
matter, from that moment, to become acquainted with everybody in the
Caf.

I did not approach Spaniards in general, I may say, with any very
romantic emotion. Each man I met possessed equally an ancient and
admirable tongue, however degenerate himself. He often appeared like
some rotten tree, in which a swarm of highly evocative admirable words
had nested. I, like a bee-cultivator, found it my business to transplant
this vagrant swarm to a hive prepared. A language has its habits and
idiosyncrasies just like a species of insect, as my first professor
comfortably explained; its little world of symbols and parts of speech
have to be most carefully studied and manipulated. But above all it is
important to observe their habits and idiosyncrasies, and the pitch and
accent that naturally accompanies them. So I had my hands full.

When the Caf closed, I went home with Don Pedro, chef d'orchestre, to
the Pension. Every evening, after dinner--and at lunch-time as well--I
repaired there. This lasted for three or four days. I now had plenty of
opportunity of talking castilian Spanish. I had momentarily forgotten my
american enemy.

On the fifth evening, I entered the Caf as usual, making towards my
most useful and intelligent group. But then, with a sinking of the
heart, I saw the rectangular form of my ubiquitous enemy, quartered with
an air of demoniac permanence in their midst. A mechanic who finds an
unaccountable lump of some foreign substance stuck in the very heart of
his machinery--what simile shall I use for my dismay? To proceed
somewhat with this image, as this unhappy engineer might dash to the
cranks or organ stops of his machine, so I dashed to several of my
formerly most willing listeners and talkers. I gave one a wrench and
another a screw, but I found that already the machine had become
recalcitrant.

I need not enumerate the various stages of my defeat on that evening. It
was more or less a passive and moral battle, rather than one with any
evident show of the secretly bitter and desperate nature of the
passions engaged. Of course, the inclusion of so many people unavoidably
caused certain brusqueries here and there. The gradual cooling down of
the whole room towards me, the disaffection that swept over the chain of
little drinking groups from that centre of mystical hostility, that soul
that recognized in me something icily antipodean too, no doubt; the
immobile figure of America's newest and most mysterious child,
apparently emitting these strong waves without effort, as naturally as a
fountain: all this, with great vexation, I recognized from the moment of
the intrusion of his presence. It almost seemed as though he had stayed
away from this haunt of his foreseeing what would happen. He had waited
until I had comfortably settled myself and there was something palpable
to attack. His absence may have had some more accidental cause.

What exactly it was, again, he found to say as regards me I never
discovered. As at Bayonne, I saw the mouth working and experienced the
social effects, only. No doubt it was the subtlest and most electric
thing that could be found; brief, searching and annihilating. Perhaps
something seemingly crude--that I was a spy--may have recommended itself
to his ingenuity. But I expect it was a meaningless blast of
disapprobation that he blew upon me, an eerie and stinging wind of
convincing hatred. He evidently enjoyed a great ascendancy in the Caf
Pelayo. This would be explained no doubt by his commercial prestige. But
it was due, I am sure, even more to his extraordinary character--moulded
by the sublime force of his illusion. His inscrutable immobility, his
unaccountable self-control (for such a person, and feeling as he did
towards me), were of course the american or anglo-saxon phlegm and
sang-froid as reflected, or interpreted, in this violent human mirror.

I left the Caf earlier than usual, before the chef d'orchestre. It was
the following morning at lunch when I next saw him. He was embarrassed.
His eyes wavered in my direction, fascinated and inquisitive. He found
it difficult to realize that his respect for me had to end and give
place to another feeling.

'You know Monsieur de Valmore?' he asked.

'That little ape of a Frenchman, do you mean?'

I knew this description of my wonderful enemy was only vulgar and
splenetic. But I was too discouraged to be more exact.

This way of describing Monsieur de Valmore appeared to the chef
d'orchestre so eccentric, apart from its vulgarity, that I lost at once
in Don Pedro's sympathy. He told me, however, all about him; details
that did not touch on the real constituents of this life.

'He owns the Burgaleza and many houses in Pontaisandra. Ships, too--Es
Americano,' he added.

Vexations and hindrances of all sorts now made my stay in Pontaisandra
useless and depressing. Don Pedro had generally almost finished when we
came to dinner, and I was forced to close down, so to say, the mine.
Nothing more was to be extracted, at length, except disobliging
monosyllables. The rest of the boarders remained morose and
inaccessible. I went once more to the Caf Pelayo, but the waiters even
seemed to have come beneath the hostile spell. The new Caf I chose
yielded nothing but gallego chatter, and the garon was not talkative.

There was little encouragement to try another Pension and stay on in
Pontaisandra. I made up my mind to go to Corunna. This would waste time
and I was short of money. But there is more gallego than spanish spoken
in Galicia, even in the cities. Too easily automatic a conquest as it
may seem, Monsieur de Valmore had left me nothing but the Gallegos. I
was not getting the practice in spanish I needed, and this sudden
deprivation of what I had mainly come into Spain for, poisoned for me
the whole air of the place. The task of learning this tiresome language
began to be burdensome. I even considered whether I should not take up
gallego instead. But I decided finally to go to Corunna. On the
following day, some hours before the time for the train, I paraded the
line of streets towards the station, with the feeling that I was no
longer there. The place seemed cooling down beneath my feet and growing
prematurely strange. But the miracle happened. It declared itself with a
smooth suddenness. A more exquisite checkmate never occurred in any
record of such warfare.

The terrible ethnological difference that existed between Monsieur de
Valmore and myself up till that moment, showed every sign of ending in a
weird and revolting defeat for me. The 'moment' I refer to was that in
which I turned out of the High Street, into the short hilly avenue where
the post office lay. I thought I would go up to the Correo and see for
the last time if a letter for which I had been waiting had arrived.

On turning the corner I at once became aware of three anomalous figures
walking just in front of me. They were all three of the proportions
known in America as 'husky.' When I say they were walking, I should
describe their movements more accurately as _wading_--wading through the
air, evidently towards the post office. Their carriage was slightly
rolling, like a ship under way. They occasionally bumped into each
other, but did not seem to mind this. Yet no one would have mistaken
these three young men for drunkards. But I daresay you will have already
guessed. It would under other circumstances have had no difficulty in
entering my head. As it was, there seemed a certain impediment of
consciousness or inhibition with me which prevented me from framing to
myself the word 'American.' These three figures were three Americans!
This seems very simple, I know: but this very ordinary fact trembled and
lingered before completely entering into my consciousness. The extreme
rapidity of my mind in another sense--in seeing all that this fact, if
verified, might signify to me--may have been responsible for that. Then
one of them, on turning his head, displays the familiar features of
Taffany, a Mississippi friend of mine. I simultaneously recognized
Blauenfeld and Morton, the other two members of a trio. A real trio,
like real twins, is rarer than one thinks. This one was the remnant of a
quartet, however. I had met it first in Paris. Poor Bill (Borden
Henneker) was killed in a motor accident. These three had mourned him
with insatiable drinking, to which I had been a party for some days the
year before. And my first feeling was complicated with a sense of their
forlornness, as I recognized their three backs, rolling heavily and
mournfully.

In becoming, from any three Americans, three friends of mine, they
precipitated in an immediate inrush of the most full-blooded hope the
sense of what might be boldly anticipated from this meeting. Two steps
brought me up with them: my cordiality if anything exceeded theirs.

'Why, if it isn't Cairo! Look at this! Off what Christmas-tree did you
drop? Gee, I'm glad to see you, Kire!' shouted Taffany. He was the
irrepressible Irishman of the three.

'Why, it's you, that's swell. We looked out for you in Paris. You'd just
left. How long have you been round here?' Blauenfeld ground out
cordially. He was the rich melancholy one of the three.

'Come right up to the Correo and interpret for us, Cairo. You know the
idioma, I guess. Feldie's a washout,' said Morton, who was the great
debauchee of the three.

Optimism, consciousness of power (no wonder! I reflected) surged out of
them, my simple-hearted friends. Ah, the kindness! the _overwhelming_
kindness. I bathed voluptuously in this american greeting--this real
american greeting. Nothing naturalized about _that_. At the same time I
felt almost awe at the thought of the dangerous nationality. These good
fellows I knew and liked so well, seemed for the moment to have some
intermixture of the strangeness of Monsieur de Valmore. However, I
measured with enthusiasm their egregious breadth of shoulder, the
exorbitance of their 'pants.' I examined with some disappointment these
signs of nationality. How english they looked, compared to de Valmore.
They were by no means american enough for my taste. Had they appeared in
a star-stripe swallow-tail suit like the cartoons of Uncle Sam, I should
not have been satisfied.

But I felt rather like some ambitious eastern prince who, having been
continually defeated in battle by a neighbour because of the presence in
the latter's army of a half-dozen elephants, suddenly becomes possessed
of a couple of dozen himself.

I must have behaved oddly. I enquired anxiously about their plans. They
were not off at once? No. That was capital. I was most awfully glad that
they were not departing at once. I was glad that they had decided to
stop. They had booked their rooms? Yes. That was good. So they were here
for the night at all events? That was as it should be! You should always
stop the night. Yes, I would with very great pleasure interpret for them
at the Correo.--I cherished my three Americans as no Americans before
have ever been cherished. I was inclined to shelter them as though they
were perishable, to see that they didn't get run over, or expose
themselves unwisely to the midday sun. Each transatlantic peculiarity
of speech or gesture I received with something approaching exultation.
Morton was soon persuaded that I was tight. All thoughts of Corunna
disappeared. I did not ask at the Poste Restante for my letter.

First of all, I took my trio into a little Caf near the post office.
There I told them briefly what was expected of them.

'You have a most distinguished compatriot here,' I said.

'Oh. An American?' Morton asked seriously.

'Well, he deserves to be. But he began too late in life, I think. He
hails from the southern part of France, and americanism came to him as a
revelation when youth had already passed. He repented sincerely of his
misguided early nationality. But his years spent as a Frenchman have
left their mark. In the meantime, he won't leave Englishmen alone. He
persecutes them, apparently, wherever he finds them.'

'He mustn't do that!' Taffany said with resolution. 'That won't do at
all.'

'Why, no, I guess he mustn't do that. What makes him want to do that?
What's biting him anyway? Britishers are harmless enough, aren't they?'
said Blauenfeld.

'I knew you'd look at the matter in that light,' I said. 'It's a rank
abuse of authority; I knew it would be condemned at headquarters. Now if
you could only be present, unseen, and witness how I, for instance, am
oppressed by this fanatic fellow-citizen of yours, and if you could
issue forth, and reprove him, and tell him not to do it again, I should
bless the day on which you were born in America.'

'I wasn't born there anyway,' said Morton. 'But that's of no importance
I suppose. Well, unfold your plan, Cairo.'

'I don't see yet what we can do. Do you owe the guy any money? How does
it come that he persecutes you like this?' Taffany asked.

'I'm very sorry you should have to complain, Mr. Ker-Orr, of treatment
of that sort--but what sort is it anyway?'

I gave a lurid picture of my tribulations, to the scandal and
indignation of my friends. They at once placed themselves, and with a
humorous modesty their americanism--any quantity of that mixture in
their 'organisms'--at my disposal.

It appeared to me, to start with, of the first importance that Monsieur
de Valmore should not get wind of what had happened. I took my three
Americans cautiously out of the Caf, reconnoitring before allowing them
outside. As their hotel was near the station and not near the enemy's
haunts, I encouraged their going back to it. I also supposed that they
would wish to make some toilet for the evening, and relied on their good
sense to put on their largest clothes, though Taffany was the only one
of the three that seemed at all promising from that point of view. The
scale of his buttocks did assure a certain outlandish girth that would
at once reveal to M. de Valmore the presence of an American.

My army was in excellent form. Robust high spirits possessed them. I
kept them out of the way till nightfall, and then after an early dinner,
by a circuitous route, approached the Caf Pelayo.

Morton was by this time a little screwed: he showed signs that he might
become difficult. He insisted on producing a packet of obscene
photographs, which he held before him fan-wise, like a hand of cards,
some of them upside down. The confused mass of bare legs and arms of the
photographs, distorted by this method of holding them, with some highly
indecent details occurring here and there, produced the effect of a
siamese demon. Blauenfeld was grinning over his shoulder, and seemed
likely to forget the purpose for which he was being brought to the
Pelayo.

'I know that coon,' he insisted, pointing to one of the photos. 'I swear
I know that coon.'

My idea was that the three Americans should enter the Caf Pelayo
without me. There they would establish themselves, and I had told them
where to sit and how to spot their man. They should become acquainted
with Monsieur de Valmore. Almost certainly the latter would approach his
fellow citizens at once. But if there was any ice to break, it must be
broken quickly by Taffany. They must ply him with imitation high-balls
or some other national drink, which they must undertake to mix for him.
For this they could hand the bill to me afterwards. When the ground was
sufficiently prepared, Taffany was to sign to me from the door, and I
would then, after a further interval, put in my appearance.

Morton was kissing one of the photographs. Should he continue to
produce, in season and out of season, his objectionable purchases, and
display them, perhaps, to the customers of the Pelayo, although he might
gain an ill-deserved popularity, he would certainly convey an impression
of a different sort to that planned by me for this all-american evening.
After considerable drunken argument I persuaded him to let me hold the
photographs until the _coup_ had been brought off. That point of
discipline enforced, I sent them forward, sheltering, myself, in an
archway in an adjoining street, and watched them enter the swing door
'ra-raing,' as ordered. But I had the mortification of seeing Morton
fall down as he got inside, tripping, apparently, over the mat. Cursing
this intemperate clown, I moved with some stealth to a small gallego
Caf within sight of the door of the Pelayo to await events.

I fixed my eyes on the brilliantly lighted windows of the Caf. I
imagined the glow of national pride, the spasm of delighted recognition,
that would invade Monsieur de Valmore, on hearing the 'ra-ra' chorus.
Apart from the sentimental reason--its use as a kind of battle-song--was
the practical one that this noisy entrance would at once attract my
enemy's attention. Ten minutes passed. I knew that my friends had
located Monsieur de Valmore, even if they had not begun operations. Else
they would have returned to my place of waiting. I wallowed navely in a
superb indifference. Having set the machinery going, I turned
nonchalantly away, paying no more attention to it. But the stage analogy
affected me, in the sense that I became rather conscious of my
appearance. I must await my cue, but was sure of my reception. I was the
great star that was not expected. I was the unknown quantity. Meantime I
pulled out the photographs and arranged them fantastically as Morton had
done. From time to time I glanced idly down the road. At last I saw
Blauenfeld making towards me, his usual american swing of the body
complicated by rhythmical upheavals of mirth into tramplings, stumblings
and slappings of his thigh. He was being very american in a traditional
way as he approached me. He was a good actor, I thought: I was grateful
to him. I paid for my coffee while he was coming up.

'Is it O.K.? Is he spitted?'

'Yep! we've got him fine! Come and have a look at him.'

'Did he carry out his part of the programme according to my
arrangements?'

'Why, yes. We went right in, and all three spotted him at the same time.
Taffany walked round and showed himself: he was the decoy. Morty and me
coquetted round too, looking arch and _very american_. We could see his
old pop-eyes beginning to stick out of his old head, and his old mouth
watering. At last he could hold himself no longer. He roared at us. We
bellowed at him. Gee, it was a great moment in american history! We just
came together with a hiss and splutter of joy. He called up a trayful of
drinks, to take off the rawness of our meeting. He can't have seen an
American for months. He just gobbled us up. There isn't much left of
poor old Taff. He likes him best and me next. Morty's on all fours at
present, tickling his legs. He doesn't much care for Morty. He's made us
promise to go to his hotel tonight.'

I approached the palmy terrace, my mouth a little drawn and pinched,
eyebrows raised, like a fastidious expert called in at a decisive
moment. I entered the swing door with Blauenfeld, and looked round in a
cold and business-like way, as a doctor might, with the dignified
enquiry, 'Where is the patient?' The patient was there right enough,
surrounded by the nurses I had sent. There he sat in as defenceless a
condition of beatitude as possible. He stared at me with an incredulous
grin at first. I believe that in this moment he would have been willing
to extend to me a temporary pardon--a passe-partout to his Caf for the
evening. He was so happy I became a bagatelle. Had I wished, an
immediate reconciliation was waiting for me. But I approached him with
impassive professional rapidity, my eye fixed on him, already making my
diagnosis. I was so carried away by the figure of the physician, and
adhered so faithfully to the bedside manner that I had decided upon as
the most appropriate for the occasion, that I almost began things by
asking him to put out his tongue. Instead I sat down carefully in front
of him, pulling up my trousers meticulously at the knee. I examined his
flushed and astounded face, his bristling moustache, his bloodshot eyes
in silence. Then I very gravely shook my head.

No man surprised by his most mortal enemy in the midst of an enervating
debauch, or barely convalescent from a bad illness, could have looked
more nonplussed. But Monsieur de Valmore turned with a characteristic
blank childish appeal to his nurses or boon companions for help,
especially to Taffany. Perhaps he was shy or diffident of taking up
actively his great rle, when more truly great actors were present.
Would not the divine America speak, or thunder, through them, at this
intruder? He turned a pair of solemn, appealing, outraged dog's-eyes
upon Taffany. Would not his master repulse and chastise this insolence?

'I guess you don't know each other,' said Taffany. 'Say, Monsieur de
Valmore, here's a friend of mine, Mr. Ker-Orr from London.'

My enemy pulled himself together as though the different parts of his
body all wanted to leap away in different directions, and he found it
all he could do to prevent such disintegration. An attempt at a bow
appeared as a chaotic movement, the various parts of his body could not
come together for it. It had met other movements on the way, and never
became a bow at all. An extraordinary confusion beset his body. The
beginning for a score of actions ran over it blindly and disappeared.

'Guess Mr. de Valmore ain't quite comfortable in that chair, Morty. Give
him yours.'

Then in this chaotic and unusual state he was hustled from one chair to
the other, his muffled expostulations being in french, I noticed.

His racial instinct was undergoing the severest revolution it had yet
known. An incarnation of sacred America herself had commanded him to
take me to his bosom. And, as the scope of my victory dawned upon him,
his personal mortification assumed the proportions of a national
calamity. For the first time since the sealing of his citizenship he
felt that he was only a Frenchman from the Midi--hardly as near an
American, in point of fact, as is even a poor god-forsaken Britisher.

The Soldier of Humour is chivalrous, though implacable. I merely drank a
bottle of champagne at his expense; made Don Pedro and his orchestra
perform three extras, all made up of the most intensely national english
light comedy music. Taffany, for whom Monsieur de Valmore entertained
the maximum of respect, held him solemnly for some time with a detailed
and fabulous enumeration of my virtues. Before long I withdrew with my
forces to riot in barbarous triumph at my friends' hotel for the rest of
the evening.

During the next two days I on several occasions visited the battlefield,
but Monsieur de Valmore had vanished. His disappearance alone would have
been sufficient to tell me that my visit to Spain was terminated. And in
fact two days later I left Pontaisandra with the Americans, parting with
them at Tuy, and myself continuing on the Leon-San Sebastian route back
to France, and eventually to Paris. The important letter which I had
been expecting had arrived at last and contained most unexpected news.
My presence was required, I learnt, in Budapest.

Arrived at Bayonne, I left the railway station with what people
generally regard as a premonition. It was nothing of course but the
usual mechanical working of inference within the fancy. It was already
night-time. Stepping rapidly across the square, I hurried down the
hall-way of the Fonda del Mundo. Turning brusquely and directly into the
dining-room of the inn I gazed round me almost shocked not to find what
I now associated with that particular scene. Although Monsieur de
Valmore had not been there to greet me, as good or better than his
presence seemed to be attending me on my withdrawal from Spain. I still
heard in this naked little room, as the wash of the sea in the shell,
the echo of the first whisperings of his weird displeasure. Next day I
arrived in Paris, my spanish nightmare shuffled off long before I
reached that humdrum spot.




BEAU SEJOUR


On arrival at _Beau Sjour_, in the country between Roznon and the
littoral, I was taken by the proprietress, Mademoiselle Pronnette, for
a 'Pole.'[1] She received my first payment with a smile. At the time I
did not understand it. I believe that she was preparing to make a great
favourite of me.

[Footnote 1: An account of the 'Pole' will be found at the end of this
story. The 'Pole' is a national variety of Pension-sponger, confined as
far as I know to France, and to the period preceding the Russian
Revolution.]

The 'Poles,' who in this case were mostly Little Russians, Finns and
Germans, sat at the table d'hte, at the head of the table. They smoked
large pipes and were served first. They took the lion's share. If it was
a chicken they stripped it, and left only the legs and bones for the
rest of the company. This was a turbulent community. The quarrels of the
permanent boarders with Mademoiselle Pronnette affected the quality of
the food that came to the table.

The master-spirit was a man named Zoborov. This is probably not the way
to spell it. I never saw it written. That is what I called him, and he
answered to it when I said it. So the sound must have been true enough,
though as I have written it down possibly no russian eye would recognize
it.

This man was a discontented 'Pole.' He always spoke against the
'Polonais,' I noticed, I could not make out why. Especially to me he
would speak with great contempt of all people of that sort. But he also
spoke harshly of Mademoiselle Pronnette and her less important partner,
Mademoiselle Maraude. He was constantly stirring up his fellow
pensionnaires against them.

Zoborov at first sight was a perfect 'Pole.' He was exceedingly quiet.
He wandered stealthily about and yawned as a cat does. Sometimes he
would get up with an abrupt intensity, like a cat, and walk steadily,
strongly and rhythmically away out of sight. He may have had a date with
another 'Pole,' of course, or have wanted exercise. But he certainly did
succeed in conveying in a truly polesque manner that it was a more
mysterious thing that had disturbed him. Every one has experienced those
attractive calls that lead people to make impulsive visits, which result
in some occurrence or meeting that, looking back on it, seems to have
lain behind the impulse. Scenes and places, at least other things than
men, an empty seashore, an old horse tethered in a field, some cavernous
armorican lane, under some special aspect and mood, had perhaps the
power of drawing these strange creatures towards it, as though it had
something to impart. Yet as far as Zoborov was concerned, although
certainly he succeeded in conveying the correct sensation at the time,
when you thought about it afterwards you felt you had been deceived. The
date or exercise seemed more likely in retrospect than the mysterious
messages from arrangements of objects, or the attractive electrical
dreaming of landscapes. In the truth-telling mind of after-the-event
this crafty and turbulent personage was more readily associated with
man-traps and human interests than with natural magic.

Zoborov was touchy, and he affected to be more so and in a different
sense than actually he was. He wished you to receive a very powerful
impression of his _independence_. To effect this he put himself to some
pains. First he attempted to hypnotize you with his isolation. Yet
everything about him proved 'the need of a world of men' for him. Are
not people more apt to bestow things on a person who is likely to spurn
them? you suspected him of reflecting: his gesture of spurning imaginary
things recurred very often. So you gradually would get a notion of the
sort of advantageous position he coveted in your mind.

After dinner in conversing with you he always spoke in a hoarse whisper,
or muttered in an affected bass. He scarcely parted his lips, often
whistling his words through his teeth inside them. Whether he were
telling you what a hypocrite Mademoiselle Pronnette was, or, to give
you a bit of romance and savagery, were describing how the Caucasians
ride standing on their horses, and become so exultant that they fling
their knives up in the air and catch them--he never became audible to
any one but you. He had a shock of dark hair, was dark-skinned, his eyes
seemed to indicate drugs and advertised a profound exhaustion. He had
the smell of a tropical plant; the vegetation of his body was probably
strong and rank. Through affecting not to notice people, to be absorbed
in his own very important thoughts, or the paper or the book he was
reading, the contraction of his eyebrows had become permanent. He
squinted slightly. He had bow-legs and protruding ears and informed me
that he suffered from haemorrhoids. His breath stank; but as he never
opened his mouth more than he could help, this concerned only himself.

He was a great raconteur. He had a strongly marked habit of imitating
his own imitations. In telling a story in which he figured (his stories
were all designed to prove his independence) he had a colourless formula
for his interlocutor. A gruff, half-blustering tone was always used to
represent himself. Gradually these two voices had coalesced and had
become his normal conversational voice. He was short, thick-set and
muscular. His physical strength must have been considerable. He
exploited it in various ways. It was a confirmation of his independence.
His 'inferiority complex' brought forward his tremendous chest, when
threatened, with above it his cat-like face seeming to quizz, threaten
and go to sleep all at once, with his mouth drawn to a point, in a
purring position. His opponent would be in doubt as to whether he was
going to hit him, laugh or sneeze.

French visitors he always made up to. Seeing him with the friend of the
moment, talking confidentially apart, making signs to him at table, you
would have supposed him an exclusive, solitary man, who 'did not make
friends easily.' Aloofness towards the rest of the company was always
maintained. You would not guess that he knew them except to nod to. When
about to take up with a new-comer, his manner became more severe than
ever, his aloofness deepened. As he passed the salt to him, he scarcely
showed any sign of realizing what he was doing, or that he had a
neighbour at all. His voice became gruffer. As though forcing himself to
come out of himself and behave with decent neighbourliness, he would
show the new guest a stiff politeness.

He was from twenty-five to thirty years old. In women he took no
interest, I think, and disliked exceedingly Mademoiselle Pronnette and
Mademoiselle Maraude. I thought he was a eunuch. No homosexuality was
evident. He often spoke of a friend of his, a Russian like himself. This
man was exceedingly independent; he was also prodigiously strong; far
stronger than Zoborov. This person's qualities he regarded as his own,
however, and he used them as such. The shadowy figure of this gigantic
friend seemed indeed superimposed upon Zoborov's own form and spirit.
You divined an eighth of an inch on all sides of the contour of his
biceps and pectorals, another contour--the visionary contour of this
friend's even larger muscles. And beyond even the sublime and frowning
pinnacles of his own independence, the still loftier summits of his
friend's pride, of a piece with his.

His friend was in the Foreign Legion. In recent fighting with the Moors
he had displayed unusual powers of resistance. Because of his
extraordinary strength he was compelled on the march to carry several of
his comrades' rifles in addition to his own. Zoborov would read his
african letters apart, with an air of absorbed and tender communion,
seeking to awaken one's jealousy. He repeated long dialogues between his
friend and himself. When it came to his friend's turn to speak, he would
puff his chest out, and draw himself up, until the penumbra of visionary
and supernatural flesh that always accompanied him was almost filled by
his own dilated person. He would assume a debonair recklessness of
manner, his moustaches would flaunt upwards over his laughing mouth,
and even the sombre character of his teeth and his strong breath would
be momentarily forgotten. His gestures would be those of an open-handed
and condescending prince. He would ostentatiously make use of the
personal pronoun 'thou' (in his french it had a finicky lisping sound),
to make one eager to get on such terms with him oneself.

I never got on those terms with him. One day he remained at table after
the others had left. He was waiting to be asked to go for a walk. Off my
guard, I betrayed the fact that I had noticed this. Several such
incidents occurred, and he became less friendly.

Many of Zoborov's tales had to do with Jews. The word 'juif' with him
appeared as a long, juicy sound, 'jouiive,' into which, sleepily
blinking his eyes, he injected much indolent contempt. When he used it
he made a particular face--sleepy, far-away, heavy-lidded, allowing his
almost immobile mouth to flower rather dirtily, drawn down to a
peculiarly feline point. He mentioned Jews so often that I wondered if
he were perhaps a Jew. On this point I never came to any definite
conclusion.

My second night at _Beau Sjour_ there was a scene outside my room,
which I witnessed. My bedroom was opposite that of Mademoiselle
Pronnette. Hearing the shattering report of a door and sounds of heavy
breathing, I got up and looked out.

'Va-t'en! Tu n'es-qu'un vaurien! Va-t'en! Tu m'entends? Tu m'agaes!
Va-t'en!'

The voice of the proprietress clappered behind her locked door. A long
white black-topped lathe was contorted against it. It was the most
spoilt of all our 'Poles,' a german giant, now quite naked. With his
bare arms and shoulders he strained against the wood. As I appeared he
turned round enquiring breathlessly with farcical fierceness:

'Faurien! Faurien! Elle m'abelle faurien!'

His eyes blazed above a black-bearded grin, with clownesque
incandescence. He was black and white, dazzling skin and black patches
of hair alternating. His thin knees were unsteady, his hands were
hanging in limp expostulation, his grin of protest wandered in an
aimless circle, with me for centre.

'Faurien,' he repeated.

'Veux-tu t'en aller? Je te dfends de faire un scandale, tu entends,
Charles? Va-t'en!' The voice of the proprietress energetically rattled
on the other side of the door.

'Sgantal?' he asked helplessly and incredulously, passing one hand
slowly in front of his body, with heavy facetious prudery. The floor
boards groaned to the right, a stumpy figure in stocking feet, but
otherwise clothed, emerged in assyrian profile, in a wrestling attitude,
flat hands extended, rolling with professional hesitation, with
factitious rudeness seized the emaciated nudity of the german giant
beneath the waist, then disappeared with him bodily down the passage to
the left. It was Zoborov in action. The word 'faurien' came escaping out
of the dark in a muzzy whistle, while the thump thump of the stocking
feet receded. I closed the door.

This gave me an insight at once into the inner social workings of the
Pension. Carl had slept with the proprietress from the start, but that
was not among Zoborov's accomplishments. He intrigued in complete
detachment. Carl and he never clashed, they both sucked up to each
other.

Next morning I had a look at Carl. He was about six foot two, with a
high, narrow, baldish black head and long black beard. His clothes hung
like a sack on his thin body. He gave me an acid grin. Zoborov frowned,
blinked stupidly in front of him, and swallowed his coffee with loud,
deep-chested relish. He then wiped his moustache slowly, rose, and
stamped heavily out into the garden in his sabots, rolling, husky
peasant fashion, from side to side. Carl's lank black hair curled in a
ridge low on his neck: a deep smooth brow surmounted the settled
unintelligent mockery of the rest of his face. The general effect was
that of an exotic, oily, south-german Royal Academician. He had an
italian name. Essaying a little conversation, I found him surly.

A week later Zoborov, sitting in the orchard with his back against a
tree, whittling a stick, obliged me with his views of Carl.

'Where did you take him?' I said, referring to the night scene.

Zoborov knitted his brows and muttered in his most rough and blustering
voice:

'Oh, he was drunk. I just threw him on his bed, and told him to shut his
head and go to sleep. He bores me, Carl does.'

'He's on good terms with Mademoiselle Pronnette?'

'Is he? I don't know if he is now. He was. She was angry with him that
night because she'd found him with the bonne, in the bonne's room.
That's why Maria left--the little bonne that waited at table when you
came. He sleeps with all the bonnes.'

'I slept with the new one last night,' I said.

He looked up quickly, wrinkling his eyes and puffed out in his
sturdiest, heartiest bass, puffed through his closed teeth, that is, in
his spluttering buzz:

'Did you? With Antoinette? She's rather a pretty girl. But all bonnes
are dirty!' He expressed distaste with his lips. 'A girl who works as a
bonne never has time to wash. Maria _stank_. There's no harm in his
sleeping with the bonnes. But truly he gets so drunk, too drunk--all the
time. He's engaged to Mademoiselle Pronnette, you know.' He laughed
softly, gently fluttering his moustaches, heaving up his square
protruding chest, and making a gruff rumble in it.

'Engaged--what is that?'

'Why, engaged to be married.' He laughed, throwing his eyes coquettishly
up. 'He _was_. I don't know if they're still supposed to be. _He_ says
she's always trying to marry him. Last year she lent him some money and
they became engaged.' He never raised his eyes, except to laugh, and
went on whittling the stick.

'She paid him for the engagement?' I said at last.

'Ye-es!' he drawled, with soft shaking chuckles. 'And that's all she'll
ever get out of old Carl!--But I don't think she wants to marry him now.
I think she wants the money back. I wish he'd take himself off!' He
frowned and became gruff. 'He's a good fellow all right, but he's always
making scandals. I _think_--he wants her to lend him more money. That's
what I think he wants. All these scandals--they disgust me, both of
them. I'd leave here tomorrow if I had any money to get out with.'

He hooked his eyebrows down in a calm and formal frown, and surveyed his
finger nails. They were short and thick. Putting down the stick he
turned his attention to them. He chipped indolently at their edges, then
bit the corners off.

I was frequently the witness of quarrels between Carl and Mademoiselle
Pronnette. A few days after my conversation in the orchard I entered
the kitchen of the Pension, but noticing that Carl was holding
Mademoiselle Pronnette by the throat, and was banging her head on the
kitchen table, I withdrew. As I closed the door I heard Mademoiselle
Pronnette, as I supposed, crash upon the kitchen floor. Dull sounds
that were probably kicks followed, and I could hear Carl roaring,
'Gourte! Zale gourte!' When enraged he always made use of the word
_gourte_. It was, I think, a corruption of the french word _gourde_,
which means a calabash.

As I was leaving Antoinette's bedroom one night I thought I noticed
something pale moving in the shadow of the staircase. Five minutes
afterwards I returned to her room to remind her to wake me early, and as
I got outside I heard voices. She was saying, 'Allez-vous-en, Charles!
Non, je ne _veux_ pas! J'ai sommeil! Laisse-moi tranquille. Non!' There
was a scuffling and creaking of the bed, accompanied by a persuasive and
wheedling rumble that I recognized as belonging to Carl.

Then suddenly there was a violent commotion, Antoinette's voice exploded
in harsh breton-french:

'Sacr _gars_, fiche-moi donc la paix, veux-tu! _Laisse_-moi tranquille,
nom de dieu de dieu----'

The door flew open and Carl, quite naked again, came hotly flopping into
my arms, his usual grin opening his beard and suffusing his eyes. He lay
in my arms a moment grinning, then stood up.

'Nothing doing tonight?' I said. I was going back to my room when a
furious form brushed past me, and I heard a violent slap, followed by
the screaming voice of our proprietress:

'Ah, satyr, tu couches avec les bonnes? Tu ne peux pas laisser les
femmes tranquilles la nuit, sale bte? C'est ainsi que tu crois toujours
dbaucher les bonnes aprs avoir trahi la patronne, espce de salopris!
Prends a pour ton rhume--et a. Fumier! Oui, sauve-toi, sale bte!'

The doors began opening along the passage: a few timid little slav
pensionnaires and a couple of Parisians began appearing in their
openings; I could see the unsteady nudity of Carl staggering beneath
slaps that resounded in him, as though she had been striking a hollow
column. I hastened to my room. A moment later the precipitate tread of
Zoborov passed my door _en route_ for the scene of the encounter. The
screaming voice of Antoinette then made itself heard amongst the others.
I went to my door: I was glad to hear that Antoinette was giving
Mademoiselle Pronnette more than she was receiving, delivering herself
of some trenchant reflections on the standard of the _moeurs_ obtaining
in the _Beau Sjour_, on employers that it was impossible to respect,
seeing that they were not respectable, and I then once more closed my
door. A few moments later Mademoiselle Pronnette's door crashed, the
other doors quietly closed, the returning tread of Zoborov passed my
wall. So that night's events terminated.

The two Parisians on our landing left next morning to seek more
respectable quarters, and Antoinette the same. Carl was at breakfast as
usual. He grinned at me when I sat down. Zoborov frowned at the table,
drank his coffee loudly, rose, pushing his chair back and standing for a
moment in a twisted overbalanced posture, then, his sabots falling
heavily on the parquet floor, his body rolling with the movement of a
husky peasant, he went out of the window into the garden. The food grew
worse. Two days later I told the proprietress that I was leaving.

Next night I was sitting in the kitchen reading _l'Eclair de l'Ouest_.
Mademoiselle Pronnette and Mademoiselle Maraude were sitting near the
lamp on the kitchen table and mending the socks of several
pensionnaires, when Carl came in at the door, shouted:

'Gourte! Brend za bour don rhume!' . . . and fired three shots from a
large revolver at Mademoiselle Pronnette. Two prolonged screams rose
from the women, rising and falling through a diapason at each fresh
shot. Mademoiselle Pronnette fell to the floor. Carl withdrew.
Mademoiselle Pronnette slowly rose from the floor, her hands trembling,
and burst into tears. A little Pole who had been curled up asleep on the
bench by the fire, and who no doubt had escaped Carl's notice, got up,
and limped towards the table. He had been hit in the calf by a bullet.
The women had not been hit, and they rolled up his trousers with
execrations of the 'bandit,' Carl, and washed and dressed the wound,
which was superficial. I went to look for Zoborov, whose presence I
thought was probably required. I found him at the bottom of the orchard
with two other 'Poles,' in the moonlight, playing a flute. As he lifted
his little finger from a stop and released a shrill squeak, he raised
one eyebrow, which he lowered again when, raising another finger, he
produced a lower note. I sat down beside them. Zoborov finished the tune
he was playing. His companions lay at right angles to each other, their
heads propped on their bent forearms.

'Carl has broken out,' I said.

'Ah. He is always doing that,' Zoborov said.

'He's been firing a pistol at the proprietress.'

Zoborov lifted one eyebrow, as he had when he released the squeak on the
flute.

'That doesn't surprise me,' he said.

'No one was hurt except a pensionnaire, who was asleep at the time. He
hit him in the calf.'

'Who was it?'

'I don't know his name.'

Zoborov turned in my direction, and falling down on his side, propped
his head like the other two 'Poles,' on his bent forearm, while he
puffed out his heavy chest. His voice became rough and deep.

'Ecoutez!' he began, with the sound like a voice blowing in a comb
covered with tissue paper. 'Ecoutez, mon ami.--This Pension will never
be quiet until that imbecile Carl leaves. He's not a bad fellow (il
n'est pas mauvais camarade), he's a bad hat (il est mauvais sujet). You
understand, he's not straight about money. He's a chap with money, his
father's a rich brewer. A brewer, yes, my friend, you may laugh! It's
not without its humour. He'd have to brew a lot to satisfy old Carl! He
is an inveterate boozer. Why? Why does a man drink so much as that?
Why?' His voice assumed the russian sing-song of pathetic enquiry, the
fine gnat-like voice rapidly ascending and dropping again in an
exhausted complaint. 'Because he is a german brute! That is the reason.
He thinks because his father is a rich brewer that people should give
him drink for nothing--it is a strange form of reasoning! He is always
dissatisfied.--Now he has shot a pensionnaire. It is not the first time
that he has fired at Mademoiselle Pronnette. But he never hits her! He
doesn't want to hit her. He just fires off his revolver to make her
excited! Then he tries to borrow more money!'

The three of them now remained quite immobile, stretched out on the dewy
grass in different directions. I got up. With a gruff and blustering
sign, Zoborov exclaimed:

'Ah yes, my friend, that is how it is!'

I walked back to the house. As I passed the kitchen, I heard a great
deal of noise, and went in.

The little shot pensionnaire was once more back on the bench, by the
fire, with his bare leg, bandaged, stretched out horizontally in front
of him, his two hands behind his head. At the table sat Carl, his face
buried in a large handkerchief, which he held against his forehead, his
shoulders heaving. A great volume of sound rose from him, a rhythmical
bellowing of grief.

Mademoiselle Pronnette was standing a few yards away from him, a
denunciatory forefinger stabbing the air in the direction of his
convulsions.

'There he sits, the wretch. Mon dieu, he is a pretty sight! And to
reflect that that is a fellow of good family, who comes from a home
cracking with every luxury! a fait piti!--Is there anything I haven't
done for you, Charles? Say, Charles, can you deny I have done all a
woman can?' she vociferated. 'I have given you my youth' (tremblingly
and tenderly), 'my beauty!--I have shamed myself. I have offered myself
to the saucy scorn of mere bonnes, I have made every sacrifice a woman
can make! With what result I should like to know? Ah yes, you may well
hide your face! You outrage me at every moment, you take my last
halfpenny, and when you have soaked yourself in a neighbouring saloon,
you come back here and debauch my bonnes! Any dirty peasant girl serves
your turn. Is not that true, Charles? Answer! Deny it if you dare! That
is what you do! That is how you repay all my kindness!'

Observing my presence, she turned expansively towards me.

'Tenez, ce monsieur-l peut te le dire, il a t le tmoin de tes
indignes caprices.--Had you not, sir, occasion to observe this ruffian,
as naked as he came into the world, issuing from the bedroom of the
good-for-nothing harlot, Antoinette? Is not that the case, sir? Without
a stitch of clothing, this incontinent ruffian----'

The french tongue, with its prolix dignity for such occasions, clamoured
on. As I was drawn into the discussion, a section of Carl's face
appeared from behind the handkerchief, enough to free the tail of his
eye for an examination of that part of the kitchen that was behind him.
Our boche exhibitionist ascertained who it was had witnessed his last
nocturnal contretemps. He thrust his head back deeper into the
handkerchief. A roar of mingled disapproval and grief broke from him.

'Ah yes, now you suffer! But you never consider how you have made me
suffer!'

But her discourse now took a new direction.

'I don't say, Charles, that you are alone--there are others who are even
more guilty than you. I could name them if I wished! There is that dirty
sneaking individual Zoborov, for instance. Ah, how he irritates me, that
man! He is an extremely treacherous personage, that! _I_ have heard the
things he says about me. He thinks I don't know. I know very well. I am
informed of all his manoeuvres. _That_ is the guilty party in this
affair. He is the person who poisons the air of this establishment! I
would get rid of him tomorrow if I could! Yes, Charles, I know that you,
in comparison with such a crapulous individual as that Zoborov, are at
least frank. At least you are a gentleman, a man of good family,
accustomed to live in ease--what do I say, in luxury: and your faults
are the faults of your station. _Tu es un fils  papa_, mon pauvre
garon--you are a spoilt darling. You are not a _dirty moujik_, like
that Zoborov!'

I noticed at this point, the face of Zoborov peering in at the window
with his gascon frown, his one hooked-down and angrily-anchored eyebrow,
and fluffy cavalier moustache, above his steady inscrutable feline pout.
Mademoiselle Pronnette observed him at the same moment.

'Yes, I see you, sir! _Toujours aux coutes!_ Always eavesdropping! What
eavesdroppers hear of themselves they deserve to hear. I hope you are
satisfied, that's all I can say!'

'La ferme! La ferme!' Zoborov's gruff railing voice puffed in at the
window. He made his hand into a duck's bill, and worked it up and down
to make it quack, as he turned away.

'He insults me, you know, that dirty _type_, he treats me as though I
were the last of creatures! Yet what is he? He is nothing but a dirty
moujik! He actually boasts of it. He's not a credit to the house--you
should see the Parisians looking at him. He has driven pensionnaires
away with his rudeness--and his dirt! He doesn't mind what he says. Then
he abuses me to _everybody_, from morning till night. C'est une mauvaise
langue!'

'En effet!' Mademoiselle Maraude agreed. 'He has a bad tongue. He does
this house no good.'

The 'Pole' with the bandaged leg began giggling. The two women turned to
him.

'What is it, mon petit? Is your leg hurting you?'

Carl's head had sunk upon the table. The heat inside the handkerchief,
the effects of the brandy he had been drinking, and the constant music
of Mademoiselle Pronnette's voice, had overcome him. Now prolonged and
congested snores rose from him, one especially vicious and intense
crescendo making Mademoiselle Pronnette, who was examining the bandage
on the leg of the pensionnaire, jump.

'Mon dieu!' she said. 'I wondered whatever it was.' The door opened, and
Zoborov entered, advancing down the kitchen with as much noise as he
could extract from his weight, his clumsiness, and the size of his
sabots.

As he came, expanding his chest and speaking in his deepest voice, he
said, bluff and 'proletarian':

'Ecoutez, Mademoiselle Pronnette! I don't like the way you talk about
me. You are absurd! What have I done to cause you to speak about me like
that? I spend half my time keeping the peace between you and Carl; and
when anything happens you turn on me! You are not reasonable!'

He spoke in an indolent sing-song, his eyes half closed, scarcely
moving his lips, and talking through his teeth. He knelt down beside his
wounded compatriot and put his hand gently upon his bandaged leg,
speaking to him in russian.

'I only say what I know, sir!' Mademoiselle Pronnette hotly replied.

Zoborov continued speaking in russian to the injured pensionnaire, who
replied in accents of mild musical protest.

'Your intrigues are notorious! You are always making mischief. I detest
you, and wish you had never entered this house!'

Zoborov had unwound the bandage. He rose with a face of frowning
indignation.

'Ecoutez, Mademoiselle! If instead of amusing yourself by blowing off
steam in that way, you did something for this poor chap who has just
been injured through no fault of his own, you would be showing yourself
more humane, yes, more humane! Why have you not at once put him to bed?
He should see a doctor. His wound is in a dangerous condition! If it is
not attended to blood-poisoning will set in.'

Mademoiselle Pronnette faced him, eye flashing; Mademoiselle Maraude
had risen and moved towards the injured figure.

'It isn't true!' Mademoiselle Maraude said. 'He is not seriously
hurt----'

'No, you are lying, Zoborov! He has been attended to,' Mademoiselle
Pronnette said. 'It doesn't hurt, does it, mon petit?' she appealed
coaxingly. 'It was nothing but a scratch, was it?--No. It was nothing
but a scratch.'

'For a scratch there's a good deal of blood,' Zoborov said. 'Fetch a
basin and some hot water. I will go for a doctor.'

The women looked at each other.

'A doctor? Why? You must be off your head! There's no occasion for a
doctor! Do you wish for a doctor, mon petit?'

The injured pensionnaire smiled indulgently, with an amused expression,
as though an elder taking part in a children's game, and shook his head.

'No. He does not wish for a doctor. Of course he doesn't! He ought to
know best himself.'

'Ecoutez!' said Zoborov sleepily. 'It's for your sake, Mademoiselle
Pronnette, as much as his----You don't want anything to happen to him?
No. These wounds are dangerous. You should get a doctor.'

Mademoiselle Pronnette stared at him in impotent hatred. She turned
quickly to Mademoiselle Maraude, and said:

'Run quickly, Marie, and get some ice--down at Cornic's.'

Zoborov started rolling with ungainly speed towards the door, saying
over his shoulder, 'I will go. I shall be back in a few minutes. Bathe
his leg.'

As the door closed Mademoiselle Pronnette stared glassily at
Mademoiselle Maraude.

'Quel homme! Quel homme! Mon dieu, quel malhonnte individu que
celui-l! You saw how he put the blame on us? Any one would think that
we had neglected this poor boy here. My god, what a man!'

An obscene and penetrating trumpeting rose from the prostrate Carl--it
rose shrieking and strong, sank to a purr, then rose again louder and
stronger, sank to a gurgling purr again, then rose to a brazen crow,
higher and higher.

Mademoiselle Pronnette put her fingers in her ears. 'My god, my god! As
though it were not enough to have caused all this trouble----'

She sprang over, and seizing Carl by the shoulders shook him nervously.

'Go and sleep off your booze somewhere else--do you hear? Be off! Get
out! Allez--vite! Marchez! Assez, assez! Fiche-moi la paix! _Enfin!_'

Carl rose unsteadily, a malevolent eye fixed on Mademoiselle Pronnette,
and staggered out of the room. Mademoiselle Pronnette drew Mademoiselle
Maraude aside, and began whispering energetically to her. I withdrew.

That night the bedroom door of the proprietress opened and shut it
seemed incessantly. Between four and five, as it was getting light, I
woke and heard a scuffle in the passage. The voice of Mademoiselle
Pronnette insisted in a juicy whisper:

'Dis, Charles, tu m'aimes? M'aimes-tu, chri? Dis!'

A sickly rumble came in response. Then more scuffling. Sucking and
patting sounds and the signs of disordered respiration, with occasional
rumbles, continued for some time. I got down to the bottom of the bed
and turned the key in the door. I expected our german exhibitionist to
enter my room at any moment with the nude form of Mademoiselle

Pronnette in his arms, and perhaps edify me with the final phases of
his heavy adieus. The sound of the key in the lock cut short whatever it
was, and gradually the sounds ceased.

Next evening, at the request of Carl, we all collected in the kitchen
for a little celebration. Whether it was to mark the rupture of the
engagement, an approaching marriage, or what, was not made clear to us.
Carl, with the courtliness of the South of Germany, his thin academic
black locks and lengthy beard conferring the air of a function upon the
scene, was very attentive to Mademoiselle Pronnette.

Zoborov was the gallant moujik. He toasted, with rough plebeian humour,
the happy couple.

'Aux deux tourtereaux!' he rolled bluffly out, lifting his glass, and
rolling the r's of 'tourtereau' with a rich russian intensity. Placing
his heavy sinewy brown hand before his mouth he whispered to me:

'Old Carl has relieved her of a bit more of her dough!' He shook his
shoulders and gurgled in the bass.

'Do you think that's it?'

'_Zurement!_' he lisped. 'He's got the secret of the safe! He knows the
combination!' He chuckled, bawdy and bluff. 'Old Carl will clean her
out, you see.'

'He's an exceedingly noisy burglar. He woke me up last night in the
course of his operations.'

Zoborov chuckled contentedly.

'He's mad!' he said. 'Still, he gets what he goes for. Good luck to him,
I say.'

'Is Mademoiselle Pronnette rich?' I asked him. He squinted and hooked
his left eyebrow down, then burst out laughing and looked in my face.

'I don't know,' he said. 'I shouldn't think so. Have you seen the safe?'
he laughed again.

'No.'

'She has the safe in her bedroom. Carl rattles it when he's very
screwed. Once he tried to carry it out of the room.' Zoborov laughed
with his sly shaking of his big diaphragm. The recollection of this
event tickled him. Then he said to me: 'If you ask me, all she's got is
in that safe, that's what I think.'

A piano had been brought in. A pensionnaire was playing the 'Blue
Danube.'

Carl and Mademoiselle Pronnette danced. She was a big woman, about
thirty. Her empty energetic face was pretty, but rather dully and evenly
laid out. Her back when _en fte_ was a long serpentine blank with an
embroidered spine. When she got up to dance she held herself forward,
bare arms hanging on either side, two big meaty handles, and she
undulated her _nuque_ and back while she drew her mouth down into the
tense bow of an affected kiss. While she held her croupe out stiffly in
the rear, in muscular prominence, her eyes burnt at you with traditional
gallic gallantry, her eyebrows arched in bland acceptance (a static
'_Mais oui, si vous voulez!_') of french sex-convention, the general
effect intended to be 'witty' and suggestive, without vulgarity. I was
very much disgusted by her for my part: what she suggested to me was
something like a mad butcher, who had put a piece of bright material
over a carcase of pork or mutton, and then started to ogle his
customers, owing to a sudden shuffling in his mind of the respective
appetites. Carl on this occasion behaved like the hallucinated customer
of such a pantomime, who, come into the shop, had entered into the
spirit of the demented butcher, and proceeded to waltz with his
sex-promoted food. The stupid madness, or commonplace wildness, that
always shone in his eyes was at full blast as he jolted uncouthly hither
and thither, while the proprietress undulated and crackled in complete
independence, held roughly in place merely by his two tentacles.

With the exception of Mademoiselle Maraude and the bonne amie of a
parisian schoolmaster on his vacation, all the guests were men. They
danced together timidly and clumsily; Zoborov, frowning and squinting,
stamped over to the schoolmaster's girl, and with a cross gruff hauteur
invited her to dance. He rolled his painful proletarian weight once or
twice round the room. The 'Blue Danube' rolled on; Carl poured
appreciative oily light into Mademoiselle Pronnette's eyes, she
redoubled her lascivious fluxions, until Carl, having exhausted all the
superlatives of the language of the eyes, cut short their rhythmical
advance and, becoming immobile in the middle of the room, clasped her in
his arms, where she hung like a dying wasp, Carl devouring with much
movement the lower part of her face, canted up with abandon. The
pensionnaire at the piano broke into a cossack dance. Zoborov, who had
handed the lady back to her schoolmaster again, with ceremony, and had
returned to sit at my side, now rose and performed a series of
gargantuan movements up and down the kitchen (flinging the less weighty
couples to left and right) studiously devoid of any element of grace or
skill. At regular intervals he stamped in his sabots and uttered a few
gruff cries, while the pianist trumped upon the piano. Then, head back
and his little moustache waving above his mouth, he trundled down the
room, with a knees-up gymnastic movement. Satisfied that he had betrayed
nothing but the completest barbaric uncouthness, he resumed his seat,
grinning gravely at me.

His compatriots applauded, the piano stopped.

'That is a _typical_ dance, mon ami, of the Don Cossacks!' he said,
puffing a little. '_Typical_' (Tee-peek!), in his slow mincing french.
In using this word his attitude was that I had a well-known curiosity
about everything cossack, and that now, by the purest chance, I had
heard a characteristic Don dance, and seen it interpreted with a racy
savagery that only a Cossack could convey: and that, at the same time,
he, Zoborov, had been astonished, he was bound to admit, at this
happening in such an informative way as it had. In fine, I was lucky.

'Typical!' he said again. 'But I am out of practice.' Then he dropped
the subject. The piano struck up again, with a contemporary Berlin
dance-tune, and the floor was soon full of bobbing shapes, attempting to
time their feet to the music. Long before the end the forms of Carl and
Mademoiselle Pronnette, head and shoulders above the rest of the
company, were transfixed in the centre of the room, Carl like a lanky
black spider, always devouring but never making an end of his meal
provided by the palpitating wasp in his arms while the others bobbed on
gently around them.

Zoborov fixed his frown of quizzical reproof upon them, and stuttered
thickly in the beard that was not there:

'Les deux tourrterreaux!'

The cider was of good quality, and it was plentiful, being drawn from a
large cask. Carl and Mademoiselle Pronnette in the intervals of the
music remained in a deep embrace by the side of the fire. At length,
when the fte had been in progress for perhaps half an hour, they
withdrew, so coiled about one another that they experienced some
difficulty in getting out of the door.

Zoborov drew my attention to their departure.

'The two doves are going to their nest to lie down for a little while!'
he remarked, with the bluff rolling jocosity of Zoborov celebrating.

Zoborov now took charge, and the party became all-russian. He fetched
his flute and another pensionnaire had an accordion: a concert of
russian popular music began. The Volga Boat Song was chorally rendered,
with Zoborov beating time.

At the end of a quarter of an hour Mademoiselle Pronnette and Carl
reappeared. Carl was pale and Mademoiselle Pronnette very red. She
affected to fan herself. Carl's monotonous grin attached itself to the
faces of the company with its unfailing brutal confession, hang-dog to
stress its obscene message, while his sleek and shining black hair
curled venerably behind, where a hasty brush and comb had arranged it.

'Qu'il fait _chaud_!' exclaimed Mademoiselle Pronnette, and drew down a
window.

Zoborov took no notice of the reappearance of the turtle doves, but
continued his concert. After a while Mademoiselle Pronnette showed
signs of impatience. She got up, and advancing towards her choir of
pensionnaires, who were gathered round the fire in a half-circle, she
exclaimed:

'What do you say to another dance, now, my friends? Let somebody play
the piano. Your russian music is very pretty but it is so sad. It always
makes me sad. Let us have something more cheerful.'

A pensionnaire got up and went to the piano. Zoborov remained near the
fire. The dance began half-heartedly. Zoborov went on playing the flute
to himself, his little peaked mouth drawn down to the mouthpiece, his
little finger remaining erect while he sampled the feeble sound.

The 'Poles' of the Pension sat and gazed, like a group of monks bowed
down with many vows, at their proprietress and her german lover, while
one of their number made music for this voluptuous couple, so strangely
different from them. Their leader, Zoborov, continued to draw a few
notes out of his flute, the skeleton of a melancholy air. Then two or
three rose and embraced each other awkwardly, and began to move round
the room, shuffling their feet, out of consideration for their worldly
hostess. The parisian schoolmaster and his bonne amie also accommodated.

The kitchen door opened and a group of eleven Russians entered, friends
of Zoborov, whom he had invited. They had come over from a neighbouring
Pension. He rose and greeted them in impressive gutturals, lurching
huskily about. They moved to the bottom of the kitchen, were provided
with cups, and drew cider from the barrel. There were now about thirty
Russians in the room. A few were dancing languidly. Mademoiselle
Pronnette and Carl were indulging in a deep kiss midway in their
career. Zoborov, when his visitors had refreshed themselves, crossed the
kitchen with them and they left. He was going to show them over the
establishment.

'I ask you!' said Mademoiselle Pronnette to Mademoiselle Maraude. 'Quel
toupet, quand mme!'

Mademoiselle Maraude, to whom I had been talking, gazed after Zoborov.

'En effet!' she said.

'One would think that the house belonged to him!' exclaimed Mademoiselle
Pronnette. 'He brings a band of strangers in here----I might not exist
at all, for all I am consulted! What an ill-mannered individual!'

'C'est un paysan, quoi!' Mademoiselle Maraude folded her hands in her
lap with dignified deliberation. Carl grinned at both of them in turn.
Zoborov returned with his friends. Mademoiselle Pronnette burst out:

'Monsieur! One would say that you have forgotten to whom this house
belongs! You bring your friends in here and take no more notice of me
than if I were the bonne. I am the proprietress of this establishment,
gentlemen, and this,' turning to Carl, 'my fianc, is now my partner.'

Zoborov advanced sleepily towards Mademoiselle Pronnette, a blustering
complaint blowing from his mouth as he came, rolling and blowing lazily
before him.

'But, Mademoiselle Pronnette, I don't understand you, really. You asked
us to invite anybody we liked.--These are good friends of mine. I have
just shown them over the house out of kindness to _you_. I was
advertising your Pension!'

'I'm quite capable of doing that myself, Monsieur Zoborov!'

'You can't have too much advertisement!' said Zoborov genially.

Carl, who had stood with his dark sheepish grin on his face, gave a loud
and unexpected laugh. Quickly raising his arm, he brought his hand down
on Zoborov's back. He then kneaded with his long white fingers Zoborov's
muscular shoulder.

'Zagr Zoborov!' he exclaimed, shaking with guttural mirth, 'that's
capital! I and my partner appoint you as our agent!'

Rolling gently in contact with the hearty mannerisms of his german
friend, glancing up quickly with shrewd conciliation, Zoborov blustered
out pleasantly:

'Good! I'll be your factor. That's fixed.--Congratulations, old fellow,
on your promotion!--What is my salary?'

'We pay by results!' grinned Carl.

'Well, here is one gentleman already who wishes to come round and reside
here.'

He pointed to a ragged figure lurking absent-mindedly in the rear of the
group. 'I shall expect my commission when he moves in.'

Mademoiselle did not like this conversation, and now said:

'I've got quite enough Russians here already. I should be more obliged
to you if you found a few Parisians or Americans. That's what I should
like.'

'En effet!' said Mademoiselle Maraude distinctly, under her breath.

The tactful pensionnaire at the piano began playing a viennese waltz.
Mademoiselle Pronnette, still boiling, drew Carl away, saying:

'C'est trop fort! How that man irritates me, how he irritates me! He's
_malin_, also, he is treacherous! He always has an answer, have you
noticed? He's never without an answer. He's as rus as a peasant--but,
anyhow, he _is_ a peasant, so that's to be expected. How he irritates
me!'

Carl rumbled along incoherently beside her, bending down, his arms
dangling, his stoop accentuated.

'Oh, he means no harm!' he said.

'Not so. He's a treacherous individual, I tell you!'

Carl put his arm around her waist, and kicking his large flat feet about
for a few moments, jerked her into a brisk dance, which with reluctant
and angry undulations she followed. As they flew round, in angular
sweeps, describing a series of rough squares, a discontented clamour
still escaped from her.

A little later the Russians began singing the Volga Boat Song, at the
bottom of the room, Zoborov again acting as conductor. Mademoiselle
Pronnette put her fingers in her ears.

'Mon dieu, quelle vilaine musique que celle-l!' she exclaimed.

'En effet!' said Mademoiselle Maraude, 'elle n'est pas bien belle!'

'En effet!' said Mademoiselle Pronnette.

Carl was pouring himself out a cognac, and in a blunt and booming bass
was intoning the air with the others. Mademoiselle Pronnette left the
room. After an interval Carl followed her.

I went over and talked by the fire to the pensionnaire who usually
played the piano. Zoborov came up, his chest protruding, and his eyes
almost closed, and sat down heavily beside us.

'Well, my friend, what do you think of Mademoiselle Pronnette's new
_partner_?' he laughed with a gruff gentle rattle.

'Carl, do you mean?'

'Why yes, Carl!' he again gave way to soft rumbling laughter. 'I wish
them luck of their partnership. They are a likely pair, I am bound to
say!'

The pianist gazed into the fire.

'What time do you leave in the morning?' he asked.

'At ten.' We talked about Vannes, to which I was going first. He seemed
to know Brittany very well. He gave several yawns, gazing over towards
his animated crowd of compatriots.

'It's time we went to bed. I shall get rid of this lot,' he said,
getting up. 'Come along, my children,' he exclaimed. 'To bed! We're
going to bed!'

Several hurried up to him excitedly. They talked for some minutes in
russian. Again he raised his voice.

'Let's go to bed, my friends! It's late.'

Mademoiselle Pronnette entered the kitchen. Zoborov, without looking in
her direction, put out his hand and switched off the lights. A roar of
surprise, laughter and scuffling ensued. The fire lighted up the faces
of those sitting near us, and a restless mass beyond.

'Will you be so kind, Monsieur Zoborov, as to put on the lights at
once!' the voice of Mademoiselle Pronnette clamoured. 'Monsieur
Zoborov, do you hear me? Put on the lights immediately!' Suddenly the
lights were switched on again. Mademoiselle Pronnette had done it
herself.

'Will you allow me, Monsieur Zoborov, to manage my own house? At last I
have had enough of your ways! You are an insolent personage. You are an
ill-conditioned individual!'

Zoborov's eyes were now completely closed, apparently with sleep that
could not be put off. He blustered plaintively back without opening
them:

'But, Mademoiselle! I thought you'd gone to bed! Some one had to get
all these people out! I don't understand you. Truly I don't understand
you at all! Still, now that you're here I can go to bed! I'm dropping
with sleep! Good-night! Good-night!' he sang gruffly as he rolled out,
raising his brawny paw several times in farewell.

'Quel homme que celui-l! Quel homme!' said Mademoiselle Pronnette,
gazing into the eyes of Mademoiselle Maraude, who had come up.

'En effet!' said Mademoiselle Maraude. 'For a pensionnaire who never
pays his "pension," he is a cool hand!'

That night the new partners had their first business disagreement in the
bedroom of the proprietress. I heard their voices booming and rattling
for a long time before the door opened. It burst open at last.
Mademoiselle Pronnette shouted:

'Bring me the fifteen thousand francs you have stolen from me, you
indelicate personage, and I will then return you your papers. If your
father knew of your conduct what would he think? Do you suppose he would
like to think that he had a son who was nothing but a crook? Yes, crook!
Our partnership begins from the moment of the first _versement_ that you
have promised, do you understand? And I require the money at once, you
hear? At once!'

A furious rumble came from outside my door.

'No, I have heard that before! Enough! I will hear no more.'

A second rumble answered.

'What, you accuse me of that? You ungrateful individual, you have the
face to----'

A long explanatory muted rumble followed.

'Never!' she screamed. 'Never, while I live! I will sign nothing! That's
flat! I would never have believed it possible----'

A rumble came from a certain distance down the passage.

'Yes, you had better go! You do well to slink away! But I'll see you
don't get far, my bird. You will be held for _escroquerie_, yes,
_escroquerie_! at the nearest commissariat! Don't make any mistake!'

A distant note sounded, like the brief flatulence of an elephant. I took
it to be 'Gourte!'

'Ah yes, my pretty bird!' vociferated Mademoiselle Pronnette. 'Wait a
bit! You may vilify me now. That is the sort of person you are! That I
should have expected! But we shall see! We shall see!'

There was no answer. There was a short silence. Mademoiselle
Pronnette's door crashed to.

The next morning I left at ten.

A year later I went to the Pardon at Rot. I was sitting amongst the
masses of black-clothed figures at a minor wedding, when I saw a figure
approaching that appeared familiar. Five peasants were rolling along in
their best sabots and finest flat black hats, one in the middle holding
the rest with some story he was telling, with heavy dare-devil gestures,
as they closed in deferentially upon him as they walked. In the middle
one I recognized Zoborov. He was now dressed completely as a breton
peasant, in black cloth a half-inch thick, of the costliest manufacture.
He rocked from side to side, stumbling at any largish cobble, chest up
and out, a double chin descending spoon-shaped and hard beneath upon his
short neck, formed as a consequence of the muscular arrangements for the
production of his deep bass. His mouth protruded like the mouths of
stone masks used for fountains.

As he shouldered his way impressively forward, he made gestures of
condescending recognition to left and right, as he caught sight of
somebody he knew. His fellow peasants responded with eager salutes or
flattering obeisances.

As he caught sight of me he stumbled heartily towards me, his mouth
belled out, as though mildly roaring, one large rough hand held back in
readiness to grasp mine.

'Why, so you are back again in this part of the country, are you? I am
glad to see you! How are you?' he said. 'Come inside, I know the
patronne here. I'll get her to give us some good cider.'

We all went in. The patronne saw us and made her way through the crowd
at once to Zoborov. Her malignant white face, bald at the sides, as
usual with the breton woman, shone with sweat; she came up whining
deferentially. With his smiling frown, and the gruff caress of his
artificial roar, Zoborov greeted her, and went with her into a parlour
next to the kitchen. We followed.

'Bring us three bottles of the best cider, Madame Mordouan,' he said.

'Why yes, Monsieur Zoborov, certainly, immediately,' she said, and
obsequiously withdrew.

Zoborov was fatter. The great thickness of the new suiting made him
appear very big indeed. The newness and stiffness of the breton fancy
dress, the shining broadcloth and velvet, combined with the noticeable
filling out of his face, resulted in a disagreeable impression of an
obese doll or gigantic barber's block.

'You look prosperous,' I said.

'Do you think so? I'm _en breton_ now, you see! When are you coming over
to see us at _Beau Sjour_? This gentleman was at _Beau Sjour_,' he
said, turning to his friends. 'Are you stopping in the neighbourhood?
I'll send the trap over for you.'

'The trap? Have they a trap now?'

'A trap? Why yes, my friend. There have been great changes since you
were at _Beau Sjour_!'

'Indeed. Of what kind?'

'Of _every_ kind, my friend!'

'How is Mademoiselle Pronnette?'

'Oh, she's gone, long ago!'

'Indeed!'

'Why yes, she and old Carl left soon after you.' He paused a moment. 'I
am the proprietor now!'

'You!'

'Why yes, my friend, me! Mademoiselle Pronnette went bust. _Beau
Sjour_ was sold at auction as it stood. It was not expensive. I took
the place on.--Mais oui, mon ami, je suis maintenant le propritaire!'
He seized me by the shoulder, then lightly tapped me there. 'C'est
drle, n'est-ce pas?'

I seemed to hear the voice of Mademoiselle Maraude replying, 'En effet.'

'En effet!' I said.

He offered himself banteringly as the comic proprietor. Fancy Zoborov
being the proprietor of a french hotel! He turned, frowning menacingly,
however, towards the peasants, and raised his glass with solemn eye. I
raised mine. They raised their glasses like a peasant chorus.

'What has become of Carl?' I asked.

'Carl? Oh I don't know what's become of Carl! He's gone to the devil, I
should think!'

I saw that I was obtruding other histories upon the same footing with
his, into a new world where they had no place. They were a part of the
old bad days.

'How are the Russians, "les Polonais"?'

He looked at me for a moment, his eyes closing in his peculiar
withdrawal or sleep.

'Oh, I've cleared all that rubbish out! I've got a chic hotel now! It is
really quite comfortable. You should come over. I have several
Americans, there's an Englishman, Kenyon, do you know him? His father is
a celebrated architect.--I only have three Russians there now. I kept
them on, poor devils. They help me with the work. Two act as valets.--I
know what Russians are, being one myself, you see! I have no wish to go
bankrupt like Mademoiselle Pronnette.'

I was rather richly dressed at the time, and I was glad. I ordered for
the great 'peasant' and his satellites another bottle of the ceremonious
cider.


THE POLE

In pre-war Europe, which was also even more the Europe of before the
Russian Revolution, a curious sect was established in the
watering-places of Brittany. Its members were generally known by the
peasants as 'Poles.' The so-called 'Pole' was a russian exile or
wandering student, often coming from Poland. The sort that collected in
such great numbers in Brittany were probably not politicians, except in
the sentimental manner in which all educated Russians before the
Revolution were 'radical' and revolutionary. They had banished
themselves, for purely literary political reasons, it is likely, rather
than been banished. Brittany became a heavenly Siberia for masses of
middle-class russian men and women who made 'art' the excuse for a
never-ending holiday. They insensibly became a gentle and delightful
parasite upon the French. Since the Revolution (it being obvious that
they cannot have vast and lucrative estates, which before the Revolution
it was easy for them to claim) they have mostly been compelled to work.
The Paris taxi-driver of today, lolling on the seat of his vehicle,
cigarette in mouth, who, without turning round, swiftly moves away when
a fare enters his cab, is what in the ancien rgime would have been a
'Pole.' If there is a communist revolution in France, this sort of new
nomad will move down into Spain perhaps. He provides for the countries
of Europe on a very insignificant scale a new version, today, of the
'jewish problem.' His indolence, not his activity, of course, makes him
a 'problem.'

The pre-war method of migration was this. A 'Pole' in his home in Russia
would save up or borrow about ten pounds. He then left his native land
for ever, taking a third-class ticket to Brest. This must have become an
almost instinctive proceeding. At Brest he was in the heart of the
promised land. He would then make the best of his way to a Pension de
Famille, already occupied by a phalanstery of 'Poles.' There he would
have happily remained until the crack of doom, but for the Bolshevik
Revolution. He had reckoned without Lenin, so to speak.

He was usually a 'noble,' very soberly but tactfully dressed. He wore
sude gloves: his manners were graceful. The proprietress had probably
been warned of his arrival and he was welcome. His first action would be
to pay three months' board and lodging in advance; that would also be
his last action of that sort. With a simple dignity that was the secret
of the 'Pole,' at the end of the trimestre, he remained as the guest of
the proprietress. His hostess took this as a matter of course. He
henceforth became the regular, unobtrusive, respected inhabitant of the
house.

If the proprietress of a Pension de Famille removed her establishment
from one part of the country to another, took a larger house, perhaps
(to make room for more 'Poles'), her 'Poles' went with her without
comment or change in their habits. Just before the war, Mademoiselle T.
still sheltered in her magnificent hotel, frequented by wealthy
Americans, some of these quiet 'Poles,' who had been with her since the
day when she first began hotel-keeping in a small wayside inn. Lunching
there you could observe at the foot of the table a group of men of a
monastic simplicity of dress and manner, all middle-aged by that time,
indeed even venerable in several instances, talking among themselves in
a strange and attractive tongue. Mademoiselle T. was an amiable old
lady, and these were her domestic gods. Any one treating them with
disrespect would have seen the rough side of Mademoiselle T.'s tongue.

Their hosts, I believe, so practical in other ways, became superstitious
about these pensive inhabitants of their houses. Some I know would no
more have turned out an old and ailing 'Pole' who owed them thirty
years' board and lodging, than many people would get rid of an aged and
feeble cat.

For the breton peasant, 'Polonais' or 'Pole' sufficed to describe the
member of any nation whom he observed leading anything that resembled
the unaccountable life of the true slav parasite with which he had
originally familiarized himself under the name of 'Pole.'

Few 'Poles,' I think, ever saw the colour of money once this initial
pin-money that they brought from Russia was spent. One 'Pole' of my
acquaintance did get hold of three pounds by some means, and went to
spend a month in Paris. After this outing, his prestige considerably
enhanced, he came back and resumed his regular life, glad to be again
away from the _sicle_ and its metropolitan degradation. In pre-war
Paris, 'Poles' were to be met, very much _de passage_, seeing some old
friends (_en route_ for Brest) for the last time.

A woman opened a smart hotel of about thirty beds not far from _Beau
Sjour_. I was going over to see it. She advertised that any artist who
would at once take up his quarters there would receive his first six
months gratis. Referring to this interesting event in the hearing of a
'Pole,' he told me he had been over there the previous day. He had found
no less than twelve 'Poles' already installed, and there was a
considerable waiting list. 'If you like to pay you can go there all
right,' he said, laughing.

The general explanation given by the 'Pole' of the position in which he
found himself, was that his hosts, after six or nine months, were afraid
to let him go, for fear of losing their money. He would add that he
could confidently rely on more and more deference the longer he stopped,
and the larger the amount that he represented in consequence. Ordinary
boarders, he would tell you, could count on nothing like so much
attention as he could.

That such a state of affairs should ever have occurred, was partly due
perhaps to the patriarchal circumstances of the breton agricultural
life. This new domestic animal was able to insinuate himself into its
midst because of the existence of so many there already. Rich peasants,
and this applied to the proprietors of country inns, were accustomed in
their households to suffer the presence of a number of poor familiars,
cousinly paupers, supernumeraries doing odd jobs on the farm or in the
stables. The people not precisely servants who found a place at their
hearth were not all members of the immediate family of the master.

But there was another factor favouring the development of the 'Pole.'
This was that many of them were described as painters. They seldom of
course were able to practise that expensive art, for they could not buy
colours or canvases: in their visitors' bulletins, however, they
generally figured as that. But after the death of Gauguin, the dealer,
Vollard, and others, came down from Paris. They ransacked the country
for forgotten canvases: when they found one they paid to the astonished
peasants, in the heat of competition, very considerable sums. Past hosts
of the great french romantic had confiscated paintings in lieu of rent.
The least sketch had its price. The sight of these breathless
collectors, and the rumours of the sums paid, made a deep impression on
the local people. The 'Poles' on their side were very persuasive. They
assured their hosts that Gauguin was a mere cipher compared to
them.--These circumstances told in favour of the 'Pole.'

But no such explanations can really account for the founding of this
charming and whimsical order. Whether there are still a few 'Poles'
surviving in Brittany or not, I have no means of knowing. In the larger
centres of _villgiature_ the _sicle_ was already paramount before the
war.

The Russian with whom translations of the russian books of tsarist
Russia familiarized the West was an excited and unstable child. We have
seen this society massacred in millions without astonishment. The
russian books prepared every Western European for that consummation. All
the cast of the _Cherry Orchard_ could be massacred easily by a single
determined gunman. This defencelessness of the essential Slav can, under
certain circumstances, become an asset. Especially perhaps the French
would find themselves victims of such a harmless parasite, so different
in his nature to themselves. A more energetic parasite would always fail
with the gallic nature, unless very resolute.




BESTRE


As I walked along the quay at Kermanac, there was a pretty footfall in
my rear. Turning my head, I found an athletic Frenchwoman, of the
bourgeois class, looking at me.

The crocket-like floral postiches on the ridges of her head-gear looked
crisped down in a threatening way: her nodular pink veil was an
apoplectic gristle round her stormy brow; steam came out of her lips
upon the harsh white atmosphere. Her eyes were dark, and the contiguous
colour of her cheeks of a redness quasi-venetian, with something like
the feminine colouring of battle. This was surely a feline battle-mask,
then; but in such a pacific and slumbrous spot I thought it an anomalous
ornament.

My dented _bidon_ of a hat--cantankerous beard--hungarian boots, the
soles like the rind of a thin melon slice, the uppers in stark calcinous
segments; my cassock-like blue broadcloth coat (why was I like
this?--the habits of needy travel grew this composite shell), this
uncouthness might have raised in her the question of defiance and
offence. I glided swiftly along on my centipedal boots, dragging my eye
upon the rough walls of the houses to my right like a listless cane. Low
houses faced the small vasey port. It was there I saw Bestre.

This is how I became aware of Bestre.

The detritus of some weeks' hurried experience was being dealt with in
my mind, on this crystalline, extremely cold walk through Kermanac to
Braspartz, and was being established in orderly heaps. At work in my
untidy hive, I was alone: the atmosphere of the workshop dammed me in.
That I moved forward was no more strange than if a carpenter's shop or
chemist's laboratory, installed in a boat, should move forward on the
tide of a stream. Now, what seemed to happen was that, as I bent over my
work, an odiously grinning face peered in at my window. The impression
of an intrusion was so strong, that I did not even realize at first that
it was I who was the intruder. That the window was not my window, and
that the face was not peering in but out: that, in fact, it was I myself
who was guilty of peering into somebody else's window: this was hidden
from me in the first moment of consciousness about the odious brown
person of Bestre. It is a wonder that the curse did not at once fall
from me on this detestable inquisitive head. What I did do was to pull
up in my automatic progress, and, instead of passing on, to continue to
stare in at Bestre's kitchen window, and scowl at Bestre's
sienna-coloured gourd of a head.

Bestre in his turn was nonplussed. He knew that some one was looking in
at his kitchen window, all right: he had expected some one to do so,
some one who in fact had contracted the habit of doing that. But he had
mistaken my steps for this other person's; and the appearance of my face
was in a measure as disturbing to him as his had been to me. My
information on these points afterwards became complete. With a flexible
imbrication reminiscent of a shutter-lipped ape, a bud of tongue still
showing, he shot the latch of his upper lip down in front of the nether
one, and depressed the interior extremities of his eyebrows sharply from
their quizzing perch--only this monkey-on-a-stick mechanical pull--down
the face's centre. At the same time, his arms still folded like bulky
lizards, blue tattoo on brown ground, upon the escarpment of his
vesicular middle, not a hair or muscle moving, he made a quick, slight
motion to me with one hand to get out of the picture without
speaking--to efface myself. It was the suggestion of a theatrical
sportsman. I was in the line of fire. I moved on: a couple of steps did
it. That lady was twenty yards distant: but nowhere was there anything
in sight evidently related to Bestre's gestures. 'Pension de Famille?'
What prices?--and how charmingly placed! I remarked the vine: the
building, of one storey, was exceedingly long, it took some time to pass
along it. I reached the principal door. I concluded this entrance was
really disused, although more imposing. So emerging on the quay once
more, and turning along the front of the house, I again discovered
myself in contact with Bestre. He was facing towards me, and down the
quay, immobile as before, and the attitude so much a replica as to make
it seem a plagiarism of his kitchen piece. Only now his head was on one
side, a verminous grin had dispersed the equally unpleasant entity of
his shut mouth. The new facial arrangement and angle for the head
imposed on what seemed his stock pose for the body, must mean: 'Am I not
rather smart? Not just a little bit smart? Don't you think? A little,
you will concede? You did not expect that, did you? That was a nasty jar
for you, was it not? Ha! my lapin, that was unexpected, that is plain!
Did you think you would find Bestre asleep? He is always awake! He
watched you being born, and has watched you ever since. Don't be too
sure that he did not play some part in planting the little seed from
which you grew into such a big, fine (many withering exclamation marks)
boy (or girl). He will be in at your finish too. But he is in no hurry
about that. He is never in a hurry! He bides his time. Meanwhile he
laughs at you. He finds you a little funny. That's right! Yes! I am
still looking!'

His very large eyeballs, the small saffron ocellation in their centre,
the tiny spot through which light entered the obese wilderness of his
body; his bronzed bovine arms, swollen handles for a variety of indolent
little ingenuities; his inflated digestive case, lent their combined
expressiveness to say these things; with every tart and biting condiment
that eye-fluid, flaunting of fatness (the well-filled), the insult of
the comic, implications of indecency, could provide. Every variety of
bottom-tapping resounded from his dumb bulk. His tongue stuck out, his
lips eructated with the incredible indecorum that appears to be the
monopoly of liquids, his brown arms were for the moment genitals, snakes
in one massive twist beneath his mammillary slabs, gently riding on a
pancreatic swell, each hair on his oil-bearing skin contributing its
message of porcine affront.

Taken fairly in the chest by this magnetic attack, I wavered. Turning
the house corner it was like confronting a hard meaty gust. But I
perceived that the central gyroduct passed a few feet clear of me.
Turning my back, arching it a little, perhaps, I was just in time to
receive on the boko a parting volley from the female figure of the
obscure encounter, before she disappeared behind a rock which brought
Kermanac to a close on this side of the port. She was evidently replying
to Bestre. It was the rash grating philippic of a battered cat, limping
into safety. At the moment that she vanished behind the boulder, Bestre
must have vanished too, for a moment later the quay was empty. On
reaching the door into which he had sunk, plump and slick as into a
stage trap, there he was inside--this grease-bred old mammifer--his
tufted vertex charging about the plank ceiling--generally ricochetting
like a dripping sturgeon in a boat's bottom--arms warm brown, ju-jitsu
of his guts, tan canvas shoes and trousers rippling in ribbed planes as
he darted about--with a filthy snicker for the scuttling female, and a
stark cock of the eye for an unknown figure miles to his right: he
filled this short tunnel with clever parabolas and vortices, little neat
stutterings of triumph, goggle-eyed hypnotisms, in retrospect, for his
hearers.

'T'as vu? T'as vu? Je l'ai fichu c'es' qu'elle n'attendait pas! Ah, la
rosse! Qu'elle aille raconter a  sa crapule de mari. Si, si, s'il
vient ici, tu sais----'

His head nodded up and down in batches of blood-curdling affirmations;
his hand, pudgy hieratic disc, tapped the air gently, then sawed
tenderly up and down.

Bestre, on catching sight of me, hailed me as a witness. 'Tiens! Ce
monsieur peut vous le dire: il tait l. Il m'a vu l-dedans qui
l'attendais!'

I bore witness to the subtleties of his warlike ambush. I told his
sister and two boarders that I had seldom been privy to such a rich
encounter. They squinted at me, and at each other, dragging their eyes
off with slow tosses of the head. I took a room in this house
immediately--the stage-box in fact, just above the kitchen. For a week I
was perpetually entertained.

Before attempting to discover the significance of Bestre's proceedings
when I clattered into the silken zone of his hostilities, I settled down
in his house; watched him idly from both my windows--from that looking
on to the back--(cleaning his gun in the yard, killing chickens,
examining the peas), from the front one--rather shyly sucking up to a
fisherman upon the quay. I went into his kitchen and his shed and
watched him. I realized as little as he did that I was patting and
prodding a subject of these stories. There was no intention in these
stoppages on my zigzag course across Western France of taking a human
species, as an entomologist would take a Distoma or a Narbonne Lycosa,
to study. Later, at the time of my spanish adventure (which was
separated by two years from Bestre), I had grown more professional.
Also, I had become more conscious of myself and of my powers of
personally provoking a series of typhoons in tea-cups. But with my
Bretons I was very new to my resources, and was living in a mild and
early millennium of mirth. It was at the end of a few months' roaming in
the country that I saw I had been a good deal in contact with a tribe,
some more and some less generic. And it is only now that it has seemed
to me an amusing labour to gather some of these individuals in
retrospect and group them under their function, to which all in some
diverting way were attached.

So my stoppage at Kermanac, for example, was because Bestre was a little
excitement. I had never seen brown flesh put to those uses. And the
situation of his boarding-house would allow of unlimited pococurantism,
idling and eating, sunning myself in one of my windows, with Berkeley or
Cudworth in my hand, and a staring eye that lost itself in reveries that
suddenly took on flesh and acted some obstinate little part or other,
the phases of whose dramatic life I would follow stealthily from window
to window, a book still in my hand, shaking with the most innocent
laughter. I was never for a minute unoccupied. Fte followed fte, ftes
of the mind. Then, as well, the small cliffs of the scurfy little port,
its desertion and queer train of life, reached a system of very early
dreams I had considered effaced. But all the same, although not
self-conscious, I went laughing after Bestre, tapping him, setting
traps for the game that he decidedly contained for my curiosity. So it
was almost as though Fabre could have established himself within the
masonries of the bee, and lived on its honey, while investigating for
the human species: or stretched himself on a bed of raphia and pebbles
at the bottom of the Lycosa's pit, and lived on flies and locusts. I lay
on Bestre's billowy beds, drank his ambrosial cider, fished from his
boat; he brought me birds and beasts that he had chased and killed. It
was an idyllic life of the calmest adventure. We were the best of
friends: he thought I slapped him because contact with his fat gladdened
me, and to establish contact with the feminine vein in his brown-coated
ducts and muscles. Also he was Bestre, and it must be nice to pat and
buffet him as it would be to do that with a dreadful lion.

He offered himself, sometimes wincing coquettishly, occasionally rolling
his eyes a little, as the lion might do to remind you of your natural
dread, and heighten the luxurious privilege.

Bestre's boarding-house is only open from June to October: the winter
months he passes in hunting and trapping. He is a stranger to Kermanac,
a Boulonnais, and at constant feud with the natives. For some
generations his family have been strangers where they lived; and he
carries on his face the mark of an origin even more distant than
Picardy. His great-grandfather came into France from the Peninsula, with
the armies of Napoleon. Possibly his alertness, combativeness and
timidity are the result of these exilings and difficult adjustments to
new surroundings, working in his blood, and in his own history.

He is a large, tall man, corpulent and ox-like: you can see by his
movements that the slow aggrandisement of his stomach has hardly been
noticed by him. It is still compact with the rest of his body, and he is
as nimble as a flea. It has been for him like the peculations of a
minister, enriching himself under the nose of the caliph; Bestre's
kingly indifference can be accounted for by the many delights and
benefits procured through this subtle misappropriation of the general
resources of the body. Sunburnt, with large yellow-white moustache,
little eyes protruding with the cute strenuosity already noticed, when
he meets any one for the first time his mouth stops open, a cigarette
end adhering to the lower lip. He will assume an expression of
expectancy and repressed amusement, like a man accustomed to
nonplussing: the expression the company wears in those games of
divination when they have made the choice of an object, and he whose
task it is to guess its nature is called in, and commences the
cross-examination. Bestre is jocose; he will beset you with mocking
thoughts as the blindfold man is danced round in a game of blind man's
buff. He may have regarded my taps as a myopic clutch at his illusive
person. He gazes at a new acquaintance as though this poor man, without
guessing it, were entering a world of astonishing things! A would-be
boarder arrives and asks him if he has a room with two beds. Bestre
fixes him steadily for twenty seconds with an amused yellow eye. Without
uttering a word, he then leads the way to a neighbouring door, lets the
visitor pass into the room, stands watching him with the expression of a
conjurer who has just drawn a curtain aside and revealed to the
stupefied audience a horse and cart, or a life-size portrait of the Shah
of Persia, where a moment ago there was nothing.

Suppose the following thing happened. A madman, who believes himself a
hen, escapes from Charenton, and gets, somehow or other, as far as
Finistre. He turns up at Kermanac, knocks at Bestre's door and asks him
with a perfect stereotyped courtesy for a large, airy room, with a
comfortable perch to roost on, and a little straw in the corner where he
might sit. Bestre a few days before has been visited by the very idea of
arranging such a room: all is ready. He conducts his demented client to
it. Now his manner with his everyday client would be thoroughly
appropriate under these circumstances. They are carefully suited to a
very weak-minded and whimsical visitor indeed.

Bestre has another group of tricks, pertaining directly to the commerce
of his hospitable trade. When a customer is confessing in the fullest
way his paraesthesias, allowing this new host an engaging glimpse of his
nastiest propriums and kinks, Bestre behaves, with unconscious logic, as
though a secret of the most disreputable nature were being imparted to
him. Were, in fact, the requirements of a vice being enumerated, he
could not display more plainly the qualms caused by his rle of
accessory. He will lower his voice, whisper in the client's ear; before
doing so glance over his shoulder apprehensively two or three times, and
push his guest roughly into the darkest corner of the passage or
kitchen. It is his perfect understanding--is he not the only man who
does, at once, forestall your eager whim: there is something of the
fortune-teller in him--that produces the air of mystery. For his
information is not always of the nicest, is it? He must know more about
you than I daresay you would like many people to know. And Bestre will
in his turn mention certain little delicacies that he, Bestre, will see
that you have, and that the other guests will not share with you. So
there you are committed at the start to a subtle collusion. But Bestre
means it. Every one he sees for the first time he is thrilled about,
until they have got used to him. He would give you anything while he is
still strange to you. But you see the interest die down in his eyes, at
the end of twenty-four hours, whether you have assimilated him or not.
He only gives you about a day for your meal. He then assumes that you
have finished him, and he feels chilled by your scheduled disillusion. A
fresh face and an enemy he depends on for that 'new' feeling--or what
can we call this firework that he sends up for the stranger, that he
enjoys so much himself--or this rare bottle he can only open when
hospitality compels--his own blood?

I had arrived at the master-moment of one of Bestre's campaigns. These
were long and bitter affairs. But they consisted almost entirely of dumb
show. The few words that passed were generally misleading. A vast deal
of talking went on in the different camps. But a dead and pulverizing
silence reigned on the field of battle, with few exceptions.

It was a matter of who could be most silent and move least: it was a
stark stand-up fight between one personality and another, unaided by
adventitious muscle or tongue. It was more like phases of a combat or
courtship in the insect-world. The Eye was really Bestre's weapon: the
ammunition with which he loaded it was drawn from all the most
skunk-like provender, the most ugly mucins, fungoid glands, of his
physique. Excrement as well as sputum would be shot from this luminous
hole, with the same certainty in its unsavoury appulsion. Every resource
of metonymy, bloody mind transfusion or irony were also his. What he
selected as an arm in his duels, then, was the Eye. As he was always the
offended party, he considered that he had this choice. I traced the
predilection for this weapon and method to a very fiery source--to the
land of his ancestry--Spain. How had the knife dropped out of his
outfit? Who can tell? But he retained the _mirada_ whole and entire
enough to please any one, all the more active for the absence of the
dagger. I pretend that Bestre behaved as he did directly because his
sweet forebears had to rely so much on the furious languishing and jolly
conversational properties of their eyes to secure their ends at all. The
spanish beauty imprisoned behind her casement can only roll her eyes at
her lover in the street below. The result of these and similar Eastern
restraints develops the eye almost out of recognition. Bestre in his
kitchen, behind his casement, was unconsciously employing this gift from
his semi-arabian past. And it is not even the unsupported female side of
Bestre. For the lover in the street as well must keep his eye in
constant training to bear out the furibund jugular drops, the mettlesome
stamping, of the guitar. And all the haughty chevaleresque habits of
this bellicose race have substituted the eye for the mouth in a hundred
ways. The Grandee's eye is terrible, and at his best is he not
speechless with pride? Eyes, eyes: for defiance, for shrivelling
subordinates, for courtesy, for love. A 'spanish eye' might be used as
we say, 'Toledo blade.' There, anyway, is my argument; I place on the
one side Bestre's eye; on the other I isolate the iberian eye. Bestre's
grandfather, we know, was a Castilian. To show how he was beholden to
this extraction, and again how the blood clung to him, Bestre was in no
way grasping. It went so far that he was noticeably careless about
money. This, in France, could not be accounted for in any other way.

Bestre's quarrels turned up as regularly as work for a good shoemaker or
dentist. Antagonism after antagonism flashed forth: became more acute
through several weeks: detonated in the dumb pyrotechnic I have
described; then wore itself out with its very exhausting and exacting
violence.--At the passing of an enemy Bestre will pull up his blind with
a snap. There he is, with his insult stewing lusciously in his yellow
sweat. The eyes fix on the enemy, on his weakest spot, and do their
work. He has the anatomical instinct of the hymenopter for his prey's
most morbid spot; for an old wound; for a lurking vanity. He goes into
the other's eye, seeks it, and strikes. On a physical blemish he turns
a scornful and careless rain like a garden hose. If the deep vanity is
on the wearer's back, or in his walk or gaze, he sluices it with an
abundance you would not expect his small eyes to be capable of
delivering.

But the _mise en scne_ for his successes is always the same. Bestre is
_discovered_ somewhere, behind a blind, in a doorway, beside a rock,
when least expected. He regards the material world as so many ambushes
for his body.

Then the key principle of his strategy is provocation. The enemy must be
exasperated to the point at which it is difficult for him to keep his
hands off his aggressor. The desire to administer the blow is as painful
as a blow received. That the blow should be taken back into the enemy's
own bosom, and that he should be stifled by his own oath--_that_ Bestre
regards as so many blows, and so much abuse, of _his_, Bestre's,
although he has never so much as taken his hands out of his pockets, or
opened his mouth.

I learnt a great deal from Bestre. He is one of my masters. When the
moment came for me to discover myself--a thing I believe few people have
done so thoroughly, so early in life and so quickly--I recognized more
and more the beauty of Bestre. I was only prevented from turning my eye
upon myself even at that primitive period of speculative adolescence by
that one-sidedness that only the most daring tamper with.

The immediate quay-side neighbours of Bestre afford him a constant
war-food. I have seen him slipping out in the evening and depositing
refuse in front of his neighbour's house. I have seen a woman screeching
at him in pidgin french from a window of the dbit two doors off, while
he pared his nails a yard from his own front door. This was to show his
endurance. The subtle notoriety, too, of his person is dear to him. But
local functionaries and fishermen are not his only fare. During summer,
time hangs heavy with the visitor from Paris. When the first ennui comes
upon him, he wanders about desperately, and his eye in due course falls
on Bestre.

It depends how busy Bestre is at the moment. But often enough he will
take on the visitor at once in his canine way. The visitor shivers,
opens his eyes, bristles at the quizzing pursuit of Bestre's oeillade;
the remainder of his holiday flies in a round of singular plots,
passionate conversations and prodigious encounters with this born
broiler.

Now, a well-known painter and his family, who rented a house in the
neighbourhood, were, it seemed, particularly responsive to Bestre. I
could not--arrived, with some perseverance, at the bottom of it--find
any cause for his quarrel. The most insignificant pretext was absent.
The pretentious peppery Paris Salon artist, and this Boulogne-bred
Breton inhabited the same village, and they grew larger and larger in
each other's eyes at a certain moment, in this armorican wilderness. As
Bestre swelled and swelled for the painter, he was seen to be the
possessor of some insult incarnate, that was an intolerable factor in
the life of so lonely a place. War was inevitable. Bestre saw himself
growing and growing, with the glee of battle in his heart, and the
flicker of budding affront in his little eye. He did nothing to arrest
this alarming aggrandizement. Pretexts could have been found: but they
were dispensed with, by mutual consent. This is how I reconstructed the
obscure and early phases of that history. What is certain, is that there
had been much eye-play on the quay between Monsieur Rivire and Monsieur
Bestre. And the scene that I had taken part in was the culmination of a
rather humiliating phase in the annals of Bestre's campaigns.

The distinguished painter's wife, I learnt, had contracted the habit of
passing Bestre's kitchen window of a morning when Mademoiselle Marie was
alone there--gazing glassily in, but never looking at Mademoiselle
Marie. This had such a depressing effect on Bestre's old sister, that it
reduced her vitality considerably, and in the end brought on diarrhoea.
Why did Bestre permit the war to be brought into his own camp with such
impunity? The only reason that I could discover for this was, that the
attacks were of very irregular timing. He had been out fishing in one or
two cases, employed in his garden or elsewhere. But on the penultimate
occasion Madame Rivire had practically finished off the last surviving
female of Bestre's notable stock. As usual, the wife of the parisian
Salon master had looked into the kitchen; but this time she had looked
_at_ Mademoiselle Marie, and in such a way as practically to curl her up
on the floor. Bestre's sister had none of her brother's ferocity, and in
every way departed considerably from his type, except in a mild and
sentimental imitation of his colouring. The distinguished painter's
wife, on the other hand, had a touch of Bestre about her. Bestre did not
have it all his own way. Because of this, recognizing the redoubtable
and Bestre-like quality of his enemy, he had resorted no doubt to such
extreme measures as I suspect him of employing. She had chosen her own
ground--his kitchen. That was a vast mistake. On that ground, I am
satisfied, Bestre was invincible. It was even surprising that there any
trump should have been lavished.

On that morning when I drifted into the picture what happened to induce
such a disarray in his opponent? What superlative shaft, with deadly
aim, did he direct against her vitals? She would take only a few
seconds to pass the kitchen window. He had brought her down with a
stupendous rush. In principle, as I have said, Bestre sacrifices the
claims any individual portion of his anatomy might have to independent
expressiveness to a tyrannical appropriation of all this varied battery
of bestial significance by his _eye_. The eye was his chosen weapon. Had
he any theory, however, that certain occasions warranted, or required,
the auxiliary offices of some unit of the otherwise subordinated mass?
Can the sex of his assailant give us a clue? I am convinced in my own
mind that another agent was called in on this occasion. I am certain
that he struck the death-blow with another engine than his eye. I
believe that the most savage and obnoxious means of affront were
employed to cope with the distinguished painter's wife. His rejoinder
would perhaps be of that unanswerable description, that it would be
stamped on the spot, for an adversary, as an authentic last word. No
further appeal to arms of that sort would be rational: it must have been
right up against litigation and physical assault.

Monsieur Rivire, with his painting-pack and campstool, came along the
quay shortly afterwards, going in the same direction as his wife. Bestre
was at his door; and he came in later, and let us know how he had
behaved.

'I wasn't such a fool as to insult him: there were witnesses; let him do
that. But if I come upon him in one of those lanes at the back there,
you know . . . I was standing at my door; he came along and looked at my
house and scanned my windows' (this is equivalent in Bestre-warfare to a
bombardment). 'As he passed I did not move. I thought to myself, "Hurry
home, old fellow, and ask Madame what she has seen during her little
walk!" _I looked him in the white of the eyes._ He thought I'd lower
mine; he doesn't know me. And, after all, what is he, though he's got
the Riband of the Legion of Honour? I don't carry my decorations on my
coat! I have mine marked on my body. Did I ever show you what I've got
here? No; I'm going to show you.' He had shown all this before, but my
presence encouraged a repetition of former successes. So while he was
speaking he jumped up quickly, undid his shirt, bared his chest and
stomach, and pointed to something beneath his arm. Then, rapidly rolling
up his sleeves, he pointed to a cicatrice rather like a vaccination
mark, but larger. While showing his scars he slaps his body, with a sort
of sneering rattle or chuckle between his words, his eyes protruding
more than usual. His customary wooden expression is disintegrated: this
compound of a constant foreboded reflection of the expression of
astonishment your face will acquire when you learn of his wisdom,
valour, or wit: the slightest shade of sneering triumph, and a touch of
calm relish at your wonder. Or he seems teaching you by his staring
grimace the amazement you should feel: and his grimace gathers force and
blooms as the full sense of what you are witnessing, hearing, bursts
upon you, while your gaping face conforms more and more to Bestre's
prefiguring mask.

As to his battles, Bestre is profoundly unaware of what strange category
he has got himself into. The principles of his strategy are possibly the
possession of his libido, but most certainly not that of the bulky and
surface citizen, Bestre. On the contrary, he considers himself on the
verge of a death struggle at any moment when in the presence of one of
his enemies.

Like all people who spend their lives talking about their deeds, he
presents a very particular aspect in the moment of action. When
discovered in the thick of one of his dumb battles, he has the air of a
fine company promoter, concerned, trying to corrupt some sombre fact
into shielding for an hour his unwieldy fiction, until some fresh wangle
can retrieve it. Or he will display a great empirical expertness in
reality, without being altogether at home in it.

Bestre in the moment of action feels as though he were already talking.
His action has the exaggerated character of his speech, only oddly
curbed by the exigencies of reality. In his moments of most violent
action he retains something of his dumb passivity. He never seems quite
entering into reality, but observing it. He is looking at the reality
with a professional eye, so to speak: with a professional liar's.

I have noticed that the more cramped and meagre his action has been, the
more exuberant his account of the affair is afterwards. The more
restrictions reality has put on him, the more unbridled is his gusto as
historian of his deeds, immediately afterwards. Then he has the common
impulse to avenge that self that has been perishing under the famine and
knout of a bad reality, by glorifying and surfeiting it on its return to
the imagination.




THE CORNAC AND HIS WIFE


I met in the evening, not far from the last inn of the town, a cart
containing the rough professional properties, the haggard offspring, of
a strolling circus troupe from Arles, which I had already seen. The
cornac and his wife tramped along beside it. Their talk ran on the
people of the town they had just left. They both scowled. They recalled
the inhabitants of the last town with nothing but bitterness.

Against the people to whom they played they had an implacable grudge.
With the man, obsessed by ill-health, the grievance against fortune was
associated with the more brutal hatred that almost choked him every time
he appeared professionally.

With their children the couple were very demonstrative. Mournful
caresses were showered upon them: it was a manner of conspicuously
pitying themselves. As a fierce reproach to the onlooker these
unhandsome gytes were publicly petted. Bitter kisses rained upon their
heads. The action implied blows and ill-treatment at the hands of an
anonymous adversary; in fact, the world at large. The children avoided
the kisses as though they had been blows, wailing and contorting
themselves. The animosity in the brutal lips thrust down upon their
faces was felt by them, but the cause remained hidden for their
inexperience. Terror, however, they learnt to interpret on all hands;
even to particularly associate it with love towards the offspring. When
the clown made a wild grimace in their blubbering faces, they would
sometimes howl with alarm. This was it, perhaps! They concluded that
this must be the sign and beginning of the terrible thing that had so
long been covertly menacing them; their hearts nearly hopped out of
their throats, although what occurred passed off in a somersault and a
gush of dust as the clown hurled his white face against the earth, and
got up rubbing his sides to assure the spectators that he was hurt.

Setting up their little tent in a country town this man and his wife
felt their anger gnawing through their reserve, like a dog under lock
and key. It was maddened by this other animal presence, the perspiring
mastodon that roared at it with cheap luxurious superiority. Their long
pilgrimage through this world inhabited by 'the Public' (from which they
could never escape) might be interpreted by a nightmare image. This was
a human family, we could say, lost in a land peopled by sodden mammoths
possessed of a deeply-rooted taste for outdoor performances of a
particularly depressing and disagreeable nature. These displays
involved the insane contortions of an indignant man and his dirty,
breathless wife, of whose ugly misery it was required that a daily
mournful exhibition should be made of her shrivelled legs, in pantomime
hose. She must crucify herself with a scarecrow abandon, this iron and
blood automaton, and affect to represent the factor of sex in a
geometrical posturing. These spells were all related in some way to
physical suffering. Whenever one of these monsters was met with, which
on an average was twice a day, the only means of escape for the
unfortunate family was to charm it. Conduct involving that never failed
to render the monster harmless and satisfied. They then would hurry on,
until they met another. Then they would repeat just the same thing over
again, and once more hasten away, boiling with resentment.

The first time I saw them, the proprietress stood straddling on a raised
platform, in loose flesh-tights with brown wrinkled knee-caps,
_espadrilles_, brandy-green feathers arching over her almost naked head;
while clutched in her hands aloft she supported a rigid child of about
six. Upon this child stood three others, each provided with a flag. The
proprietor stood some distance away and observed this event as one of
the public. I leant on the barrier near him, and wondered if he ever
willed his family to fall. I was soon persuaded, on observing him for a
short while, that he could never be visited by such a mild domestic
sensation. He wished steadily and all the time, it was quite certain,
that the earth would open with a frantic avulsion, roaring as it parted,
decorated with heavy flames, across the middle of the space set aside
for his performance; that everybody there would immediately be hurled
into this chasm, and be crushed flat as it closed up. The Public on its
side, of course, merely wished that the entire family might break their
necks one after the other, the clown smash his face every time he fell,
and so on.

To some extent Public and Showman understood each other. There was this
amount of give and take, that they both snarled over the money that
passed between them, or if they did not snarl it was all the worse.
There was a unanimity of brutal hatred about that. Producer and consumer
both were bestially conscious of the passage of coppers from one pocket
to another. The public lay back and enjoyed itself hardly, closely, and
savagely. The showman contorted himself madly in response. His bilious
eye surveyed its grinning face, his brow sweated for its money, his
ill-kept body ached. He made it a painful spectacle; he knew how to make
it painful. He had the art of insisting on the effort, that foolish
effort. The public took it in the contrary spirit, as _he_ felt, on
purpose. It was on purpose, as he saw it, that it took its recreation,
which was coarse. It deliberately promoted his misery and affected to
consider him a droll gay bird.

So this by no means exceptional family took its lot: it dressed itself
up, its members knocked each other about, tied their bodies in
diabolical knots before a congregation of Hodges, who could not even
express themselves in the metropolitan tongue, but gibbered in breton,
day in, day out. That was the situation. Intimately, both Showman and
Public understood it, and were in touch more than, from the outside,
would be at once understood. Each performance always threatened to end
in the explosion of this increasing volume of rage. (This especially
applied to its fermentation within the walls of the acrobatic vessel
known as the 'patron,' who was Monsieur Jules Montort.) Within, it
flashed and rumbled all the time: but I never heard of its bursting its
continent, and it even seemed of use as a stimulus to gymnastics after
the manner of Beethoven with a fiery composition.

So there those daily crowds collected, squatted and watched, 'above the
mle,' like _aristos_ or gentlepeople. But they did pay for their
pleasure (and such pleasure!): they were made to part with their sous,
strictly for nothing, from the performers' standpoint. That would be the
solitary bright spot for the outraged nomad. At least to that extent
they were being got the better of. Had you suggested to the Showman that
the Public paid for an idea, something it drew out of itself, that would
have been a particularly repugnant thought. The Public depends upon him,
that the primitive performer cannot question. And if women for instance
find it hard to look on their own beauty as their admirer does (so that
a great number of their actions might be traced to a contempt for men,
who become so passionate about what they know themselves to be such an
ordinary matter--namely themselves), so it was perhaps their contempt
that enabled this fierce couple to continue as they did.

This background of experience was there to swell out my perception of
what I now saw--the advancing caravan, with the familiar forms of its
owners approaching one of their most hated haunts, but their heads as
yet still full of the fury aroused by the last mid-day encounter. I
followed them, attempting to catch what they were saying: but what with
the rumbling of the carriages and the thick surge of the proprietor's
voice, I could not make out much except expletives. His eye, too, rolled
at me so darkly that I fell behind. I reflected that his incessant
exercise in holding up his family ranged along his extended arm, though
insipid to watch, must cause him to be respected on a lonely road, and
his desperate nature and undying resentment would give his ferocity an
impact that no feeling I then experienced could match. So I kept my eyes
to myself for the time and closed down my ears, and entered the town in
the dust of his wagons.

But after my evening meal I strolled over the hill bisected by the main
street, and found him in his usual place on a sort of square, one side
of which was formed by a stony breton brook, across which went a bridge.
Drawn up under the beeches stood the brake. Near it in the open space
the troupe had erected the trapeze, lighted several lamps (it was after
dark already), and placed three or four benches in a narrow semicircle.
When I arrived, a large crowd already pressed round them. 'Fournissons
les bancs, Messieurs et M'dames! fournissons les bancs, et alors nous
commenons!' the proprietor was crying.

But the seats remained unoccupied. A boy in tights, with his coat drawn
round him, shivered at one corner of the ring. Into the middle of this
the Showman several times advanced, exhorting the coy Public to make up
its mind and commit itself to the extent of sitting down on one of his
seats. Every now and then a couple would. Then he would walk back, and
stand near his cart, muttering to himself. His eyebrows were hidden in a
dishevelled frond of hair. The only thing he could look at without
effort was the ground, and there his eyes were usually directed. When he
looked up they were heavy--vacillating painfully beneath the weight of
their lids. The action of speech with him resembled that of swallowing:
the dreary pipe from which he drew so many distressful sounds seemed to
stiffen and swell, and his head to strain forward like a rooster about
to crow. His heavy under-lip went in and out in sombre activity as he
articulated. The fine natural resources of his face for inspiring a
feeling of gloom in his fellows, one would have judged irresistible on
that particular night. The bitterest disgust disfigured it to a high
degree.

But _they_ watched this despondent and unpromising figure with a glee
and keen anticipation. This incongruity of appearance and calling was
never patent to them at all, of course. That they had no wish to
understand. When the furious man scowled they gaped delightedly; when
he coaxed they became grave and sympathetic. All his movements were
followed with minute attention. When he called upon them to occupy their
seats, with an expressive gesture, they riveted their eyes on his hand,
as though expecting a pack of cards to suddenly appear there. They made
no move at all to take their places. Also, as this had already lasted a
considerable time, the man who was fuming to entertain them--they just
as incomprehensible to him as he was to them from that point of
view--allowed the outraged expression that was the expression of his
soul to appear more and more in his face.

Doubtless they had an inspired presentiment of what might shortly be
expected of the morose figure before them. The chuckling exultation with
which an amateur of athletics or fight-fan would examine some athlete
with whose prowess he was acquainted, yet whose sickly appearance gives
no hint of what is to be expected of him, it was with that sort of
enlightened and hilarious knowingness that they responded to his
melancholy appeals.

His cheerless voice, like the moaning bay of solitary dogs, conjured
them to occupy the seats.

'Fournissons les bancs!' he exhorted them again and again. Each time
he retired to the position he had selected to watch them from, far
enough off for them to be able to say that he had withdrawn his
influence, and had no further wish to interfere. Then, again, he stalked
forward. This time the exhortation was pitched in as formal and
matter-of-fact a key as his anatomy would permit, as though this were
the first appeal of the evening. Now he seemed merely waiting, without
discreetly withdrawing--without even troubling to glance in their
direction any more, until the audience should have had time to seat
themselves,--absorbed in briefly rehearsing to himself, just before
beginning, the part he was to play. These tactics did not alter things
in the least. Finally, he was compelled to take note of his failure. No
words more issued from his mouth. He glared stupidly for some moments
at the circle of people, and they, blandly alert, gazed back at him.

Then unexpectedly, from outside the periphery of the potential audience,
elbowing his way familiarly through the wall of people, burst in the
clown. Whether sent for to save the situation, or whether his toilet
were only just completed, was not revealed.

'B-o-n-soir, M'sieurs et M'dames,' he chirruped and yodeled, waved his
hand, tumbled over his employer's foot. The benches filled as if by
magic. But the most surprising thing was the change in the proprietor.
No sooner had the clown made his entrance, and, with his assurance of
success as the people's favourite, and comic familiarity, told the
hangers-back to take their seats, than a brisk dialogue sprang up
between him and his melancholy master. It was punctuated with resounding
slaps at each fresh impertinence of the clown. The proprietor was
astonishing. I rubbed my eyes. This lugubrious personage had woken to
the sudden violence of a cheerful automaton. In administering the
chastisement his irrepressible friend perpetually invited, he sprang
nimbly backwards and forwards as though engaged in a boxing match,
while he grinned appreciatively at the clown's wit, as though in spite
of himself, nearly knocking his teeth out with delighted blows. The
audience howled with delight, and every one seemed really happy for the
moment, except the clown. The clown every day must have received, I saw,
a little of the _trop-plein_ of the proprietor.

In the tradition of the circus it is a very distinct figure, the part
having a psychology of its own--that of the man who invents posers for
the clown, wrangles with him, and against whom the laugh is always
turned. One of the conventions of the circus is, of course, that the
physical superiority of this personage should be legendary and
indisputable. For however numerous the clowns may be, they never attack
him, despite the brutal measures he adopts to cover his confusion and
meet their ridicule. He seems to be a man with a marked predilection for
evening dress. As a result he is a far more absurd figure than his
painted and degenerate opponent. It may be the clown's superstitious
respect for rank, and this emblem of it, despite his consciousness of
intellectual superiority, that causes this ruffianly dolt to remain
immune.

In playing this part the pompous dignity of attitude should be preserved
in the strictest integrity. The actor should seldom smile. If so, it is
only as a slight concession, a bid to induce the clown to take a more
serious view of the matter under discussion. He smiles to make it
evident that he also is furnished with this attribute of man--a
discernment of the ridiculous. Then, with renewed gusto and solemnity,
he asks the clown's _serious_ opinion of the question by which he seems
obsessed, turning his head sideways with his ear towards his droll
friend, and closing his eyes for a moment.

Or else it is the public for whom this smile is intended, and towards
whom the discomfited 'swell' in evening dress turns as towards his
peers, for sympathy and understanding, when 'scored off' anew, in, as
the smile would affirm, this low-bred and unanswerable fashion. They are
appealed to, as though it were their mind that was being represented in
the dialogue, and constantly discomfited, and he were merely their
mouthpiece.

Originally, no doubt, this throaty swell stood in some sense for the
Public. Out of compliment to the Public, of course, he would be provided
with evening dress. It would be tacitly understood by the courteous
management, that although many of those present were in billycocks,
blouses and gaiters, shawls and reach-me-downs, their native attire was
a ceremonial evening outfit.

The distinguished Public would doubtless still further appreciate the
delicacy of touch in endowing its representative with a high-born
inability to understand the jokes of his inferiors, or be a match for
them in wit. In the better sort of circus, his address is highly
genteel, throaty and unctuous.

In the little circuses, such as the one I am describing, this is a
different and a very lonely part. There are none of those appeals to the
Public--as the latter claim, not only community of mind, but of class,
with the clown. It becomes something like a dialogue between mimes,
representing employer and employee, although these original distinctions
are not very strictly observed.

A man without a sense of humour, the man in the toff's part, finds
himself with one whose mischievous spirit he is aware of, and whose
ridicule he fears. Wishing to avoid being thought a bore, and racking
his brains for a means of being entertaining, he suddenly brings to
light a host of conundrums, for which he seems endowed with a stupefying
memory. Thoroughly reassured by the finding of this powerful and
traditional aid, with an amazing persistence he presses the clown,
making use of every 'gentlemanly' subterfuge, to extract a grave answer.
'Why is a cabbage like a soul in purgatory?' or, 'If you had seven
pockets in your waistcoat, a hip pocket, five ticket-pockets, and three
other pockets, how many extra buttons would you need?' So they follow
each other. Or else some anecdote (a more unmanageable tool) is
remembered. The clown here has many opportunities of displaying his
mocking wit.

This is the rle of honour usually reserved for the head showman, of
course. The part was not played with very great consistency in the case
in question. Indeed, so irrepressible were the comedian's spirits, and
so unmanageable his vitality at times, that he seemed to be turning the
tables on the clown. In his cavernous baying voice, he drew out of his
stomach many a caustic rejoinder to the clown's pert but stock wit. The
latter's ready-made quips were often no match for his strange but
genuine hilarity. During the whole evening he was rather 'hors de son
assiette,' I thought. I was very glad I had come, for I had never seen
this side of him, and it seemed the most unaccountable freak of
personality that it was possible to imagine. Before, I had never spent
more than a few minutes watching them, and certainly never seen anything
resembling the present display.

This out-of-door audience was differently moved from the audiences I
have seen in the little circus tents of the breton fairs. The absence of
the mysterious hush of the interior seemed to release them. Also the
nearness of the performers in the tent increases the mystery. The
proximity of these bulging muscles, painted faces and novel garbs,
evidently makes a strange impression on the village clientle. These
primitive minds do not readily dissociate reality from appearance.
However well they got to know the clown, they would always think of him
the wrong way up, or on all-fours. The more humble suburban theatre-goer
would be twice as much affected at meeting the much-advertised star with
whose private life he is more familiar than with her public display, in
the wings of the theatre, as in seeing her on the stage. Indeed, it
would be rather as though at some turning of an alley at the Zoo, you
should meet a lion face to face--having gazed at it a few minutes before
behind its bars. So the theatre, the people on the stage and the plays
they play, is part of the surface of life, and is not troubling. But to
get behind the scenes and see these beings out of their parts, would be
not merely to be privy to the workings and 'dessous' of the theatre, but
of life itself.

Crowded in the narrow and twilight pavilion of the saltimbanques at the
breton Pardon, the audience will remain motionless for minutes together.
Their imagination is awakened by the sight of the flags, the tent, the
drums, and the bedizened people. Thenceforth it dominates them,
controlling their senses. They enter the tent with a mild awe, in a
suggestive trance. When a joke is made that requires a burst of
merriment, or when a turn is finished, they all begin moving
themselves, as though they had just woken up, changing their attitude,
shaking off the magnetic sleep.

Once I had seen this particular troupe in a fair with their tent up. I
had gone in for a short while, but had not paid much attention to them
individually and soon left. But the clown, I remember, conducted
everything--acting as interpreter of his own jokes, tumbling over and
getting up and leading the laugh, and explaining with real
conscientiousness and science the proprietor's more recondite
conundrums. He took up an impersonal attitude. He was a friend who had
dropped in to see the 'patron'; he appreciated quite as one of the
public the curiosities of the show. He would say, for instance: 'Now
this is very remarkable: this little girl is only eleven, and she can
put both her toes in her mouth,' etc., etc. Had it not been for his
comments, I am persuaded that the performance would have passed off in a
profound, though not unappreciative, silence.

Returning to the present occasion, some time after the initial bout
between the clown and his master, and while some chairs were being
placed in the middle of the ring, I became aware of a very grave
expression on the latter's face. He now mounted upon one of the chairs.
Having remained impressively silent till the last moment, from the edge
of the chair, as though from the brink of a precipice, he addressed the
audience in the following terms:

'Ladies and gentlemen! I have given up working for several years myself,
owing to ill-health. As far as some of my most important tricks are
concerned, my little girl has taken my place. But Monsieur le
Commissaire de Police would not give the necessary permission for her to
appear.--Then I will myself perform!'

A grievance against the police would, of course, any day of the week,
drive out everything else with any showman. The Public momentarily
benefited. At these words M. Montort jerked himself violently over the
back of the chair, the unathletic proportions of his stomach being
revealed in this movement, and touched the ground with his head. Then,
having bowed to the audience, he turned again to the chairs and grasping
them, with a gesture of the utmost recklessness, heaved his body up into
the air. This was accompanied by a startling whir proceeding from his
corduroys, and a painful crepitation of his joints. Afterwards he
accomplished a third feat, suspending himself between two chairs; and
then a fourth, in which he gracefully lay on all three, and picked up a
handkerchief with his face reversed. At this sensational finish, I
thought it appropriate to applaud: a _feu nourri_ of clapping broke from
me. Unfortunately the audience was spellbound and my demonstration
attracted attention. I was singled out by the performer for a look of
individual hatred. He treated all of us coldly: he bowed stiffly, and
walked back to the cart with the air of a man who has just received a
bullet wound in a duel, and refusing the assistance of a doctor walks to
his carriage.

He had accomplished the feats that I have just described with a bitter
dash that revealed once more the character that from former more casual
visits I recognized. He seemed courting misfortune. 'Any mortal injury
sustained by me, M. le Commissaire, during the performance, will be at
your door! The Public must be satisfied. I am the servant of the Public.
You have decreed that it shall be me (all my intestines displaced by
thirty years of contortions) that shall satisfy them. Very well! I know
my duty, if you don't know yours. Good! It shall be done as you have
ordered, M. le Commissaire!'

The drama this time was an _internal_ one, therefore. It was not a
question of baiting the public with a broken neck. We were invited to
concentrate our minds upon what was going on _inside_. We had to
visualize a colony of much-twisted, sorely-tried intestines, screwed
this way and that, as they had never been screwed before. It was an
anatomical piece.

The unfortunate part was that the public could not _see_ these
intestines as they could see a figure suspended in the air, and liable
to crash. A mournful and respectful, a _dead_ silence, would have been
the ideal way, from his point of view, for the audience to have greeted
his pathetic skill. Instead of that, salvos of muscular applause shook
the air every time he completed one of the phases of this painful trick.
Hearing the applause, he would fling himself wildly into his next
posture, with a whistling sneer of hatred. The set finished, the last
knot tied and untied, he went back and leant against the cart, his head
in the hollow of his arm, coughing and spitting. A boy at my side said,
'Regarde--donc; il souffre!' This refusal of the magistrate to let his
little girl perform was an event that especially outraged him: it
wounded his french sense of the dignity of a fully-enfranchised person.
His wife was far less affected, but she seconded him with a lofty scowl.
Shortly afterwards, she provided a new and interesting feature of the
evening's entertainment.

Various insignificant items immediately succeeded the showman's dramatic
exploit, where he deputized for his daughter. A donkey appeared, whose
legs could be tied into knots. The clown extracted from its middle-class
comfortable primness of expression every jest of which it was
susceptible. The conundrums broke out again; they only ceased after a
discharge that lasted fully a quarter of an hour. There was a little
trapeze. For some time already we had been aware of a restless figure in
the background. A woman with an expression of great dissatisfaction on
her face, stood with muffled arms knotted on her chest, holding a shawl
against the cold air. Next, we became aware of a harsh and indignant
voice. This woman was slowly advancing, talking all the while, until she
arrived in the centre of the circle made by the seats. She made several
slow gestures, slightly raising her voice. She spoke as a person who had
stood things long enough. 'Here are hundreds of people standing round,
and there are hardly a dozen sous on the carpet! We give you
entertainment, but it is not for nothing! We do not work for nothing! We
have our living to make as well as other people! This is the third
performance we have given today. We are tired and have come a long way
to appear before you this evening. You want to enjoy yourselves; but you
don't want to pay! If you want to see any more, loosen your
purse-strings a little!'

While delivering this harangue her attitude resembled that seen in the
London streets, when women are quarrelling--the neck strained forward,
the face bent down, and the eyes glowering upwards at the adversary. One
hand was thrust stiffly out. In these classes of action the body,
besides, is generally screwed round to express the impulse of turning
on the heel in disgust and walking away. But the face still confronts
whoever is being apostrophized, and utters its ever-renewed maledictory
post-scriptums.

Several pieces of money fell at her feet. She remained silent, the arms
fiercely folded, the two hands bitterly dug into her sides. Eventually
she retired, very slowly, as she had advanced, as it were indolently,
her eyes still flashing and scowling resentfully round at the crowd as
she went. They looked on with amiable and gaping attention. They took
much more notice of her than of the man; she thoroughly interested them,
and they conceded to her unconditionally their sympathy. There was no
response to her attack--no gibing or discontent; only a few more sous
were thrown. Her husband, it appeared, had been deeply stimulated by her
speech. One or two volcanic conundrums followed closely upon her exit.
The audience seemed to relish the entertainment all the more after this
confirmation from the proprietress of its quality, instead of being put
in a more critical frame of mind.

Her indignant outburst carried this curious reflection with it; it was
plain that it did not owe its tone of conviction to the fact that she
conceived a high opinion of their performance. Apparently it was an
axiom of her mind that the public paid, for some obscure reason, not
for its proper amusement, but for the trouble, inconvenience, fatigue,
and in sum for all the ills of the showman's lot. Or rather did _not_
pay, sat and watched and did not pay. Ah a!--that was trying the
patience too far. This, it is true, was only the reasoning every gesture
of her husband forcibly expressed, but explicit, in black and white, or
well-turned forcible words.

Peasant audiences in latin countries, and no doubt in most places, are
herded to their amusements like children; the harsh experts of fun
barbarously purge them for a few pence. The spectacles provided are
received like the daily soup and weekly cube of tobacco of the convict.
Spending wages, it seems, is as much a routine as earning them. So in
their entertainment, when buying it with their own money, they support
the same brow-beating and discipline as in their work. Of this the
outburst of the proprietress was a perfect illustration. Such figures
represent for the spectators, for the moment, authority. In consequence
a reproof as to their slackness in spending is received in the same
spirit as a master's abuse at alleged slackness in earning it.

I have described the nature of my own humour--how, as I said, it went
over into everything, making a drama of mock-violence of every social
relationship. Why should it be so _violent_--so mock-violent--you may
at the time have been disposed to enquire? Everywhere it has seemed to
be compelled to go into some frame that was always a simulacrum of
mortal combat. Sometimes it resembled a dilution of the Wild West film,
chaplinesque in its violence. Why always _violence_? However, I have
often asked that myself.

For my reply here I should go to the modern Circus or to the Italian
Comedy, or to Punch. Violence is of the essence of _laughter_ (as
distinguished of course from smiling wit): it is merely the inversion or
failure of _force_. To put it in another way, it is the _grin_ upon the
Deathshead. It must be extremely primitive in origin, though of course
its function in civilized life is to keep the primitive at bay. But it
hoists the primitive with its own explosive. It is a realistic firework,
reminiscent of war.

These strolling players I am describing, however, and their relation to
their audience, will provide the most convincing illustration of what I
mean. The difference and also the inevitable consanguinity between my
ideal of humour, and that of any other man whatever, will become plain.
For the primitive peasant audience the comic-sense is subject to the
narrowest convention of habit. Obviously a peasant would not see
anything ridiculous in, or at least never amuse himself over his pigs
and chickens: his constant sentiment of their utility would be too
strong to admit of another. Thus the disintegrating effect of the
laughing-gas, and especially the fundamentals of the absurd, that strike
too near the life-root, is instinctively isolated. A man who succeeds in
infuriating us, again, need never fear our ridicule, although he may
enhance our anger by his absurdity. A countryman in urging on his beast
may make some disobliging remark to it, really seizing a ludicrous point
in its appearance to envenom his epithet: but it will be caustic and
mirthless, an observation of his intelligence far removed from the
irresponsible emotion of laughter. It will come out of his anger and
impatience, not his gaiety. You see in the peasant of Brittany and other
primitive districts of France a constant tendency to sarcasm. Their
hysterical and monotonous voices--a variety of the 'celtic' screech--are
always with the Bretons pitched in a strain of fierce raillery and
abuse. But this does not affect their mirth. Their laughter is sharp and
mirthless and designed usually to wound. With their grins and quips they
are like armed men who never meet without clashing their weapons
together. Were my circus-proprietor and his kind not so tough, this
continual howl or disquieting explosion of what is scarcely mirth would
shatter them.

So (to return to the conventions of these forms of pleasure) it could be
said that if the clown and the manager consulted in an audible voice,
before cracking each joke--in fact, concocted it in their
hearing--these audiences would respond with the same alacrity. Any
rudiment of dcor or makeshift property, economy in make-up, or feeble
trick of some accredited acrobat, which they themselves could do twice
as well, or mirthless patter, is not enough to arouse criticism in them,
who are so critically acute in other matters. To criticize the
amusements that Fate has provided, is an anarchy to which they do not
aspire.

The member of a peasant community is trained by Fate, and his law is to
accept its manifestations--one of which is comic, one of love, one of
work, and so on. There is a little flowering of tenderness for a moment
in the love one. The comic is always strenuous and cruel, like the work.
It never flowers. The intermediary, the showman, knows that. He knows
the brutal _frisson_ in contact with danger that draws the laughter up
from the deepest bowel in a refreshing unearthly gush. He knows why he
and the clown are always black and blue, his children performing dogs,
his wife a caryatid. He knows Fate, since he serves it, better than even
the peasant.

The educated man, like the true social revolutionary, does not _accept_
life in this way. He is in revolt, and it is the laws of Fate that he
sets out to break. We can take another characteristic fatalism of the
peasant or primitive man. He can never conceive of anybody being
anything else but just what he is, or having any other name than that he
is known by. John the carpenter, or Old John (or Young John) the
carpenter, is not a person, but, as it were, a fixed and rigid
communistic convention. One of our greatest superstitions is that the
plain man, being so 'near to life,' is a great 'realist.' In fact, he
seldom gets close to reality at all, in the way, for instance, that a
philosophic intelligence, or an imaginative artist, does. He looks at
everything from the outside, reads the labels, and what he _sees_ is
what he has been told to see, that is to say, what he expects. What he
does not expect, he, of course, does not see. For him only the well-worn
and general exists.

That the peasant, or any person living under primitive conditions, does
not appreciate the scenery so much as, say, John Keats, is a generally
accepted truth, which no available evidence gives us any reason to
question. His contact with the quickest, most vivid, reality, if he is
averagely endowed, is muffled, and his touch upon it strangely
insensitive; he is surrounded by signs, not things. It is for this
reason that the social revolutionary, who wishes to introduce the
unexpected and to awaken a faculty of criticism, finds the peasant such
unsatisfactory material.

Just as the peasant, then, has little sense of the beauty of his life,
so his laughter is circumscribed. The herd-bellow at the circus is
always associated with mock-violent events, however, and his true
laughter is always torn out of a tragic material. How this explains my
sort of laughter is that both our patterns are cut or torn out of
primitive stuff. The difference is that pure physical action usually
provides him with his, whereas mine deal with the phantoms of action and
the human character. For me _everything_ is tragically primitive:
whereas the peasant only feels 'primitively' at stated times. But both
our comedies are comedies of action, that is what I would stress.

This particular performance wound up rather strangely. The showman's
wife had occasion to approach and lash the public with her tongue again,
in the final phase. As the show approached its conclusion, the donkey
was led in once more, pretended to die, and the clown made believe to
weep disconsolately over it. All was quiet and preparation for a moment.

Then, from an unexpected quarter, came a sort of dnouement to our
evening. Every one's attention was immediately attracted to it. A small
boy in the front row began jeering at the proprietor. First, it was a
constant muttering, that made people turn idly to that quarter of the
ring. Then it grew in volume and intensity. It was a spontaneous action
it appeared, and extremely sudden. The outraged showman slouched past
him several times, looking at him from the tail of his eye, with his
head thrust out as though he were going to crow. He rubbed his hands as
he was accustomed to do before chastizing the clown. Here was a little
white-faced clown, an unprofessional imp of mischief! He would slap him
in a moment. He rubbed his horny hands but without conviction. This had
no effect: the small voice went steadily on like a dirge. This
unrehearsed number found him at a loss. He went over to the clown and
complained in a whisper. This personage had just revealed himself as a
serious gymnast. Baring his blacksmith's arms, and discarding his
ludicrous personality, he had accomplished a series of mild feats on the
trapeze. He benefited, like all athletic clowns, by his traditional
foolish incompetence. The public were duly impressed. He now surveyed
them with a solemn and pretentious eye. When his master came up to him,
supposing that the complaint referred to some disorderly booby, he
advanced threateningly in the direction indicated. But when he saw who
was the offender, finding a thoughtful-looking little boy in place of an
intoxicated peasant, he was as nonplussed as had been his master. He
looked foolishly round, and then fell to jeering back, the clown
reasserting itself. Then he returned with a shrug and grimace to his
preparations for the next and final event.

It is possible that this infant may never have thought comically before.
Or he may, of course, have visited travelling shows for the purpose of
annoying showmen, advertising his intelligence, or even to be taken on
as a clown. But he may have been the victim of the unaccountable
awakening of a critical vein, grown irresponsibly active all at once. If
the latter, then he was launched on a dubious career of offence. He had
one of the handsome visionary breton faces. His oracular vehemence,
though bitterly sarcastic, suggested the more romantic kind of
motivation. The showman prowled about the enclosure, grinning and
casting sidelong glances at his poet: his vanity tickled in some
fashion, perhaps: who knows? the boy persevering blandly, fixing him
with his eye. But suddenly his face would darken, and he would make a
rush at the inexplicable juvenile figure. Would this boy have met death
with the exultation of a martyr rather than give up his picture of an
old and despondent mountebank--like some stubborn prophet who would not
forgo the melodrama forged by his orderly hatreds--always of the gloom
of famine, of cracked and gutted palaces, and the elements taking on new
and extremely destructive shapes for the extermination of man?

At last that organism, 'the Public,' as there constituted, fell to
pieces, at a signal: the trapeze collapsed, the benches broke the circle
described for the performance, and were hurried away, the acetylene
lamps were extinguished, the angry tongues of the saltimbanques began
their evil retrospective clatter. There had been _two_ Publics, however,
this time. It had been a good show.




THE DEATH OF THE ANKOU

'_And Death once dead, there's no more dying then._'
                              William Shakespeare.


Ervoanik Plouillo--meaning the death-god of Ploumilliau; I said over the
words, and as I did so I saw the death-god.--I sat in a crowded inn at
Vandevennec, in the _argoat_, not far from Rot, at the Pardon, deafened
by the bitter screech of the drinkers, finishing a piece of cheese. As I
avoided the maggots I read the history of the Ankou, that is the
armorican death-god. The guide-book to the antiquities of the district
made plain, to the tourist, the ancient features of this belief. It
recounted how the gaunt creature despatched from the country of death
traversed at night the breton region. The peasant, late on the high-road
and for the most part drunk, staggering home at midnight, felt around
him suddenly the atmosphere of the shades, a strange cold penetrated his
tissues, authentic portions of the _Nant_ pushed in like icy wedges
within the mild air of the fields and isolated him from Earth, while
rapid hands seized his shoulders from behind, and thrust him into the
ditch. Then, crouching with his face against the ground, his eyes shut
fast, he heard the hurrying wheels of the cart. Death passed with his
assistants. As the complaint of the receding wheels died out, he would
cross himself many times, rise from the ditch, and proceed with a
terrified haste to his destination.

There was a midnight mass at Ploumilliau, where the Ankou, which stood
in a chapel, was said to leave his place, pass amongst the kneeling
congregation, and tap on the shoulders those he proposed to take quite
soon. These were memories. The statue no longer stood there, even. It
had been removed some time before by the priests, because it was an
object of too much interest to local magicians. They interfered with it,
and at last one impatient hag, disgusted at its feebleness after it had
neglected to assist her in a deadly matter she had on hand, introduced
herself into the chapel one afternoon and, unobserved by the staff,
painted it a pillar-box red. This she imagined would invigorate it and
make it full of new mischief. When the priest's eyes in due course fell
upon the red god, he decided that that would not do: he put it out of
the way, where it could not be tampered with. So one of the last truly
pagan images disappeared, wasting its curious efficacy in a loft, dusted
occasionally by an ecclesiastical _bonne_.

Such was the story of the last authentic plastic Ankou. In ancient
Brittany the people claimed to be descended from a redoubtable god of
death. But long passed out of the influence of that barbarity, their
early death-god, competing with gentler images, saw his altars fall one
by one. In a semi-'parisian' parish, at last, the cult which had
superseded him arrived in its turn at a universal decline, his ultimate
representative was relegated to a loft to save it from the contemptuous
devotions of a disappointed sorceress. Alas for Death! or rather for its
descendants, thought I, a little romantically: that chill in the bone it
brought was an ancient tonic: so long as it ran down the spine the
breton soul was quick with memory. So, _alas_!

But I had been reading after that, and immediately prior to my
encounter, about the peasant in the ditch, also the blinding of the god.
It was supposed, I learnt, that formerly the Ankou had his eyesight. As
he travelled along in his cart between the hedges, he would stare about
him, and spot likely people to right and left. One evening, as his flat,
black, breton peasants' hat came rapidly along the road, as he straddled
attentively bolt-upright upon its jolting floor, a man and his master,
in an adjoining field, noticed his approach. The man broke into song.
His scandalized master attempted to stop him. But this bright bolshevik
continued to sing an offensively carefree song under the nose of the
supreme authority. The scandal did not pass unnoticed by the touchy
destroyer. He shouted at him over the hedge, that for his insolence he
had eight days to live, no more, which perhaps would teach him to sing
etcetera! As it happened St. Peter was there. St. Peter's record leaves
little question that a suppressed communist of an advanced type is
concealed beneath the archangelical robes. It is a questionable policy
to employ such a man as doorkeeper, and many popular airs in latin
countries facetiously draw attention to the possibilities inherent in
such a situation. In this case Peter was as scandalized at the behaviour
of the Ankou as was the farmer at that of his farm-hand.

'Are you not ashamed, strange god, to condemn a man in that way, _at his
work_?' he exclaimed. It was the _work_ that did it, as far as Peter was
concerned. Also it was his interference with work that brought his great
misfortune on the Ankou. St. Peter, so the guide-book said, was as
touchy as a captain of industry or a demagogue on that point. Though how
could poor Death know that work, of all things, was sacred? Evidently he
would have quite different ideas as to the attributes of divinity. But
he had to pay immediately for his blunder. The revolutionary archangel
struck him blind on the spot--struck Death blind; and, true to his
character, that of one at all costs anxious for the applause of the
_muchedumbre_, he returned to the field, and told the astonished
labourer, who was still singing--because in all probability he was a
little soft in the head--that he had his personal guarantee of a very
long and happy life, and that he, Peter, had punished Death with
blindness. At this the labourer, I daresay, gave a hoarse laugh; and St.
Peter probably made his way back to his victim well-satisfied in the
reflection that he had won the favour of a vast mass of mortals.

In the accounts in the guide-book, it was the dating, however, connected
with the tapping of owls, the crowing of hens, the significant
evolutions of magpies, and especially the subsequent time-table involved
in the lonely meetings with the plague-ridden death-cart, that seemed to
me most effective. If the peasant were overtaken by the cart on the
night-road towards the morning, he must die within the month. If the
encounter is in the young night, he may have anything up to two years
still to live. It was easy to imagine all the calculations indulged in
by the distracted man after his evil meeting. I could hear his screaming
voice (like those at the moment tearing at my ears as the groups of
black-coated figures played some game of chance that maddened them) when
he had crawled into the large, carved cupboard that served him for a
bed, beside his wife, and how she would weigh this living, screaming,
man, in the scales of time provided by superstition, and how the death
damp would hang about him till his time had expired.

I was persuaded, finally, to go to Ploumilliau, and see the last statue
of the blind Ankou. It was not many miles away. _Ervoanik
Plouillo_--still to be seen for threepence: and while I was making plans
for the necessary journey, my mind was powerfully haunted by that blind
and hurrying apparition which had been so concrete there.

It was a long room where I sat, like a gallery: except during a Pardon
it was not so popular. When I am reading something that interests me,
the whole atmosphere is affected. If I look quickly up, I see things as
though they were a part of a dream. They are all penetrated by the
particular medium I have drawn out of my mind. What I had last read on
this occasion, although my eyes at the moment were resting on the words
_Ervoanik Plouillo_, was the account of how it affected the person's
fate at what hour he met the Ankou. The din and smoke in the dark and
crowded gallery was lighted by weak electricity, and a wet and lowering
daylight beyond. Crowds of umbrellas moved past the door which opened on
to the square. Whenever I grew attentive to my surroundings, the
passionate movement of whirling and striking arms was visible at the
tables where the play was in progress, or a furious black body would
dash itself from one chair to another. The 'celtic screech' meantime
growing harsher and harsher, sharpening itself on caustic snarling
words, would soar to a paroxysm of energy. 'Garce!' was the most
frequent sound. All the voices would clamour for a moment together. It
was a shattering noise in this dusky tunnel.--I had stopped reading, as
I have said, and I lifted my eyes. It was then that I saw the Ankou.

With revulsed and misty eyes almost in front of me, an imperious figure,
apparently armed with a club, was forcing its way insolently forward
towards the door, its head up, an eloquently moving mouth hung in the
air, as it seemed, for its possessor. It forced rudely aside everything
in its path. Two men who were standing and talking to a seated one flew
apart, struck by the club, or the sceptre, of this king amongst
afflictions. The progress of this embodied calamity was peculiarly
straight. He did not deviate. He passed my table and I saw a small,
highly coloured, face, with waxed moustaches. But the terrible
perquisite of the blind was there in the staring, milky eyeballs: and an
expression of acetic ponderous importance weighted it so that, mean as
it was in reality, this mask was highly impressive. Also, from its
bitter immunity and unquestioned right-of-way, and from the habit of
wandering through the outer jungle of physical objects, it had the look
that some small boy's face might acquire, prone to imagine himself a
steam-roller, or a sightless Juggernaut.

The blinded figure had burst into my daydream so unexpectedly and so
pat, that I was taken aback by this sudden close-up of so trite a
tragedy. Where he had come was compact with an emotional medium emitted
by me. In reality it was a private scene, so that this overweening
intruder might have been marching through my mind with his taut
convulsive step, club in hand, rather than merely traversing the
eating-room of a hotel, after a privileged visit to the kitchen.
Certainly at that moment my mind was lying open so much, or was so much
exteriorized, that almost literally, as far as I was concerned, it was
inside, not out, that this image forced its way. Hence, perhaps, the
strange effect.

The impression was so strong that I felt for the moment that I had met
the death-god, a garbled version with waxed moustaches. It was noon. I
said to myself that, as it was noon, that should give me twelve months
more to live. I brushed aside the suggestion that day was not night,
that I was not a breton peasant, and that the beggar was probably not
Death. I tried to shudder. I had not shuddered. His attendant, a
sad-faced child, rattled a lead mug under my nose. I put two sous in it.
I had no doubt averted the omen, I reflected, with this bribe.

The weather improved in the afternoon. As I was walking about with a
fisherman I knew, who had come in twenty miles for this Pardon, I saw
the Ankou again, collecting pence. He was strolling now, making a
leisurely harvest from the pockets of these religious crowds. His
attitude was, however, peremptory. He called out hoarsely his
requirements, and turned his empty eyes in the direction indicated by
his acolyte, where he knew there was a group who had not paid. His
clothes were smart, all in rich, black broadcloth and black velvet, with
a ribboned hat. He entered into every door he found open, beating on it
with his club-like stick. I did not notice any _Thank you_! pass his
lips. He appeared to snort when he had received what was due to him, and
to turn away, his legs beginning to march mechanically like a man mildly
shell-shocked.

The fisherman and I both stood watching him. I laughed.

'Il ne se gne pas!' I said. 'He does not _beg_. I don't call that a
_beggar_.'

'Indeed, you are right.--That is Ludo,' I was told.

'Who is Ludo, then?' I asked.

'Ludo is the king of Rot!' my friend laughed. 'The people round here
spoil him, according to my idea. He's only a beggar. It's true he's
blind. But he takes too much on himself.'

He spat.

'He's not the only blind beggar in the world!'

'Indeed, he is not,' I said.

'He drives off any other blind beggars that put their noses inside Rot.
You see his stick? He uses it!'

We saw him led up to a party who had not noticed his approach. He stood
for a moment shouting. From stupidity they did not respond at once.
Turning violently away, he dragged his attendant after him.

'He must not be kept waiting!' I said.

'Ah, no. With Ludo you must be nimble!'

The people he had left remained crestfallen and astonished.

'Where does he live?' I asked.

'Well, he lives, I have been told, in a cave, on the road to Kermarquer.
That's where he lives. Where he banks I can't tell you!'

Ludo approached us. He shouted in breton.

'What is he saying?'

'He is telling you to get ready; that he is coming!' said my friend. He
pulled out a few sous from his pocket, and said: 'Faut bien! Needs
must!' and laughed a little sheepishly.

I emptied a handful of coppers into the mug.

'Ludo!' I exclaimed. 'How are you? Are you well?'

He stood, his face in my direction, with, except for the eyes, his mask
of an irritable Jack-in-office, with the waxed moustaches of a small
pretentious official.

'Very well! And you?' came back with unexpected rapidity.

'Not so bad, touching wood!' I said. 'How is your wife?'

'Je suis garon! I am a bachelor!' he replied at once.

'So you are better off, old chap!' I said. 'Women serve no good purpose,
for serious boys!'

'You are right,' said Ludo. He then made a disgusting remark. We
laughed. His face had not changed its expression. Did he try, I
wondered, to picture the stranger, discharging remarks from empty
blackness, or had the voice outside become for him or had it always been
what the picture is to us? If you had never seen any of the people you
knew, but had only talked to them on the telephone--what under these
circumstances would So-and-So be as a voice, I asked myself, instead of
mainly a picture?

'How long have you been a beggar, Ludo?' I asked.

'Longtemps!' he replied. I had been too fresh for this important beggar.
He got in motion and passed on, shouting in breton.

The fisherman laughed and spat.

'Quel type!' he said. 'When we were in Penang, no it was at Bankok, at
the time of my service with the fleet, I saw just such another. He was a
blind sailor, an Englishman. He had lost his sight in a shipwreck.--He
would not beg from the black people.'

'Why did he stop there?'

'He liked the heat. He was a _farceur_. He was such another as this
one.'

Two days later I set out on foot for Kermarquer. I remembered as I was
going out of the town that my friend had told me that Ludo's cave was
there somewhere. I asked a woman working in a field where it was. She
directed me.

I found him in a small, verdant enclosure, one end of it full of
half-wild chickens, with a rocky bluff at one side, and a stream running
in a bed of smooth boulders. A chimney stuck out of the rock, and a
black string of smoke wound out of it. Ludo sat at the mouth of his
cave. A large dog rushed barking towards me at my approach. I took up a
stone and threatened it. His boy, who was cooking, called off the dog.
He looked at me with intelligence.

'Good morning, Ludo!' I said. 'I am an Englishman. I met you at the
Pardon, do you remember? I have come to visit you, in passing. How are
you? It's a fine day.'

'Ah, it was you I met? I remember. You were with a fisherman from
Kermanec?'

'The same.'

'So you're an Englishman?'

'Yes.'

'Tiens!'

I did not think he looked well. My sensation of mock-superstition had
passed. But although I was now familiar with Ludo, when I looked at his
staring mask I still experienced a faint reflection of my first
impression, when he was the death-god. That impression had been a strong
one, and it was associated with superstition. So he was still a feeble
death-god.

The bodies of a number of esculent frogs lay on the ground, from which
the back legs had been cut. These the boy was engaged in poaching.

'What is that you are doing them in?' I asked him.

'White wine,' he said.

'Are they best that way?' I asked.

'Why, that is a good way to do them,' said Ludo. 'You don't eat frogs in
England, do you?'

'No, that is repugnant to us.'

I picked one up.

'You don't eat the bodies?'

'No, only the thighs,' said the boy.

'Will you try one?' asked Ludo.

'I've just had my meal, thank you all the same.'

I pulled out of my rucksack a flask of brandy.

'I have some eau-de-vie here,' I said. 'Will you have a glass?'

'I should be glad to,' said Ludo.

I sat down, and in a few minutes his meal was ready. He disposed of the
grenouilles with relish, and drank my health in my brandy, and I drank
his. The boy ate some fish that he had cooked for himself, a few yards
away from us, giving small pieces to the dog.

After the meal Ludo sent the boy on some errand. The dog did not go with
him. I offered Ludo a cigarette which he refused. We sat in silence for
some minutes. As I looked at him I realized how the eyes mount guard
over the face, as well as look out of it. The faces of the blind are
hung there like a dead lantern. Blind people must feel on their skins
our eyes upon them: but this sheet of flesh is rashly stuck up in what
must appear far outside their control, an object in a foreign world of
sight. So in consequence of this divorce, their faces have the
appearance of things that have been abandoned by the mind. What is his
face to a blind man? Probably nothing more than an organ, an exposed
part of the stomach, that is a mouth.

Ludo's face, in any case, was _blind_; it looked the blindest part of
his body, and perhaps the deadest, from which all the functions of a
living face had gone. As a result of its irrelevant external situation,
it carried on its own life with the outer world, and behaved with all
the disinvolture of an internal organ, no longer serving to secrete
thought any more than the foot. For after all to be lost _outside_ is
much the same as to be hidden in the dark _within_.--What served for a
face for the blind, then? What did they have instead, that was
expressive of emotion in the way that our faces are? I supposed that all
the responsive machinery must be largely readjusted with them, and
directed to some other part of the body. I noticed that Ludo's hands,
all the movement of his limbs, were a surer indication of what he was
thinking than was his face.

Still the face registered something. It was a health-chart perhaps. He
looked very ill I thought, and by that I meant, of course, that his
_face_ did not look in good health. When I said, 'You don't look well,'
his hands moved nervously on his club. His face responded by taking on a
sicklier shade.

'I'm ill,' he said.

'What is it?'

'I'm indisposed.'

'Perhaps you've met the Ankou.' I said this thoughtlessly, probably
because I had intended to ask him if he had ever heard of the Ankou, or
something like that. He did not say anything to this, but remained
quite still, then stood up and shook himself and sat down again. He
began rocking himself lightly from side to side.

'Who has been telling you about the Ankou, and all those tales?' he
suddenly asked.

'Why, I was reading about it in a guide-book, as a matter of fact, the
first time I saw you. You scared me for a moment. I thought you might be
he.'

He did not reply to this, nor did he say anything, but his face assumed
the expression I had noticed on it when I first saw it, as he forced his
way through the throngs at the inn.

'Do you think the weather will hold?' I asked.

He made no reply. I did not look at him. With anybody with a face you
necessarily feel that they can see you, even if their blank eyes prove
the contrary. His fingers moved nervously on the handle of the stick. I
felt that I had suddenly grown less popular. What had I done? I had
mentioned an extinct god of death. Perhaps that was regarded as unlucky.
I could not guess what had occurred to displease him.

'It was a good Pardon, was it not, the other day?' I said.

There was no reply. I was not sure whether he had not perhaps moods in
which, owing to his affliction, he just entered into his shell, and
declined to hold intercourse with the outside. I sat smoking for five
minutes, I suppose, expecting that the boy might return. I coughed. He
turned his head towards me.

'Vous tes toujours l?' he asked.

'Oui, toujours,' I said. Another silence passed. He placed his hand on
his side and groaned.

'Is there something hurting you?' I asked.

He got up and exclaimed:

'Merde!'

Was that for me? I had the impression, as I glanced towards him to
enquire, that his face expressed fear. Of what?

Still holding his side, shuddering and with an unsteady step, he went
into his cave, the door of which he slammed. I got up. The dog growled
as he lay before the door of the cave. I shouldered my rucksack. It was

no longer a hospitable spot. I passed the midden on which the bodies of
the grenouilles now lay, went down the stream, and so left. If I met the
boy I would tell him his master was ill. But he was nowhere in sight,
and I did not know which way he had gone.

I connected the change from cordiality to dislike on the part of Ludo
with the mention of the Ankou. There seemed no other explanation. But
why should that have affected him so much? Perhaps I had put myself in
the position of the Ankou, even--unseen as I was, a foreigner and, so,
ultimately dangerous--by mentioning the Ankou, with which he was
evidently familiar. He may even have retreated into his cave, because he
was afraid of me. Or the poor devil was simply ill. Perhaps the frogs
had upset him: or maybe the boy had poisoned him. I walked away. I had
gone a mile probably when I met the boy. He was carrying a covered
basket.

'Ludo's ill. He went indoors,' I said. 'He seemed to be suffering.'

'He's not very well today,' said the boy. 'Has he gone in?'

I gave him a few sous.

Later that summer the fisherman I had been with at the Pardon told me
that Ludo was dead.




FRANCISCAN ADVENTURES


I found him in front of a crowd of awestruck children, the french
vagabond, hoisting a box up under his arm, strapping it over his
shoulder, and brandishing three ruined umbrellas. 'Ah, yes, say what you
will, music, that is the art for me! Do you know, shall I tell you?' (he
approached a little girl, who shrank abashed from his confidences).
'Shall I tell you, my little chicken?' he whispered, his voice
sustaining in a sepulchral vibration the _dise_ of 'veux-tu que je te
_dise_?' and slobbering at 'poule,' which he puffed out from his vinous
lips, eyes sodden, fixed and blank.

'_I am musical!_'

Waggling his head, he turned away and started down the road. Then he
wheeled at their jeers. In big strides he hurried back: he saw himself
as a giant in a fairy tale. The group of small children backed in a
block, all eyes centering on the figure stalking towards them. He
brought himself to a sudden halt, stiffened to lift himself still
further above their lilliputian stature. 'Music!' he exclaimed: 'ah,
yes, I am' (he paused, kneading them with his fiery eyes; then in a very
confidential key) '_musical!_' He proceeded with that theme, but
conversationally. In making use of certain expressions such as
_pianissimo_ and _contralto_, he would add, as a polite afterthought,
'that is a term in music.' Then, towering over his puny audience, arms
extended, head thrown back, he would call out menacingly his maxims--all
on the subject of music. Afterwards, dropping his voice once more, and
turning his pompous and knowing eyes upon the nearest infant, he would
add, in a manner suggestive of a favoured privacy, some further
information or advice, 'Remember, the stomach is the womb! L'estomac,
c'est la matrice! it is the stomach that sings! It comes out here.' He
pointed to his mouth. He placed his hand midway on his person. 'It is
born here.' Tall, slender and with graceful waving limbs, he wore a full
beard, growing in a lustreless, grey-green cascade, while hair fell,
curling at the ends, upon his shoulders. He had a handsome, fastidiously
regular, thin and tanned face, in which his luminous black eyes
recognized the advantage of their position; they rolled luxuriously on
either side of his aristocratic nose. He would frequently pass his
hands, of a 'musical' tenuity, over his canonical beard.

I thought I would stop and interrogate this shell. I watched his
performance from a distance. He soon saw me and left the children. He
passed, his hat struck down over his eyes, a drunken pout of watchful
defiance lying like a burst plum in a nest of green bristle and mildewed
down, his nose reddening at its fine extremity. From beneath the
hat-brim he quizzed me, but offering alternatives, I thought.

I smiled at him broadly, showing him my big, white, expensive teeth, in
perfect condition.

'Good-day!' I nodded.

He might pull up, or perhaps he was too drunk, or not in the mood: I
thought I would leave it at that. He was not sure: the tail of his eye
interrogated.

'Good-day!' I nodded more sharply, reassuringly.

An arch light replaced the quizzing scowl, but still he did not stop.

'Good-day!' I exclaimed. 'Yes!' I nodded with pointed affirmative.

'Good-day!'

He went on, his eyes trained sideways on me. I gave a salvo of emphatic
nods in quick succession.

'Yes!' I coaxed. I showed my teeth again. 'Why yes!'

He was repelled by my shabby appearance, I saw. I opened my coat and
showed him a rich coloured scarf. I smiled again, slowly and
hypnotically, offering to his dazzled inspection the dangling scarf.

He suddenly wheeled in my direction, stopped, stretched out the hand
with the scarecrow umbrellas, and began singing a patriotic song. I
stopped. A half-dozen yards separated us. His voice was strong: it spent
most of its time in his throat, wallowing in a juicy bellow. Sometimes
by accident the sinuses were occupied by it, as it charged up the
octave, and it issued pretty and flute-like from the well-shaped inside
of his face. As he sang, his head was dramatically lowered, to enable
him to fish down for the low notes; his eyes glared fixedly up from
underneath. His mouth was stretched open to imitate the dark, florid
aperture of a trumpet: from its lips rich sputum trickled. He would
stop, and with an indrawn wheeze or a quick gasp, fetch it back as it
was escaping. Then he would burst out violently again into a heaving
flux of song. I approached him.

'That was not at all bad,' I remarked when he had done, and was
gathering up stray drops the colour of brandy with his tongue.

'No?'

'Not at all. It was very musical. Quite good!'

'Ah!' he exclaimed, and his eyes rested blankly on my person. 'Musical!
Ah!'

'Yes, I think so.'

'Ah!'

'By God and the Devil and what comes between, you have a voice that is
not at all bad.'

'You are of that opinion?'

'My God, yes!'

'Truly?'

'That is what I hold for the moment. But I must hear more of it.'

He retreated a step, lowered his head, took a deep breath, and opened
his mouth. I held up my hand. He closed his mouth, deflated his chest,
and raised his head.

'Have a cigarette,' I said.

He eyed my luxurious new morocco cigarette case. He perceived the clean,
pink shirt and collar as I drew it out. With a clear responsive
functioning to delight 'Behavior,' he swung his box off his shoulder,
put it down upon the road, and placed his umbrellas upon it. He felt
stiff when that was off. He rattled himself about circumspectly.

'Thanks! Thanks!'

His fine amber and ebony finger-tips entered the case with suspicious
decorum, and drew out the little body of a cigarette nipped between
thumb and index.

'Thank you, old chap!'

The cigarette was stuck into the split plum, which came out in the midst
of his beard--its dull-red hemispheres revolving a little, outward and
then inward, to make way, gently closing upon it. I lighted it; he began
sucking the smoke. A moment later it burst from his nostrils.

'What is the time, mon petit?' he asked.

He wanted to see my watch.

'Half-past hanging time,' I said. 'Will you have a drink? Tu prendras un
petit coup, n'est-ce pas?'

'Mais!--je-ne-demande-pas-mieux!'

It was done. I led him to the nearby dbit. We sat down in the excessive
gloom and damp. I rattled on the tin table with the soucoupe of the last
drinker.

I examined this old song-bird with scorn. Monotonous passion,
stereotyped into a frenzied machine, he irritated me like an aimlessly
howling wind. Had I been sitting with the wind, however, I should not
have felt scorn. He was at the same time elemental and silly, that was
the reason. What emotions had this automaton experienced before he
accepted outcast life? In the rounded personality, known as Father
Francis, the answer was neatly engraved. _The emotions provoked by the
bad, late, topical sentimental songs of Republican France._ You could
get no closer answer than that, and it accounted completely for him. He
had become their disreputable embodiment. In his youth the chlorotic
heroine of the popular lyrical fancy must have been his phantom mate.
He became her ideal, according to the indications provided by the lying
ballad. So he would lose touch more and more with unlyricized reality,
which would in due course vomit him into the outcast void. That was the
likeliest story of this shell I had arrested and attracted in here to
inspect.

I settled down to watch. I flashed a few big smiles at him to warm him
up. But he was very businesslike. A stranger would have supposed us
engaged in some small but interesting negotiation. My rle would have
seemed that of a young, nave, enthusiastic impresario. Francis was my
'find.' (I was evidently a musical impresario.)

After having been shown his throat, and having failed in my attempt to
seize between my thumb and forefinger an imaginary vessel, which he
insisted, with considerable violence, I should locate, our relations
nearly terminated out of hand. I had cast doubt, involuntarily, upon a
possession by which he set great store. He frowned. But he had other
resources. I pursued song across this friend's anatomy to its darkest
springs. Limited, possibly, to the field of his own body, he was a
consummate ventriloquist. I have heard the endocrines uttering a C
sharp, and there is nowhere in the intestines from which for me musical
notes have not issued. Placing his hand upon his stomach, and convulsing
himself solemnly, as though about to eat, his chin on his chest, he and
I would sit and listen, and we would both hear a rich, musical sound an
inch or so above the seat of the stool on which he sat.

He would then look up at me slowly, with a smile of nave understanding.

I got tired of this, and said irrelevantly:

'Your hair is very long.'

He pushed in a brake--he had heard--he slowed down his speech, his eye
doubtfully hooked on to mine: some sentences still followed. Then after
a silence, releasing as it were with a snap all his face muscles so that
his mask dropped into lines of preternatural gravity, he exclaimed:

'T'as raison, mon pauv' gosse!--I will tell you. Here, I say, I will
tell you. It's too long. My hair is too long!'

How vastly this differed from my own observation, though the words were
the same, it is difficult to convey. If he had with irrefragable proofs
confuted my statement for ever, it could not have been more utterly
wiped out.

What was I? That did not exercise him. Once or twice he looked at me,
not certainly with curiosity, but with a formal attention. An
inscrutable figure had beckoned to him, and was now treating him for no
reason beyond that he was. (This might be a strange circumstance. But it
possessed no monopoly of strangeness.) His cigarettes, though not
strong, were good. He was a foreigner. That was sufficient. Franois was
not interested in other people, except as illustrations of elementary
physics. Some people repelled him, violently on occasion, and set up
interferences, resulting in hunger and thirst. He lived in outer space,
outcast, and only came to earth to drink and get a crust. There people
mattered, for a moment, but without identity.

The obstacles to be overcome if you were to establish profitable
relations with this at first sight inaccessible mind, were many. Between
it and the outer world many natural barriers existed. His conversation
was obscure. My ignorance of the theory of music, the confusion caused
in my mind by his prolonged explanation of difficult passages (full of
what I supposed to be musicians' slang, confounded with thieves' slang
and breton idiom); the destructive hiccups that engulfed so many of his
phrases, and often ruined a whole train of thought, even nipped in the
bud entire philosophies, the constant sense of insecurity consequent
upon these repeated catastrophes, these were only a few of the
disappointments. Another obstacle was that he spoke the major part of
the time in a whisper. When I could not catch a single word, I yet often
could judge, by the glances he shot at me, the scornful half-closing of
his eyes, screwing up of his mouth and nose, all the horrid cunning of
his expression and nodding of his head, the sort of thing that was
occurring. At other times, his angry and defiant looks showed me that my
respect was being peremptorily claimed. But it remained dumb show,
often, his voice was pitched so low.

'Speak up, Francis. On Tibb's-eve you'll have to be louder than that.'

'I'm sorry, my poor friend.--It's the vocal cords. They function badly
today.'

'Are you dry? Fill up.'

He forgot the next moment, and renewed his muttering.

The remembrance of injuries constantly stirred in him. Excited by his
words, when he had found some phrase happier than another to express his
defiant independence, he felt keenly the chance he had lost. But enemies
melted into friends, and vice versa, in his mind, as they had in his
experience. He turned and frankly enjoyed his verbal triumphs at my
expense.

We had been together some time, and he had drunk a bottle of wine, when
his thoughts began to run on a certain hotel-keeper of the
neighbourhood, whom he suspected of wishing to sell his present
business. The day before, or the week before, he had observed him
looking up at a newly-constructed building in the main street of Rot.

When he first began about this, I supposed he was referring to the
coarse eructations of some figure whom we had imperceptibly left,
although I thought we were still with him. He dropped his voice, and
looked behind him when he said 'Rot.' (Rot is a breton commune, and it
also means a belch.) I sat over him with knitted brows for some time.

'Oui. Pour moi, c'est sa dame qui ne veut plus de Kermanec.--Que la vase
pue l-bas--oh, l l! Quel odeur! Elle a raison! Qu'il aille  Rot!
Qu'il y aille! Moi, je m'en fous! Tant pis pour lui. C'est un malin, tu
sais.' He drank fiercely and continued (I will translate the sort of
rigmarole that followed): 'He's like that. Once he gets an idea in his
head. What's he want to leave Kermanec for? It's a good place: he has a
fine trade. He's my cousin. He doesn't know me. I got behind the wall.
It's not a bad house. It's been in that state for two years. What? Two
years, I say, for certain; it may be three or four. There's no roof, but
its first floor is in:--no staircase. It's dry. I don't say it's a
Rgina! They put a _flic_ at the corner, but we got in the back way.
There's waste-land--yes, waste. Of course. _Naturally._ I saw him. He
was going in at the gate. I hid. He paced the frontage.' He put one
sabot in front of the other to show the method. This was the
innkeeper--not the _flic_--measuring the frontage of the half-built
house, in the sheltered part of which tramps were accustomed to spend
the night, under the nose of the sergent de ville. And this was the
house on which, so it seemed, the landlord had his eye.

In the course of his recital, he repeatedly reverted to the proud spirit
of this publican. On my catching the word 'vermin,' and showing
interest, he repeated what he was saying a little louder.

'Any one seeing me as I am, without profession, poor, might suppose that
I had vermin in my beard. Yes,' he added softly. We fell into a
conversation at this point upon matters connected with the toilet. What
a bore it was to wash! No great men had ever washed. There was a great
sage in England called Shaw, I told him, he never washed. Doctor
Johnson, another british sage, found washing repugnant. It was very
unusual, I said, for _me_ to wash, though I had, I said, washed that
morning. Searching stealthily behind the unorganized panels of rags,
which could be seen symmetrically depending when his great-coat was
opened, he produced the middle section of a comb. With this he made
passes over his beard--without, however, touching it--which he shook
scornfully. He looked at me steadily. I showed I was impressed. He
replaced the comb. The dumb-show had been intended to reveal to my
curiosity a characteristic moment of his toilet.

'Zut!' he said, coughing, 'I had a good brush. That rogue Charlot (ce
chenapan de Charlot!) pinched it!' 'Charlot,' I heard, was so named
among his brother vagabonds on account of his resemblance to Chaplin.

A story intervened in which he gave a glimpse of his physical resource
and determination in moments of difficulty. The landlords of inns, and
farmers, were his principal enemies. He told me how he treated them.
First, it was in general, then particular figures suggested themselves.
He dealt with them one by one.

'Je lui disais: Monsieur!' (Like Doctor Johnson all his addresses began
with an emphatic and threatening 'Sir!') 'I said: Your views are not
mine. It's no use my affecting to be in agreement with you. You say I'm
a "rdeur." I give you the lie. (--_I don't beat about the bush!_ he
said in an aside to me.) Je n'ai jamais rd.--Je ne bouge pas,
moi--jamais! J'y suis, j'y reste!--That is my motto! That is my way,
sir!'

A scene of considerable violence shortly took place. He stamped on the
floor with his great sabots to render more vivid to himself this scene,
also to supply the indispensable element of noise. Owing to emotion, his
voice was incapable of providing this. He spoke with a dreadful
intensity, glaring into my face. Eventually he sprang up; struggling and
stamping about the room (over-matched at first) with an indomitable
heave of the shoulders, and an irresistible rush, he then made believe
to fling his antagonist out of the door. While engaged in this feat,
panting and stamping, he had exclaimed where the action suggested it,
'Ah! veux-tu! Sale bte! Ah sacr gars! Et puis alors, quoi? Es-tu fou?
Tu crois ptrir avec tes mains un tel que moi! Allons donc! Tu
plaisantes! Ah! Je vois bien ton jeu!--Ah bah! le voil foutu! Tant
mieux! Con! Oui! Con! sale con! Ah!' He came back and sat down, his
chest heaving, looking at me for a long time silently, with an air of
insolent triumph.

It would have been difficult to blame him for the steps he had taken,
for he evidently experienced a great relief at the eviction of this
imaginary landlord. Probably he had thrown him out of every bar along
the road. Ever since we had entered he had been restless. I was not
sorry he had rid us of this phantom; but I looked with a certain anxiety
towards the door from time to time. He now seemed enjoying the peace
that he had so gallantly secured for himself. His limbs relaxed, his
eyes were softer. The lips of the voluptuary were everted again, moving
like gorged red worms in the hairs of his moustache and beard. He
delicately fed them from his wineglass. He proceeded now to show me his
mild side. He could afford to. He assured me that he did not like
turbulent people. 'J' n'aime pas l'monde turbulent!' And then he raised
his voice, making the gesture of the teacher: 'Socrates said, "Listen,
but do not strike!"' ('Socrate a dit: "Ecoutez, mais ne frappez pas."')

He abounded in a certain kind of catch-word (such as 'Il ne faut pas
confondre la vitesse avec la prcipitation! Non! il ne faut pas
confondre la vitesse avec la prcipitation!'). These sayings occurred to
him hors d' propos. Sometimes, finding them there on his tongue, he
would just use them and leave it at that. Or he would boldly utter them
and take them as a text for a new discourse. Another perhaps would turn
up: he would drop the first and proceed triumphantly at a tangent.

'Do you go to Rumengol?' I asked him.

'Rumengol? Why, yes, I have gone to Rumengol.'

'It is the Pardon for men of your profession.'

He looked at me, saying absent-mindedly:

'Why, yes, perhaps.'

'It is called _le Pardon des chanteurs_, "the singers' Pardon," is not
that so, I believe?'

His face lit up stupidly.

'Ah, is it called that?' he said. 'I didn't know it was called that.
_Pardon des chanteurs._ That's jolly! Pardon des chanteurs!'

He began singing a catch.

'Is your beat mostly on the _armor_, or is it in the _argoat_?'

'Argouate?' he asked blankly. 'What is that? Argouate! I don't know it.'

Those are the terms for the littoral and the interior respectively. I
was surprised to find he did not know them.

'Where do you come from?' I asked.

'I don't know.--Far from here,' he said briefly.

So he was not breton. The historic rle of the vagabond in Armorica has
almost imposed on him the advertisement of a mysterious origin. It was
so much to his advantage, in the more superstitious centuries, to be a
stranger, and seem not to know the breton tongue, if not deaf and mute.
So he could slip into the legendary framework, and become, at need,
Gabik or Gralon.

Something had struck his fancy particularly. This was connected with his
name Franois. He told me how he had slept in the chteau of Franois I.
at Chambord. It appeared that it was in giving information against his
_bte noire_, the local innkeeper, that he had come to sleep there. I
could not discover what connection these two facts might have. I expect
they had none. It began suddenly with a picture of a wintry night in the
forest. It was very cold and it blew. An inn put in its appearance.
There an 'orgie' was in progress. He introduced himself. Without being
exactly welcomed, he was suffered to remain. The account at this point
became more and more fantastic and uncertain. He must have got drunk
almost immediately. This I put down to his exposure to the cold: so I
picked my way through his disordered words. His story staggered and came
in flashes. He could not understand evidently why the material had, all
of a sudden, grown so intractable. Once or twice he stopped. Living it
again, he rolled his eyes and even seemed about to lose his balance on
the stool. He wanted to go on telling it: but it began to sound absurd
even to him. It still did not occur to him that at this point he had
fallen down drunk. He gave it up.

But the inevitable wicked landlord put in his appearance, robbed him of
his tobacco and other articles. He resisted this exploitation. Then we
certainly reached the chteau. His face cleared up. We had arrived at
the chteau. He became more composed. I asked him where he had slept in
the chteau. He answered he had slept on a mattress, and had had _two_
blankets. On second thoughts he concluded that this would tax my
credulity too much, and withdrew one of the blankets. It was in the
Chteau de Chambord that Molire played for the first time _Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme_, under the splendid ceiling covered then with freshly
painted salamanders. But how did this Francis come to lodge there, if he
ever did? Flaubert's indignant account of the neglect into which, in his
time, this celebrated castle had fallen, may afford some clue. He says
of it: 'On l'a donn  tout le monde, comme si personne ne voulait le
garder. Il a l'air de n'avoir presque jamais servi et avoir t toujours
trop grand. C'est comme une htellerie abandonne o les voyageurs n'ont
pas mme laiss leurs noms aux murs.'

As it has been 'given to everybody,' and yet 'nobody has ever wanted
it,' perhaps this 'derelict inn' was given to le pre Franois for a
night. When Flaubert and Maxime du Camp, already in a state of bellicose
distress, gaze over the staircase into the central court, their
indignant gaze falls on a humble female donkey, giving milk to a
newly-born colt. 'Voil ce qu'il y avait dans la cour d'honneur du
Chteau de Chambord!' exclaims Flaubert: 'un chien qui joue dans l'herbe
et un ne qui tette, ronfle et brait, fiente et gambade sur le seuil des
rois. . . .' Could Flaubert have observed le pre Franois installed
beneath his sumptuous blanket in the entrance court of kings, or
addressing himself to his toilet, I feel certain that that impetuous man
would have passionately descended the staircase and driven him out with
his cane. But this account of Flaubert's does make the franciscan
adventure of the Chteau de Chambord more likely: for if a dog and a
donkey, why not a tramp?

There was no break in the story; but the chteau grew dim. He evidently
rapidly fell asleep, owing to the unaccustomed blanket. He forgot the
last landlord. He had been a robust man. He ran after the bonnes. He
melted into a farmer. The farmer was robust. He ran after Franois.
There was a dog. It fixed its teeth in his leg. He struggled madly with
the dog, his back against the dbit wall. Afterwards, when it was all
over, he rolled up his trousers and we attempted to find a cicatrice. He
wetted his thumb, with that he abraded a rectangular strip near the
ankle: there was a little weal.

The saloon-keeper passed the table several times during this chain of
stories. Once he said, stopping to listen for a moment, 'Ouf, a pack of
lies!' 'Non pas!' replied Francis. 'You lie. You love falsehood! I can
see it. Go away.' The man shrugged violently and went back to the bar.
Some customers had come in. One sat listening to Franois with a heavy
grin. I turned to him and said:

'He is original, le pre Franois, don't you find that so?'

'Why, yes. He's mad.' The steady eyes of the smiling peasant continued
to follow his movements with lazy attention.

'Yes, _original_, I am original!' Franois eagerly assented, as though
in fear, then, that I should be converted to this other man's opinion.

'Original!' he insisted. 'I am original.'

Suddenly turning to me, with rapid condescension, he remarked:

'Je suis content de toi! I am satisfied with you!'

However, the horizon became anew over-clouded. With him it never stood
at Fair for long. He grew more and more violent. Often he sprang up and
whirled round without reason, with the ecstasy of a dervish, his ruined
umbrellas shaken at arm's length. Afterwards he sat down suddenly. He
held his arm out stiffly towards me, looked at it, then at me, wildly,
contracting his muscles, as if searching for some thought that this
familiar instrument suggested, without finding it. Stretching his arm
back swiftly as though about to strike, drawing his breath between his
teeth, with the other hand he seized his forearm as though it were an
independent creature, his fingers its legs, and stared at it. What did
this mad arm want? Allons donc! He dropped it listlessly at his side,
where it hung.

Night had fallen: the landlord had lighted the lamp over the bar.
Francis grew steadily more noisy, singing and using the window as a
drum, his arms on either side of it, tattooing and banging it, his head
turned towards us. The landlord shouted at him at last, with great
violence, 'Tais-toi, vieil imbcile!' The landlord was vexed. His wife
slouched out from the kitchen, and directing the fine hostility of her
gaze toward Francis, muttered heatedly with her husband for some
minutes. They were afraid they would have to give him a night's lodging
in the barn. Not long after this we were turned out. Francis went
meekly: he ridiculed the event, in sotto voce conversation with himself.
I was ready to go. At the door he cut a caper, and shouted at the
landlord, bolder out of doors:

'Je vous remercie! Monsieur, adieu! Me v'l qui va me chauffer  la
chemine du roi Ren.'

'Plutt  la belle toile, mon pauv' viou!'

Francis looked up into the sky overhead and saw a bright star.

'Plutt, en effet,' he said. 'Mais oui-d, t'as raison--il fait nuit!
T'es intelligent, tu sais! N'est-ce pas, mon petit, qu'il est
intelligent, le patron, quand mme? Il n'en a pas l'air, parbleu! Pauv'
colas, va! Ah, bah! Tant pis! Les paysans de par-ici sont d'une
btise!--c'est fantastique! Oui-dame: mais coute! C'mme-l, tu sais:
il n'est pas mchant; _mais_ non! Il est trop bte! C'est  peine s'il
sait lire et crire. C'est une brute, quoi! Tant pis! Ah! merde alors,
o sont donc mes photos----?'

He stood drawn up to his full height, his hands hurrying dramatically
into all the hiding-places of his person. First one hand, then the
other, disappeared beneath his rags and leapt out empty.

'Rien! Ils ne sont pas l! Nom d'un nom! On m'a vol!'

He made as though to rush back to the dbit. I held him by the arm.

'Come on! I'll give you a franc. You can buy some more.'

He was about to put into execution the immemorial tactic of the outcast
in such a situation. Eviction from an eating and drinking house, first:
then comes the retort of an accusation of theft. The indignant customary
words raced on his tongue. He had been robbed! All his photographs had
been pinched! What a house! What people! It was not safe for honest men
to drink there! He would inform the Commissioner of Police when he
reached Saint-Kaduan. They would see if he was to be robbed with
impunity!

He shook his fist at the dbit while I held him. The landlord had left
the door. The road was deserted; a gilt moon (it was that he had
mistaken for the sun, in a condition of partial eclipse) hung over the
village a hundred yards away. Our shadows staggered madly for a moment,
then the thought of the franc cut short this ceremony, and he came away
towards the village. I gave him the franc. He came half way, then left
me. Standing in the middle of the road, the moonlight converting him
into a sickly figure of early republican romance, he sang to me as I
walked away. With the franc, I supposed it was his intention to return
to the dbit.

In the 'granges' at the various farms, tramps usually find a night's
lodging. They make arrangements to meet, and often spend several nights
together in this way. The farm people take their matches and pipes away
from them. Or they put them in the stable among the cattle, making a
hole in the wet straw like a cradle for them. Two days later I saw him
through an inn window for a moment, outside Braspartz. He was dancing in
his heavy sabots, his shoulders drawn up to his ears, arms akimbo. 'I
saw an Italian dance this way,' I heard him exclaim. 'It's true! This is
the way the Italians dance!' A group of sullen peasants watched him, one
laughing, to show he was not taken in. On noticing me, he began singing
a love song, in a loud strong voice. Without interrupting the song, he
stretched his hand through the window for a cigarette. There was no
recognition in his face while he sang: his lips protruded eloquently in
keeping with the sentiment. That is the last I saw of him.




BROTCOTNAZ


Madame Brotcotnaz is orthodox: she is the breton woman at forty-five,
from La Basse-Bretagne, the heart of Old Brittany, the region of the
great Pardons. Frans Hals also would have passed from the painting of
the wife of a petty burgess to Madame Brotcotnaz without any dislocation
of his formulas or rupture of the time-sense. He would still have seen
before him the black and white--the black broadcloth and white coiffe or
caul; and for the white those virgate, slate-blue surfaces, the cold
ink-black for the capital masses of the picture, would have appeared
without a hitch. On coming to the face Frans Hals would have found his
favourite glow of sallow-red, only deeper than he was accustomed to find
in the flemish women. He would have gone to that part of the palette
where the pigment lay for the men's faces at forty-five, the opposite
end to the monticules of olive and sallow peach for the _juniores_, or
the virgins and young wives.

The distillations of the breton orchard have almost subdued the
obstinate yellow of jaundice, and Julie's face is a dull claret. In many
tiny strongholds of eruptive red the more recent colour has entrenched
itself. Her hair is very dark, parted in the middle, and tightly brushed
down upon her head. Her eyebrows are for ever raised. She could not
depress them, I suppose, any more, if she wanted to. A sort of scaly
rigor fixes the wrinkles of the forehead into a seriated field of what
is scarcely flesh, with the result that if she pulled her eyebrows down,
they would fly up again the moment she released the muscles. The flesh
of the mouth is scarcely more alive: it is parched and pinched in, so
that she seems always hiding a faint snicker by driving it primly into
her mouth. Her eyes are black and moist, with the furtive intensity of a
rat. They move circumspectly in this bloated shell. She displaces
herself also more noiselessly than the carefulest nun, and her hands are
generally decussated, drooping upon the ridge of her waist-line, as
though fixed there with an emblematic nail, at about the level of her
navel. Her stomach is, for her, a kind of exclusive personal 'calvary.'
At its crest hang her two hands, with the orthodox decussation, an
elaborate ten-fingered symbol.

Revisiting the home of the Brotcotnazes this summer, I expected to find
some change: but as I came down the steep and hollow ramp leading from
the cliffs of the port, I was reassured at once. The door of the dbit I
perceived was open, with its desiccated bush over the lintel. Julie,
with her head bound up in a large surgical bandage, stood there peering
out, to see if there were any one in sight. No one was in sight, I had
not been noticed; it was not from the direction of the cliffs that she
redoubted interruption. She quickly withdrew. I approached the door of
the dbit in my noiseless _espadrilles_ (that is, the hemp and canvas
shoes of the country), and sprang quickly in after her. I snapped her
with my eye while I shouted:

'Madame Brotcotnaz! Attention!'

She was behind the bar-counter, the fat medicine-glass was in the air,
reversed. Her head was back, the last drops were trickling down between
her gum and underlip, which stuck out like the spout of a cream-jug. The
glass crashed down on the counter; Julie jumped, her hand on her heart.
Beneath, among tins and flagons, on a shelf, she pushed at a bottle. She
was trying to get it out of sight. I rushed up to her and seized one of
her hands.

'I am glad to see you, Madame Brotcotnaz!' I exclaimed. 'Neuralgia
again?' I pointed to the face.

'Oh, que vous m'avez fait peur, Monsieur Kairor!'

She placed her hand on her left breast, and came out slowly from behind
the counter.

'I hope the neuralgia is not bad?'

She patted her bandage with a sniff.

'It's the erysipelas.'

'How is Monsieur Brotcotnaz?'

'Very well, thank you, Monsieur Kairor!' she said in a subdued
sing-song. 'Very well,' she repeated, to fill up, with a faint prim
smile. 'He is out with the boat. And you, Monsieur Kairor? Are you quite
well?'

'Quite well, I thank you, Madame Brotcotnaz,' I replied, 'except perhaps
a little thirsty. I have had a long walk along the cliff. Could we have
a little glass together, do you think?'

'Why, yes, Monsieur Kairor.' She was more reserved at once. With a
distant sniff, she turned half in the direction of the counter, her eyes
on the wall before her. 'What must I give you now?'

'Have you any _pur jus_, such as I remember drinking the last time I was
here?'

'Why, yes.' She moved silently away behind the wooden counter. Without
difficulty she found the bottle of brandy, and poured me out a glass.

'And you, Madame? You will take one with me, isn't that so?'

'Mais, je veux bien!' she breathed with muted dignity, and poured
herself out a small glass. We touched glasses.

'A votre sant, Madame Brotcotnaz!'

'A la vtre, Monsieur Kairor!'

She put it chastely to her lip and took a decent sip, with the
expression reserved otherwise for intercourse with the sacrament.

'It's good.' I smacked my lips.

'Why, yes. It is not at all bad,' she said, turning her head away with a
faint sniff.

'It's good _pur jus_. If it comes to that, it is the best I have tasted
since last I was here. How is it your _pur jus_ is always of this high
quality? You have taste where this drink is concerned, about that there
can be no two opinions.'

She very softly tossed her head, wrinkled her nose on either side of the
bridge, and appeared about to sneeze, which was the thing that came next
before a laugh.

I leant across and lightly patted the bandage. She withdrew her head.

'It is painful?' I asked with commiseration.

My father, who, as I believe I have said, is a physician, once remarked
in my hearing at the time my mother was drinking very heavily, prior to
their separation, that for the management of alcoholic poisoning there
is nothing better than koumiss.

'Have you ever tried a mixture of fermented mare's milk? Ordinary
buttermilk will do. You add pepsin and lump sugar and let it stand for a
day and a night. That is a very good remedy.'

She met this with an airy mockery. She dragged her eyes over my face
afterwards with suspicion.

'It's excellent for erysipelas.'

She mocked me again. I told myself that she might at any moment find
koumiss a useful drink, though I knew that she was wounded in the
sex-war now only, and so required a management of another sort. I
enjoyed arousing her veteran's contempt. She said nothing, but sat with
resignation on the wooden bench at the table.

'I remember well these recurrent indispositions before, Madame
Brotcotnaz,' I said. She looked at me in doubt for a moment, then turned
her face quickly towards the door, slightly offended.

Julie was, of course, secretive, but as it had happened, she was forced
to hug her secrets in public like two dolls that every one could see. I
pretended to snatch first one, then the other. She looked at me and saw
that I was not serious. She was silent in the way a child is: she just
silently looked at me with a primitive coquetry of reproach, and turned
her side to me.--Underneath the counter on the left hand of a person
behind it was the bottle of eau-de-vie. When every one else had gone to
the river to wash clothes, or had collected in the neighbouring inn, she
approached the bottle on tiptoe, poured herself out several glasses in
succession, which she drank with little sighs. Everybody knew this. That
was the first secret. I had ravished it impetuously as described. Her
second secret was the periodic beatings of Brotcotnaz. They were of very
great severity. When I had occupied a room there, the crashing in the
next apartment at night lasted sometimes for twenty minutes. The next
day Julie was bandaged and could hardly limp downstairs. That was the
erysipelas. Every one knew this, as well: yet her secretiveness had to
exercise itself upon these scandalously exposed objects. I just thought
I would stroke the second of them when I approached my hand to her
bandaged face. These intrusions of mine into a _public_ secret bored her
only. She knew as well as I did when a thing was secret and when it was
not. _Qu'est-ce qu'il a, cet homme?_ she would say to herself.

'When do you expect Nicholas?' I asked.

She looked at the large mournful clock.

'Il ne doit pas tarder.'

I lifted my glass.

'To his safe return.'

The first muscular indications of a sneeze, a prim depression of the
mouth, and my remark had been acknowledged, while she lifted her glass
and took a solid sip.


Outside it was a white calm: I had seen a boat round the corner, with
folded sails, beneath the cliff. That was no doubt Brotcotnaz. As I
passed, they had dropped their oars out.

He should be here in a moment.

'Fill up your glass, Madame Brotcotnaz,' I said.

She did not reply. Then she said in an indifferent catch of the breath.

'Here he is!' Hands folded, or decussated as I have said they always
were, she left him to me. She had produced him with her exclamation, 'Le
v'l!'

A footfall, so light that it seemed nothing, came from the steps
outside. A shadow struck the wall opposite the door. With an easy,
dainty, and rapid tread, with a coquettishly supple giving of the knees
at each step, and a gentle debonair oscillation of the massive head, a
tall heavily-built fisherman came in. I sprang up and exclaimed:

'Ah! Here is Nicholas! How are you, old chap?'

'Why, it is Monsieur Kairor!' came the low caressing buzz of his voice.
'How are you? Well, I hope?'

He spoke in a low indolent voice. He smiled and smiled. He was dressed
in the breton fashion.

'Was that you in the boat out there under the cliff just now?' I asked.

'Why, yes, Monsieur Kairor, that must have been us. Did you see us?' he
said, with smiling interest.

I noted his child's pleasure at the image of himself somewhere else, in
his boat, observed by me. It was as though I had said, Peep-oh! I see
you, and we were back in the positions we then had occupied. He
reflected a moment.

'I didn't see you. Were you on the cliff? I suppose you've just walked
over from Loperec?'

His instinct directed him to account for my presence, here, and then up
on the cliff. It was not curiosity. He wished to have cause and effect
properly displayed. He racked his brains to see if he could remember
having noticed a figure following the path on the cliff.

'Taking a little walk?' he added then.

He sat on the edge of a chair, with the symmetrical propriety of his
healthy and powerful frame, the balance of the seated figure of the
natural man, of the european type, found in the quattrocento frescoes.
Julie and he did not look at each other.

'Give Monsieur Brotcotnaz a drink at once,' I said.

Brotcotnaz made a deprecatory gesture as she poured it, and continued to
smile abstractedly at the table.

The dimensions of his eyes, and their oily suffusion with smiling-cream,
or with some luminous jelly that seems still further to magnify them,
are very remarkable. They are great tender mocking eyes that express the
coquetry and contentment of animal fats. The sides of his massive
forehead are often flushed, as happens with most men only in moments of
embarrassment. Brotcotnaz is always embarrassed. But the flush with him,
I think, is a constant affluence of blood to the neighbourhood of his
eyes, and has something to do with their magnetic machinery. The tension
caused in the surrounding vessels by this aesthetic concentration may
account for it. What we call a sickly smile, the mouth remaining lightly
drawn across the gums, with a slight painful contraction--the set
suffering grin of the timid--seldom leaves his face.

The tread of this timid giant is softer than a nun's--the supple
quick-giving at the knees at each step that I have described is the
result no doubt of his fondness for the dance, in which he was so rapid,
expert, and resourceful in his youth. When I first stayed with them, the
year before, a man one day was playing a pipe on the cliff into the
hollow of which the house is built. Brotcotnaz heard the music and
drummed upon the table. Then, lightly springing up he danced in his
tight-fitting black clothes a finicky hornpipe, in the middle of the
dbit. His red head was balanced in the air, face downwards, his arms
went up alternately over his head, while he watched his feet like a
dainty cat, placing them lightly and quickly here and there, with a
ceremonial tenderness, and then snatching them away.

'You are fond of dancing,' I said.

His large tender steady blue eyes, suffused with the witchery of his
secret juices, smiled and smiled: he informed me softly:

'J'suis matre danseur. C'est mon plaisir!'

The buzzing breton drawl, with as deep a 'z' as the dialect of Somerset,
gave a peculiar emphasis to the _C'est mon plaisir_! He tapped the
table, and gazed with the full benignity of his grin into my face.

'I am master of all the breton dances,' he said.

'The aubade, the gavotte----?'

'Why, yes, the breton gavotte.' He smiled serenely into my face. It was
a blast of innocent happiness.

I saw as I looked at him the noble agility of his black faun-like figure
as it must have rushed into the dancing crowd at the Pardon, leaping up
into the air and capering to the _biniou_ with grotesque elegance, while
a crowd would gather to watch him. Then taking hands, while still
holding their black umbrellas, they would spread out in chains, jolting
in a dance confined to their rapidly moving feet. And still like a black
fountain of movement, its vertex the flat, black, breton hat, strapped
under the chin, he would continue his isolated performance.--His calm
assurance of mastery in these dances implied such a position in the
past in the festal life of the pagan countryside.

'Is Madame fond of dancing?' I asked.

'Why, yes. Julie can dance.'

He rose, and extending his hand to his wife with an indulgent gallantry,
he exclaimed:

'Viens donc, Julie! Come then. Let us dance.'

Julie sat and sneered through her vinous mask at her fascinating
husband. He insisted, standing over her with one toe pointed outward in
the first movement of the dance, his hand held for her to take in a
courtly attitude.

'Viens donc, Julie! Dansons un peu!'

Shedding shamefaced, pinched, and snuffling grins to right and left as
she allowed herself to be drawn into this event, she rose. They danced a
sort of minuet for me, advancing and retreating, curtseying and
posturing, shuffling rapidly their feet. Julie did her part, it seemed,
with understanding. With the same smile, at the same pitch, he resumed
his seat in front of me.

'He composes verses also, to sing,' Julie then remarked.

'Songs for gavotte-airs, to be sung----?'

'Why, yes. Ask him!'

I asked him.

'Why, yes,' he said. 'In the past I have written many verses.'

Then, with his settled grin, he intoned and buzzed them through his
scarcely parted teeth, whose tawny rows, he manipulating their stops
with his tongue, resembled some exotic musical instrument.

Brotcotnaz is at once a fisherman, dbitant or saloon-keeper, and
'cultivator.' In spite of this trinity of activities, he is poor. To
build their present home he dissipated what was then left of Julie's
fortune, so I was told by the postman one evening on the cliff. When at
length it stood complete, beneath the little red bluff hewn out for its
reception, brightly whitewashed, with a bald slate roof, and steps
leading up to the door, from the steep and rugged space in front of it,
he celebrated its completion with an expressive housewarming. Now he has
the third share in a fishing boat, and what trade comes his way as a
saloon-keeper, but it is very little.

His comrades will tell you that he is a 'charmant garon, mais jaloux.'
They call him 'tratre.' He has been married twice. Referring to this,
gossip tells you he gave his first wife a hard life. If this is true,
and by analogy, he may have killed her. In spite of this record, poor
Julie 'would have him.' Three times he has inherited money which was
quickly spent. Such is his bare history and the character people give
him.

The morning after a beating--Julie lying seriously battered upon their
bed, or sitting rocking herself quietly in the dbit, her head a turban
of bandages, he noiselessly attends to her wants, enquires how she
feels, and applies remedies. It is like a surgeon and a patient, an
operation having just been successfully performed. He will walk fifteen
miles to the nearest large town and back to get the necessary medicines.
He is grave, and receives pleasantly your commiserations on her behalf,
if you offer them. He has a delicate wife, that is the idea: she suffers
from a chronic complaint. He addresses her on all occasions with a
compassionate gentleness. There is, however, something in the bearing of
both that suggests restraint. They are resigned, but none the less they
remember the cross they have to bear. Julie will refer to his
intemperance, casually, sometimes. She told me on one occasion, that,
when first married, they had had a jay. This bird knew when Brotcotnaz
was drunk. When he came in from a wake or 'Pardon,' and sat down at the
dbit table, the jay would hop out of its box, cross the table, and peck
at his hands and fly in his face.

The secret of this smiling giant, a year or two younger, I daresay, than
his wife, was probably that he intended to kill her. She had no more
money. With his reputation as a wife-beater, he could do this without
being molested. When he went to a 'Pardon,' she on her side knew he
would try to kill her when he came back. That seemed to be the
situation. If one night he did succeed in killing her, he would
sincerely mourn her. At the fianailles with his new bride he would see
this one on the chair before him, his Julie, and, still radiating
tolerance and health, would shed a melancholy smiling tear.

'You remember, Nicholas, those people that called on Thursday?' she now
said.

He frowned gently to recall them.

'Ah, yes, I know--the Parisians that wanted the room.'

'They have been here again this afternoon.'

'Indeed.'

'I have agreed to take them. They want a little cooking. I've consented
to do that. I said I had to speak to my husband about it.--They are
coming back.'

He frowned more heavily, still smiling. He put his foot down with
extreme softness:

'Julie, I have told you that I won't have that! It is useless for you to
agree to do cooking. It is above your strength, my poor dear. You must
tell them you can't do it.'

'But--they are returning. They may be here at any moment, now. I can do
what they wish quite easily.'

With inexorable tenderness he continued to forbid it. Perhaps he did not
want people in the house.

'Your health will not permit of your doing that, Julie.'

He never ceased to smile, but his brows remained knit. This was almost a
dispute. They began talking in breton.

'Nicholas, I must go,' I said, getting up. He rose with me, following me
up with the redoubled suavity of his swimming eyes.

'You must have a drink with me, Monsieur Kairor. Truly you must! Julie!
Another glass for Monsieur Kairor.'

I drank it and left, promising to return. He came down the steps with
me, his knee flexing with exaggerated suppleness at each step, placing
his feet daintily and noiselessly on the dryest spaces on the wet
stones. I watched him over my shoulder returning delicately up the
steps, his massive back rigid, inclined forward, as though he were being
steadily hauled up with a cord, only his feet working.

It was nearly three weeks later when I returned to Kermanec. It was in
the morning. This time I came over in a tradesman's cart. It took me to
the foot of the rough ascent, at the top of which were Brotcotnaz's
steps. There seemed to be a certain animation. Two people were talking
at the door, and a neighbour, the proprietress of the successful dbit,
was ascending the steps. The worst had happened. a y est. He had
killed her! Taking this for granted, I entered the dbit, framing my
_condolances_. She would be upstairs on the bed. Should I go up? There
were several people in the room. As I entered behind them, with a start
of surprise I recognized Julie. Her arm was in a large sling. From
beneath stained cloths, four enormously bloated and discoloured fingers
protruded. These the neighbours inspected. Also one of her feet had a
large bandage. She looked like a beggar at a church door: I could almost
hear the familiar cry of the 'droit des pauvres!' She was speaking in
breton, in her usual tone of 'misricorde,' with her ghostly
sanctimonious snigger. In spite of this, even if the circumstances had
not made this obvious, the atmosphere was very different from that to
which I had been accustomed.

At first I thought: She has killed Brotcotnaz, it must be that. But that
hypothesis was contradicted by every other fact that I knew about them.
It was possible that he had killed himself by accident. But, unnoticed,
in the dark extremity of the dbit, there he was! On catching sight of
his dejected figure, thrust into the darkest shadow of his saloon, I
received my second shock of surprise. I hesitated in perplexity. Would
it be better to withdraw? I went up to Julie, but made no reference to
her condition, beyond saying that I hoped she was well.

'As well as can be expected, my poor Monsieur Kairor!' she said in a
sharp whine, her brown eyes bright, clinging and sad.

Recalling the events of my last visit and our conversation, in which I
had tapped her bandages, I felt these staring fingers, thrust out for
inspection, were a leaf taken out of my book. What new policy was this?
I left her and went over to Brotcotnaz. He did not spring up: all he did
was to smile weakly, saying:

'Tiens! Monsieur Kairor, vous voil.--Sit down, Monsieur Kairor!'

I sat down. With his elbows on the table he continued to stare into
space. Julie and her women visitors stood in the middle of the dbit; in
subdued voices they continued their discussion. It was in breton, I
could not follow it easily.

This situation was not normal: yet the condition of Julie was the
regular one. The intervention of the neighbours and the present
dejection of Brotcotnaz was what was unaccountable. Otherwise, for the
cause of the mischief there was no occasion to look further; a solution,
sound, traditional, and in every way satisfying, was there before me in
the person of Nicholas. But he whom I was always accustomed to see
master of the situation was stunned and changed, like a man not yet
recovered from some horrid experience. He, the recognized agent of Fate,
was usually so above the mle. Now he looked another man, like
somebody deprived of a coveted office, or from whom some privilege had
been withheld. Had Fate acted without him? Such necessarily was the
question that at this point took shape.

Meanwhile I no doubt encountered in turn a few of the perplexities,
framing the same dark questions, that Brotcotnaz himself had done. He
pulled himself together now and rose slowly.

'You will take something, Monsieur Kairor!' he said, habit operating,
with a thin unction.

'Why, yes, I will have a glass of cider,' I said. 'What will you have,
Nicholas?'

'Why, I will take the same, Monsieur Kairor,' he said. The break or give
at the knee as he walked was there as usual, but mechanical, I felt.
Brotcotnaz would revive, I hoped, after his drink. Julie was describing
something: she kept bending down to the floor, and making a sweeping
gesture with her free hand. Her guests made a chuckling sound in their
throats like 'hoity-toity.'

Brotcotnaz returned with the drinks.

'A la vtre, Monsieur Kairor!' He drank half his glass. Then he said:

'You have seen my wife's fingers?'

I admitted guardedly that I had noticed them.

'Higher up it is worse. The bone is broken. The doctor says that it is
possible she will lose her arm. Her leg is also in a bad state.' He
rolled his head sadly.

At last I looked at him with relief. He was regaining his old composure.
I saw at once that a very significant thing had happened for him, if she
lost her arm, and possibly her leg. He could scarcely proceed to the
destruction of the trunk only. It was not difficult at least to
appreciate the sort of problem that might present itself.

'Her erysipelas is bad this time, there is no use denying it,' I said.

A look of confusion came into his face. He hesitated a moment. His
ill-working brain had to be adjusted to a past time, when what now
possessed him was not known. He disposed himself in silence, then
started in an astonished voice, leaning over the table:

'It isn't the erysipelas, Monsieur Kairor! Haven't you heard?'

'No, I have heard nothing. In fact, I have only just arrived.'

Now I was going to hear some great news from this natural casuist: or
was I not? It was _not_ erysipelas.

Julie had caught the word 'erysipelas' whispered by her husband. She
leered round at me, standing on one leg, and tossed me a desperate
snigger of secretive triumph, very well under control and as hard as
nails.

Brotcotnaz exclaimed.

The baker had asked her, on driving up the day before, to put a stone
under the wheel of his cart, to prevent it from moving. She had bent
down to do so, pushing the stone into position, but suddenly the horse
backed: the wheel went over her hand. That was not all. At this she
slipped on the stony path, blood pouring from her fingers, and went
partly under the cart. Bystanders shouted, the horse started forward,
and the cart went over her arm and foot in the reverse direction.

He told me these facts with astonishment--the sensation felt by him when
he had heard them for the first time. He was glad to tell me. There was
a misunderstanding, or half misunderstanding, on the part of his wife
and all the others in this matter. He next told me how he had first
heard the news.

At the time this accident had occurred he had been at sea. On landing he
was met by several neighbours.

'Your wife is injured! She has been seriously injured!'

'What's that? My wife injured? My wife seriously injured!'--Indeed I
understood him! I began to feel as he did. 'Seriously' was the word
stressed navely by him. He repeated these words, and imitated his
expression. He reproduced for me the dismay and astonishment, and the
shade of overpowering suspicion, that his voice must originally have
registered.

It was now that I saw him encountering all the notions that had come
into my own mind a few minutes before, on first perceiving the injured
woman, the visiting neighbours and his dejected form thrown into the
shade by something.

'Your wife is seriously injured!' I stood there altogether upset--tout 
fait boulevers.

The familiar image of her battered form as seen on a _lendemain de
Pardon_ must have arisen in his mind. He is assailed with a sudden
incapacity to think of injuries in his wife's case except as caused by a
human hand. He is solicited by the reflection that he himself had not
been there. There was, in short, the effect, but not the cause. Whatever
his ultimate intention as regards Julie, he is a 'jaloux.' All his wild
jealousy surges up. A cause, a rival cause, is incarnated in his excited
brain, and goes in an overbearing manner to claim its effect. In a
second a man is born. He does not credit him, but he gets a foothold
just outside of reason. He is a rival!--another Brotcotnaz; all his
imagination is sickened by this super-Brotcotnaz, as a woman who had
been delivered of some hero, already of heroic dimensions, might
naturally find herself. A moment of great weakness and lassitude seizes
him. He remains powerless at the thought of the aggressive actions of
this hero. His mind succumbs to torpor, it refuses to contemplate this
figure.

It was at this moment that some one must have told him the actual cause
of the injuries. The vacuum of his mind, out of which all the machinery
of habit had been momentarily emptied, filled up again with its
accustomed furniture. But after this moment of intense void the
furniture did not quite resume its old positions, some of the pieces
never returned, there remained a blankness and desolate novelty in the
destiny of Brotcotnaz. That was still his state at present.

I then congratulated Julie upon her escape. Her eyes peered into mine
with derision. What part did I play in this? She appeared to think that
I too had been outwitted. I sauntered over to the counter and withdrew
the bottle of eau-de-vie from its hiding-place.

'Shall I bring it over to you?' I called to Brotcotnaz. I took it over.
Julie followed me for a moment with her mocking gaze.

'I will be the dbitant!' I said to Brotcotnaz.

I poured him out a stiff glass.

'You live too near the sea,' I told him.

'Needs must,' he said, 'when one is a fisherman.'

'Ahs!' I sighed, trying to recall the famous line of the armorican
song, that I was always meeting in the books that I had been reading.
It began with this whistling sigh of the renegade king, whose daughter
Ahs was.

'Why, yes,' Brotcotnaz sighed politely, supposing I had complimented the
lot of the fisherman in my exclamation, doing the devil's tattoo on the
table, as he crouched in front of me.

'Ahs, _brman_ Mary Morgan.' I had got it.

'I ask your pardon, Monsieur Kairor?'

'It is the lament of your legendary king for having been instrumental in
poisoning the sea. You have never studied the lore of your country?'

'A little,' he smiled.

The neighbours were leaving. We three would now be alone. I looked at my
watch. It was time to rejoin the cart that had brought me.

'A last drink, Madame Brotcotnaz!' I called.

She returned to the table and sat down, lowering herself to the chair,
and sticking out her bandaged foot. She took the drink I gave her, and
raised it almost with fire to her lips. After the removal of her arm,
and possibly a foot, I realized that she would be more difficult to get
on with than formerly. The bottle of eau-de-vie would remain no doubt in
full view, to hand, on the counter, and Brotcotnaz would be unable to
lay a finger on her: in all likelihood she meant that arm to come off.

I was not sorry for Nicholas; I regarded him as a changed man. Whatever
the upshot of the accident as regards the threatened amputations, the
disorder and emptiness that had declared itself in this mind would
remain.

'To your speedy recovery, Madame Brotcotnaz,' I said.

We drank to that, and Brotcotnaz came to the door. Julie remained alone
in the dbit.




INFERIOR RELIGIONS


PART I

To introduce my puppets, and the Wild Body, the generic puppet of all, I
must project a fanciful wandering figure to be the showman to whom the
antics and solemn gambols of these wild children are to be a source of
strange delight. In the first of these stories he makes his appearance.
The fascinating imbecility of the creaking men machines, that some
little restaurant or fishing-boat works, was the original subject of
these studies, though in fact the nautical set never materialized. The
boat's tackle and dirty little shell, or the hotel and its technique of
hospitality, keeping the limbs of the men and women involved in a
monotonous rhythm from morning till night, that was the occupational
background, placed in Brittany or in Spanish Galicia.

A man is made drunk with his boat or restaurant as he is with a
merry-go-round: only it is the staid, everyday drunkenness of the normal
real, not easy always to detect. We can all see the ascendance a
'carousal' has on men, driving them into a set narrow intoxication. The
wheel at Carisbrooke imposes a set of movements upon the donkey inside
it, in drawing water from the well, that it is easy to grasp. But in the
case of a hotel or fishing-boat, for instance, the complexity of the
rhythmic scheme is so great that it passes as open and untrammelled
life. This subtle and wider mechanism merges, for the spectator, in the
general variety of nature. Yet we have in most lives the spectacle of a
pattern as circumscribed and complete as a theorem of Euclid. So these
are essays in a new human mathematic. But they are, each of them, simple
shapes, little monuments of logic. I should like to compile a book of
forty of these propositions, one deriving from and depending on the
other. A few of the axioms for such a book are here laid down.

These intricately moving bobbins are all subject to a set of objects or
to one in particular. Brotcotnaz is fascinated by one object, for
instance; one at once another vitality. He bangs up against it wildly at
regular intervals, blackens it, contemplates it, moves round it and
dreams. He reverences it: it is his task to kill it. All such
fascination is religious. The damp napkins of the inn-keeper are the
altar-cloths of his rough illusion, as Julie's bruises are the markings
upon an idol; with the peasant, Mammon dominating the background.
Zoborov and Mademoiselle Pronnette struggle for a Pension de Famille,
unequally. Zoborov is the 'polish' cuckoo of a stupid and ill-managed
nest.

These studies of rather primitive people are studies in a savage worship
and attraction. The inn-keeper rolls between his tables ten million
times in a realistic rhythm that is as intense and superstitious as are
the figures of a war-dance. He worships his soup, his damp napkins, the
lump of procreative flesh probably associated with him in this task.
Brotcotnaz circles round Julie with gestures a million times repeated.
Zoborov camps against and encircles Mademoiselle Prronette and her
lover Carl. Bestre is the eternal watchdog, with an elaborate civilized
ritual. Similarly the Cornac is engaged in a death struggle with his
'Public.' All religion has the mechanism of the celestial bodies, has a
dance. When we wish to renew our idols, or break up the rhythm of our
navet, the effort postulates a respect which is the summit of
devoutness.


PART II

I would present these puppets, then, as carefully selected specimens of
religious fanaticism. With their attendant objects or fetishes they live
and have a regular food and vitality. They are not creations, but
puppets. You can be as exterior to them, and live their life as little,
as the showman grasping from beneath and working about a Polichinelle.
They are only shadows of energy, not living beings. Their mechanism is a
logical structure and they are nothing but that.

Boswell's Johnson, Mr. Veneering, Malvolio, Bouvard and Pcuchet, the
'commissaire' in _Crime and Punishment_, do not live; they are congealed
and frozen into logic, and an exuberant hysterical truth. They transcend
life and are complete cyphers, but they are monuments of dead
imperfection. Their only significance is their egoism. So the great
intuitive figures of creation live with the universal egoism of the
poet. This 'Realism' is satire. Satire is the great Heaven of Ideas,
where you meet the titans of red laughter; it is just below intuition,
and life charged with black illusion.


PART III

When we say 'types of humanity,' we mean violent individualities, and
nothing stereotyped. But Quixote, Falstaff, and Pecksniff attract, in
our memory, a vivid following. All difference is energy, and a category
of humanity a relatively small group, and not the myriads suggested by a
generalization.

A comic type is a failure of a considerable energy, an imitation and
standardizing of self, suggesting the existence of a uniform
humanity,--creating, that is, a little host as like as ninepins;
instead of one synthetic and various ego. It is the laziness that is the
habit-world or system of a successful personality. It is often part of
our own organism become a fetish. So Boswell's Johnson or Sir John
Falstaff are minute and rich religions.

That Johnson was a sort of god to his biographer we readily see. But
Falstaff as well is a sort of english god, like the rice-bellied gods of
laughter in China. They are illusions hugged and lived in; little dead
totems. Just as all gods are a repose for humanity, the big religions an
immense refuge and rest, so are these little grotesque fetishes. One
reason for this is that, for the spectator or participator, it is a
world within the world, full of order, even if violent.

All these are forms of static art, then. There is a great deal of divine
olympian sleep in english humour, and its delightful dreams. The most
gigantic spasm of laughter is sculptural, isolated, and essentially
simple.


PART IV

I will catalogue the attributes of Laughter.

   1. Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph.

   2. Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and
      smelling self-consciously.

   3. Laughter is the hark of delight of a gregarious animal at the
      proximity of its kind.

   4. Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid
      emotion.

   5. Laughter is the representative of tragedy, when tragedy is away.

   6. Laughter is the emotion of tragic delight.

   7. Laughter is the female of tragedy.

   8. Laughter is the strong elastic fish, caught in Styx, springing
      and flapping about until it dies.

   9. Laughter is the sudden handshake of mystic violence and the
      anarchist.

  10. Laughter is the mind sneezing.

  11. Laughter is the one obvious commotion that is not complex, or
      in expression dynamic.

  12. Laughter does not progress. It is primitive, hard and
      unchangeable.


PART V

The Wild Body, I have said, triumphs in its laughter. What is the Wild
Body?

The Wild Body, as understood here, is that small, primitive, literally
antediluvian vessel in which we set out on our adventures. Or regarded
as a brain, it is rather a winged magic horse, that transports us hither
and thither, sometimes rushing, as in the Chinese cosmogonies, up and
down the outer reaches of space. Laughter is the brain-body's snort of
exultation. It expresses its wild sensation of power and speed; it is
all that remains physical in the flash of thought, its friction: or it
may be a defiance flung at the hurrying fates.

The Wild Body is this supreme survival that is us, the stark apparatus
with its set of mysterious spasms; the most profound of which is
laughter.


PART VI

The chemistry of personality (subterranean in a sort of cemetery, whose
decompositions are our lives) puffs up in frigid balls, soapy Snowmen,
arctic carnival-masks, which we can photograph and fix.

Upwards from the surface of existence a lurid and dramatic scum oozes
and accumulates into the characters we see. The real and tenacious
poisons, and sharp forces of vitality, do not socially transpire. Within
five yards of another man's eyes we are on a little crater, which, if it
erupted, would split up as would a cocoa-tin of nitrogen. Some of these
bombs are ill-made, or some erratic in their timing. But they are all
potential little bombs. Capriciously, however, the froth-forms of these
darkly-contrived machines twist and puff in the air, in our legitimate
and liveried masquerade.

Were you the female of Bestre or Brotcotnaz and beneath the counterpane
with him, you would be just below the surface of life, in touch with a
tragic organism. The first indications of the proximity of the real soul
would be apparent. You would be for hours beside a filmy crocodile,
conscious of it like a bone in an X-ray, and for minutes in the midst of
a tragic wallowing. The soul lives in a cadaverous activity; its
dramatic corruption thumps us like a racing engine in the body of a car.
The finest humour is the great play-shapes blown up or given off by the
tragic corpse of life underneath the world of the camera. This futile,
grotesque, and sometimes pretty spawn, is what in this book is
snapshotted by the imagination.

Any master of humour is an essential artist; even Dickens is no
exception. For it is the character of uselessness and impersonality
which is found in laughter (the anarchist emotion concerned in the comic
habit of mind) that makes a man an 'artist.' So when he begins living on
his laughter, even in spite of himself a man becomes an artist. Laughter
is that arch complexity that is really as simple as bread.


PART VII

In this objective play-world, corresponding to our social consciousness,
as opposed to our solitude, no final issue is decided. You may blow away
a man-of-bubbles with a burgundian gust of laughter, but that is not a
personality, it is an apparition of no importance. But so much
correspondence it has with its original that, if the cadaveric travail
beneath is vigorous and bitter, the dummy or mask will be of a more
original grotesqueness. The opposing armies in the early days in
Flanders stuck up dummy-men on poles for their enemies to pot at, in a
spirit of ferocious banter. It is only a shell of that description that
is engaged in the sphere of laughter. In our rather drab revel there is
a certain category of spirit that is not quite inanimate and yet not
very funny. It consists of those who take, at the Clarkson's situated at
the opening of their lives, some conventional Pierrot costume. This is
intended to assure them a minimum of strain, of course, and so is a
capitulation. In order to evade life we must have recourse to those
uniforms, but such a choice leaves nothing but the white and ethereal
abstraction of the shadow of laughter.

So the King of Play is not a phantom corresponding to the sovereign
farce beneath the surface. The latter must always be reckoned on: it is
the Skeleton at the Feast, potentially, with us. That soul or dominant
corruption is so real that he cannot rise up and take part in man's
festival as a Falstaff of unwieldy spume. If he comes at all it must be
as he is, the skeleton or bogey of veritable life, stuck over with
corruptions and vices. As such he could rely on a certain succs
d'estime: nothing more.


PART VIII

A scornful optimism, with its confident onslaughts on our snobbism, will
not make material existence a peer for our energy. The gladiator is not
a perpetual monument of triumphant health: Napoleon was harried with
Elbas: moments of vision are blurred rapidly, and the poet sinks into
the rhetoric of the will.

But life is invisible, and perfection is not in the waves or houses that
the poet sees. To rationalize that appearance is not possible. Beauty is
an icy douche of ease and happiness at something _suggesting_ perfect
conditions for an organism: it remains suggestion. A stormy landscape,
and a pigment consisting of a lake of hard, yet florid waves; delight in
each brilliant scoop or ragged burst, was John Constable's beauty.
Leonardo's consisted in a red rain on the shadowed side of heads, and
heads of massive female aesthetes. Uccello accumulated pale parallels,
and delighted in cold architecture of distinct colour. Korin found in
the symmetrical gushing of water, in waves like huge vegetable insects,
traced and worked faintly, on a golden pte, his business. Czanne liked
cumbrous, democratic slabs of life, slightly leaning, transfixed in
vegetable intensity.

Beauty is an immense predilection, a perfect conviction of the
desirability of a certain thing, whatever that thing may be. It is a
universe for one organism. To a man with long and consumptive fingers, a
sturdy hand may be heaven. We can aim at no universality of form, for
what we see is not the reality. Henri Fabre was in every way a superior
being to a Salon artist, and he knew of elegant grubs which he would
prefer to the Salon's painter's nymphs.--It is quite obvious though, to
fulfil the conditions of successful art, that we should live in
relatively small communities.




THE MEANING OF THE WILD BODY

  'From man, who is acknowledged to be intelligent, non-intelligent
  things such as hair and nails originate, and . . . on the other
  hand, from avowedly non-intelligent matter (such as cow-dung),
  scorpions and similar animals are produced. But . . . the real
  cause of the non-intelligent hair and nails is the human body,
  which is itself non-intelligent, and the non-intelligent dung. Even
  there there remains a difference . . . in so far as non-intelligent
  matter (the body) is the abode of an intelligent principle (the
  scorpion's soul) while other unintelligent matter (the dung) is
  not.'
                                         _Vednta-Stras._
                                      _II Adhyya. I Pda_, 6.


1. THE MEANING OF THE WILD BODY

First, to assume the dichotomy of mind and body is necessary here,
without arguing it; for it is upon that essential separation that the
theory of laughter here proposed is based. The essential us, that is the
laughter, is as distinct from the Wild Body as in the Upanisadic account
of the souls returned from the paradise of the Moon, which, entering
into plants, are yet distinct from them. Or to take the symbolic vedic
figure of the two birds, the one watching and passive, the other
enjoying its activity, we similarly have to postulate _two_ creatures,
one that never enters into life, but that travels about in a vessel to
whose destiny it is momentarily attached. That is, of course, the
laughing observer, and the other is the Wild Body.

To begin to understand the totality of _the absurd_, at all, you have to
assume much more than belongs to a social differentiation. There is
nothing that is animal (and we as bodies are animals) that is not
absurd. This sense of the absurdity, or, if you like, the madness of our
life, is at the root of every true philosophy. William James delivers
himself on this subject as follows:--

   'One need only shut oneself in a closet and begin to think of the
   fact of one's being there, of one's queer bodily shape in the
   darkness (a thing to make children scream at, as Stevenson says),
   of one's fantastic character and all, to have the wonder steal over
   the detail as much as over the general fact of being, and to see
   that it is only familiarity that blunts it. Not only that
   _anything_ should be, but that _this_ very thing should be, is
   mysterious. Philosophy stares, but brings no reasoned solution, for
   from nothing to being there is no logical bridge.'

It is the chasm lying between non-being, over which it is impossible for
logic to throw any bridge, that, in certain forms of laughter, we leap.
We land plumb in the centre of Nothing. It is easy for us to see, if we
are french, that the German is 'absurd,' or if german, that the French
is 'ludicrous,' for we are _outside_ in that case. But it was
Schopenhauer (whom James quotes so aptly in front of the above passage),
who also said: 'He who is proud of being "a German," "a Frenchman," "a
Jew," can have very little else to be proud of.' (In this connection it
may be recalled that his father named him 'Arthur,' because 'Arthur' was
the same in all languages. Its possession would not attach him to any
country.) So, again, if we have been at Oxford or Cambridge, it is easy
to appreciate, from the standpoint acquired at a great university, the
absurdity of many manners not purified or intellectualized by such a
training. What it is far more difficult to appreciate, with any
constancy, is that, whatever his relative social advantages or
particular national virtues may be, every man is profoundly open to the
same criticism or ridicule from any opponent who is only different
enough. Again, it is comparatively easy to see that another man, as an
animal, is absurd; but it is far more difficult to observe oneself in
that hard and exquisite light. But no man has ever continued to live who
has observed himself in that manner for longer than a flash. Such
consciousness must be of the nature of a thunderbolt. Laughter is only
summer-lightning. But it occasionally takes on the dangerous form of
absolute revelation.

This fundamental self-observation, then, can never on the whole be
absolute. We are not constructed to be _absolute observers_. Where it
does not exist at all, men sink to the level of insects. That does not
matter: the 'lord of the past and the future, he who is the same today
and tomorrow'--that 'person of the size of a thumb that stands in the
middle of the Self'--departs. So the 'Self' ceases, necessarily. The
conditions of an insect communism are achieved. There would then no
longer be any occasion, once that was completely established, to argue
for or against such a dichotomy as we have assumed, for then it could no
longer exist.


2. THE ROOT OF THE COMIC

The root of the Comic is to be sought in the sensations resulting from
the observations of a _thing_ behaving like a person. But from that
point of view all men are necessarily comic: for they are all _things_,
or physical bodies, behaving as _persons_. It is only when you come to

deny that they are 'persons,' or that there is any 'mind' or 'person'
there at all, that the world of appearance is accepted as quite natural,
and not at all ridiculous. Then, with a denial of 'the person,' life
becomes immediately both 'real' and very serious.

To bring vividly to our mind what we mean by 'absurd,' let us turn to
the plant, and enquire how the plant could be absurd. Suppose you came
upon an orchid or a cabbage reading Flaubert's _Salammb_, or Plutarch's
_Moralia_, you would be very much surprised. But if you found a man or a
woman reading it, you would _not_ be surprised.

Now in one sense you ought to be just as much surprised at finding a man
occupied in this way as if you had found an orchid or a cabbage, or a
tomcat, to include the animal world. There is the same physical anomaly.
It is just as absurd externally, that is what I mean.--The deepest root
of the Comic is to be sought in this anomaly.

The movement or intelligent behaviour of matter, any autonomous movement
of matter, is essentially comic. That is what we mean by comic or
ludicrous. And we all, as human beings, answer to this description. We
are all autonomously and intelligently moving matter. The reason we do
not laugh when we observe a man reading a newspaper or trimming a lamp,
or smoking a pipe, is because we suppose he 'has a mind,' as we call it,
because we are accustomed to this strange sight, and because we do it
ourselves. But because when you see a man walking down the street you
know why he is doing that (for instance, because he is on his way to
lunch, just as the stone rolling down the hillside, you say, is
responding to the law of gravitation), that does not make him less
ridiculous. But there is nothing essentially ridiculous about the
stone. The man is ridiculous fundamentally, he is ridiculous _because he
is a man_, instead of a thing.

If you saw (to give another example of intelligence or movement in the
'dead') a sack of potatoes suddenly get up and trundle off down the
street (unless you were at once so sceptical as to think that it was
some one who had got inside the sack), you would laugh. A couple of
trees suddenly tearing themselves free from their roots, and beginning
to waltz: a 'cello softly rubbing itself against a kettle-drum: a
lamp-post unexpectedly lighting up of its own accord, and then
immediately hopping away down to the next lamp-post, which it proceeded
to attack: all these things would appear very 'ridiculous,' although
your alarm, instead of whetting your humour, might overcome it. These
are instances of miraculous absurdities, they do not happen; I have only
enumerated them, to enlighten us as regards the things that do happen.

The other day in the underground, as the train was moving out of the
station, I and those around me saw a fat but active man run along, and
deftly project himself between the sliding doors, which he pushed to
behind him. Then he stood leaning against them, as the carriage was
full. There was nothing especially funny about his face or general
appearance. Yet his running, neat, deliberate, but clumsy embarkation,
_combined with the coolness of his eye_, had a ludicrous effect, to
which several of us responded. His _eye_ I decided was the key to the
absurdity of the effect. It was its detachment that was responsible for
this. It seemed to say, as he propelled his sack of potatoes--that is
himself--along the platform, and as he successfully landed the sack in
the carriage:--'I've not much "power," I may just manage it:--yes,
_just_!' Then in response to our gazing eyes, 'Yes, that's me! That was
not so bad, was it? When you run a line of potatoes like ME, you get the
knack of them: but they take a bit of moving.'

It was the detachment, in any case, that gave the episode a comic
quality, that his otherwise very usual appearance would not have
possessed. I have sometimes seen the same look of whimsical detachment
on the face of a taxi-driver when he has taken me somewhere, in a very
slow and ineffective conveyance. _His taxi for him stood for his body._
He was quite aware of its shortcomings, but did not associate himself
with them. He knew quite well what a taxi ought to be. He did not
identify himself with his machine.

Many cases of the comic are caused by the reverse of this--by the
_unawareness_ of the object of our mirth: though awareness (as in the
case of comic actors) is no hindrance to our enjoyment of the ludicrous.
But the case described above, of the man catching the train,
illustrates my point as to the root of the sensation of the comic. It is
because the man's body was not him.

These few notes, coming at the end of my stories, may help to make the
angle from which they are written a little clearer, in giving a general
rough definition of what 'Comic' means for their author.




SIGISMUND


Sigismund's bulldog was called Pym. He believed implicitly in his
pedigree. And every one understood that the names of famous dogs to be
found on Pym's family tree constituted a genealogical crop which did
great credit to him and his master. This lifted Pym for Sigismund into
the favoured world of race. He staggered and snorted everywhere in the
company of Sigismund, with a look that implied his intention to make the
most of being a bulldog, and a contemptuous curl of his chop for the
world in which that appeared to signify so much.

Now Pym was really rather peak-headed. Far from being 'well broken up,'
his head was almost stopless. His nostrils were perpendicular, the lay
back of the head unorthodox: he would have been unable to hold anything
for more than twenty seconds, as his nose would have flattened against
it as well as his muzzle, his breathing automatically corked up by his
prey. His lips were pendent, but his flews were not: his tusks were near
together, and like eyes too closely set, gave an air of meanness. The
jaws as well were level: in short he was both 'downfaced' and 'froggy'
to an unheard-of degree. As to his ears, sometimes he had the appearance
of being button-eared, sometimes tulip-eared: he was defective in
dewlap, his brisket was shallow, he had a pendulous belly and a thick
waist.

As to the back, far from being a good 'cut-up,' he had a very bad
'cut-up' indeed. He had _no_ 'cut-up.' He was 'swamp-backed' and
'ring-tailed.' He also possessed a disgusting power of lifting his tail
up and waggling it about above the level of his disgraceful stern,
anomalously high up on which it was placed. His pasterns were too long,
his toes seemed glued together: his stifles were wedge-shaped, and
turned in towards the body. His coat was wiry, of the most questionable
black and tan.

He was certainly the ugliest, wickedest, most objectionable bulldog that
ever trod the soil of Britain. In the street he conducted himself like
the most scurvy hoodlum ever issued from a nameless kennel. But he was a
_bulldog_. His forebears had done romantic things. They had fixed their
teeth in the noses of bulls. Sigismund was very proud of him. He
insisted that the blood of Rosa flowed in his veins. All Sigismund's
friends thumped and fingered him, saying what a splendid dog he was. To
see Sigismund going down the road with Pym, you would say, from the
dashing shamble of his gait, that he was bound for the Old Conduit
Fields, or the Westminster Pit.

This partnership continued very uneventfully for several years, to
Sigismund's perfect satisfaction. Then a heavy cantrip, of the most
feudal ingredients, was cast upon Sigismund. He became deeply enamoured
of a deep-chested lady. He pursued her tirelessly with his rather trite
addresses. She had the slightest stagger, reminiscent of Pym. She was
massive and mute. And when Sigismund mechanically slapped her on the
back one day, she had a hollow reverberation such as Pym's swollen body
would emit. Her eyes flickered ever so little. Sigismund the next moment
was overcome with confusion at what he had done: especially as her
pedigree was like Pym's, and he had the deepest admiration for race. A
minute or two later she coughed. And he could not for the life of him
decide whether the cough was admonitory--possibly the death-knell of his
suit--or whether it was the result of his premature caress.

The next day, grasping the stems of a bushel of new flowers inside a
bladder of pink paper, he called. A note accompanied them:

   Dear Miss Libyon-Bosselwood,--There are three flowers in this
   bouquet which express, by their contrite odour, the sentiments
   of dismay which I experience in remembering the hapless slap
   which I delivered upon your gorgeous back yesterday afternoon.
   Can you ever forgive me for this good-for-nothing action?--Your
   despondent admirer.
                                                    Sigismund.

But when they next met she did not refer to the note. As she rose to her
thunderous stature to go over to the vase where the bushel of flowers he
had brought was standing, and turned on him her enormous and outraged
back, Sigismund started. For there, through a diaphanous nglig, he saw
a blood-red hand upon her skin. His hand! And in a moment he realized
that she had painted it to betray her sentiments, which otherwise would
have remained, perhaps for ever, hidden. So he sprang up and grasped her
hand, saying:

'Deborah!'

She fell into his arms to signify that she would willingly become his
bride. In a precarious crouch he propped her for a moment, then they
both subsided on to the floor, she with her eyes closed, rendered doubly
heavy by all the emotion with which she was charged. Pym, true to type,
'the bulldog' at once, noticing this contretemps, and imagining that his
master was being maltreated by this person whom he had disliked from the
first, flew to the rescue. He fixed his teeth in her eighteenth-century
bottom. She was removed, bleeding, in a titanic faint. Sigismund fled
once more in dismay.

The next day he called unaccompanied by Pym. He was admitted to
Deborah's chamber. She lay on her stomach. Her swollen bottom rose in
the middle of the bed. But a flat disc of face lay sideways on the
pillow, a reproachful eye slumbering where her ear would usually be.

He flung himself down on the elastic nap of the carpet and rolled about
in an ecstasy of dismay. She just lisped hoarsely: 'Sigismund!' and all
was well between them.

But she stipulated that Pym should be eliminated from their nuptial
arrangements. So he sold Pym and wedded Deborah.

                  *       *       *       *       *

On returning from the church--husband, at length, of the Honourable
Deborah Libyon-Bosselwood--Sigismund's first action was to rub a little
sandal-wood oil into both her palms. As she had stood beside him at the
altar, her heavy hand in his, he had wondered what lay concealed in this
prize-packet he was grasping. As the gold ring ploughed into the tawny
fat of her finger, descending with difficulty toward the Mount of the
Sun, he asked himself if this painful adjustment contained an augury.
Appropriately for the golden mount, however, the full-bellied ring, of
very unusual circumference, settled down on this characteristic
Bosselwood paw as though determined to preside favourably over that
portion of the hand.

Having oiled her palms, much to her surprise, he flew with Deborah to a
steaming basin, drew out a sheet of dental wax, and planted her hand
firmly on it. But, alas, the Libyon hairiness had invaded even the
usually bald area of the inside of the hand. And when Sigismund tried to
pull her hand off the wax, Deborah screamed. She had not at all
understood or relished his proceedings up to this point. And now that,
adhering by these few superfluous hairs to the inadequately heated wax,
she felt convinced of the malevolence of his designs, she gave him such
a harsh buffet with her free hand that he fell at full length at her
feet, a sound shaken out of him that was half surprise and half apology.
He soon recovered, rushed to fetch a pair of scissors, and snipped her
hand free of the wax cast. His bride scowled at him, but the next moment
bit his ear and attempted to nestle, to show that he was forgiven.

'Deborah! Will you ever _really_ forgive me?' He gasped in despair,
covering her injured hand with kisses and a little blood, the result of
her impulsive blow. The great Bosselwood motto 'Never Forgive' made him
shake in every limb as he thought of it. How _uncanny_ to be united to
such a formidable offshoot of such an implacable race!

'Say you _can_ forgive!'

But she only murmured in sulphurous Latin the words 'Nunquam ignoscete.'

For she read his heart and remembered the motto (with some difficulty).
She always read his heart, but could not always remember the heraldic
and other data required properly to prostrate him. On these occasions,
she would confine herself to smiling enigmatically. This redoubled his
terror. She in due course observed this, too. After that she did nothing
but grin at him the whole time.

But now came the moment that must be considered as the virtual
consummation of Sigismund's vows. The ordinary brutal proclivities of
man were absent in the case of Sigismund. The monstrous charms of the
by-now lisping and blushing Deborah he was not entirely unaffected by:
but the innermost crypt of this cathedral of a body Sigismund sought in
a quite public place. The imminence of her brown breasts was hidden to
him. They were almost as remote as the furniture of the Milky Way.
Enormous mounts, he saw them as (but of less significance than) those
diminutive ones of Saturn or the Sun at the base of her fingers. The
real secrets of this highly-pedigreed body lay at the extremities of her
limbs. The Mount of Venus, for him, was to be sought on the base of the
thumb, and nowhere else. The certain interest he felt for her person,
heavy with the very substance of Race, that made it like a palpitating
relic, was due really to the element of reference that lay in every form
of which it was composed, to the clear indications of destiny that
enlivened to such an incredible degree the leathery cutis of her palm.
Her jawbone, the jutting of her thighs, the abstract tracts of her
heavily-embossed back, meant so many mitigations or confirmations of the
Via Lasciva or her very 'open' line of head. Surely the venustal pulp of
her thumb, the shape of a leg of mutton, had a more erotic significance
than any vulgarer desiderata of the bust or belly? The desmoid bed of
her great lines of Race, each 'island' a poem in itself, adapted for the
intellectual picnicking he preferred, was a more suitable area for the
discreet appearance of such sex-aims as those of Sigismund.

So, still bleeding slightly from the feudal buffet he had lately
encountered, he seized her hand, and slowly forced it round with the air
of a brutal ravisher, until it lay palm uppermost. The pudeur and
mystery of these primitive tracings sent a thrill down his spine. It had
been almost a point of honour with him not to ravish the secrets of her
hand until now. 'Silent upon a peak in Darien' was nothing to the awe
and enthusiasm with which he peeped over the ridge of her palm as it
gradually revolved.

But now occurred one of the most substantial shocks of Sigismund's
career. Deborah's palm was almost _without_ lines of any sort. Where he
had expected to find every foray of a feudal past marked in some way or
another, every intrigue with its zig-zag, every romantic crime owning
its little line, there was nothing but a dumbfounding, dead, distressing
_blank_. Sigismund was staggered. The Palmer Arch, it is true, had its
accompanying furrow, rather yellow (from which he could trace the action
of Deborah's bile) but clear. The Mars line reinforced it. Great health:
pints of blood: larders full of ox-like resistance to disease. It was
the health sheet of a bullock, not the flamboyant history of a lady
descended from armoured pirates.

All the mounts swelled up in a humdrum way. But from the Mount of the
Sun to the first bracelet, and from the Mount of Venus to Mars Mental,
it was, O alas, for his purposes, an empty hand! Her life had never been
disturbed by the slightest emotional spasm: the spasms of her ancestors
were seemingly obliterated from the recording skin. Nature had made an
enigma of her hide! The life-line flowed on and on. He followed it
broodingly to the wrist. It actually seemed to continue up the arm.
Sigismund turned in dismay from this complacent bulletin of unchequered
health.

He set to work, however, on the sparse indications that his noble bride
was able to provide. He made the little insular convolutions of the line
of heart spell simply 'Sigismund.' Kisses followed: coquettish and
minute kisses attempted to land on each island in turn. Deborah glared
in surly amusement.

A sinister stump where the head-line should have been disturbed him. It
had a frayed ending. (More uneasiness.) Although in quantity this hand
possessed few marks, those that were there were calculated to electrify
any cheiromancer. It was a penny-shocker of a hand.

But most disquieting of all was a peculiar little island that mated a
similar offensive little irregularity in his own hand. He had never seen
it on the hand of any other being. And it was backed up by a faint but
very horrible Star. This star furthermore was situated in the midst of
Jupiter. But, worse still, a cross on another part of the hand
completely unnerved him. He paced twice from one end of the room to the
other. He was so abstracted that it was with a new anxiety and amazement
that he found in a minute or two, that Deborah had disappeared.

He rushed all over the house. At last he came upon her in the
dining-room, finishing a stiff whisky-and-soda. A rather cross squint
was levelled at him across the whisky. Five minutes later she again
vanished. Fresh alarmed pursuit. This time he discovered her in their
bedroom, as naked as your hand (though he would never have used this
expression, having an intense delicacy about everything relating to the
hand), in bed, and trumpeting in a loud, dogmatic, and indecent way. The
palliasse purred, and the bed creaked beneath her baronial weight. The
eiderdown rose and fell with a servile gentleness. Her face was calm and
forbidding. It was the dreamless, terrible sleep of the Hand he had just
fled from. Yes. It was the Hand sleeping! He was united for better or
for worse with this empty, sinisterly-starred, well-fed, snoring Hand.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Their honeymoon was uneventful. Sigismund went about with an ephemeris
of the year of Deborah's birth, with Tables of Eclipses. He had the
moon's radical elongation, and the twenty-two synods that represented
his wife's life up to date. The mundane ingress of planets, their less
effectual zodiacal ingress, had all been considered in their bearing on
the destinies of Deborah and himself. But as on her hand, so in the
heavens, the planets and Houses appeared to behave in a peculiarly
non-committal, dull and vacant manner. The Spheres appeared to have
slowed down their dance, and got in to some sort of clodhopping rustic
meander, to celebrate the arrival of his wife upon the earth. But still
the sinister star placed where her forefinger plunged into the palm
perplexed him.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Back in London, he took her about as he had formerly taken Pym. He
explained her pedigree. He pointed to her nose, which was heavy and
flat, and told his friends that underneath was the pure Roman curve of
the Bosselwoods. Also he detected a blue glint in her eye. That was the
blue of the Viking! The Bosselwoods, it was gathered, were huge,
snake-headed, bull-horned, armour-plated norse buccaneers. She would
give him a terrifying leer when this transpired. It was her only
histrionic effort. Her feet, on the other hand, were purely Libyon. If
his friend could only see their jolly little well-oiled knuckles! A
world of race slumbered in her footwear.

'Race is so poetic, don't you agree?' he would say.

All agreed with Sigismund that race was the most romantic thing
imaginable, and that it lent a new interest not only to the human
skeleton, but also to the smallest piece of fat or gristle. There were
three friends especially of Sigismund's who felt things very much as he
did. The four of them would sit around Deborah and gaze at her as
connoisseurs in race. They all agreed that they had never met with quite
so much race in anybody--so much of it, so exquisitely proportioned, or
carried about with so much modesty.

'Deborah is amazing!' Sigismund would lisp. 'Her blood is the bluest in
the land. But it might be green, she is so natural.'

'She is natural!' Fireacres said, with the emphasis proper to his years.

'Her language is sometimes--he! he--as blue, I promise you, as her
blood!'

They all shuffled and a break of merriment went on cannoning for about a
minute. It ended in a sharp crack crack from Gribble-Smith. She scowled
at them with a look of heavy mischief. She felt like a red, or perhaps
blue, ball, among several very restless white ones. She liked laughter
about as little as a Blackfoot brave of romantic fiction. Her tongue
appeared to be dallying, for a moment, with the most mediaeval
malediction. They hushed themselves rapidly and looked frightened.

'You should have heard her today. A taxi-driver--he! he!--you should
have seen the fellow stare! He wilted. He seemed to forget that he had
ever known how to say "Dash it!"'

Deborah plucked at her chin, and spat out the seeds of her last plate of
jam.

'How extremes meet!' said a newcomer.

A great insolence was noticeable in this man's carriage. He swung
himself about like a famous espada. But when he tossed his locks off his
brow, you saw that his bull-ring must be an intellectual one, where he
would no doubt dispose of the most savage ideas. He was followed about
by the eyes of the little group. Sigismund whispered to Deborah, 'He's a
Mars Mental man.' An uninitiated person would probably, after being
plunged for a little in this atmosphere, have thought of the Mars Mental
man as possessed of phenomenally large muscular mental mounts, whatever
they might be. The slender elevation on the side of his palm opposite to
the thumb affected these simple people in the same way as athletic
potentialities affect the schoolboy. In fingering his hand, as they
sometimes did, it was with visible awe, and an eye fixed on the negative
mount in question, as though they expected it to develop an eruption.

Deborah scratched her off leg. All were ravished. The Bosselwoods had no
doubt always been great Scratchers: 'mighty scratchers before the Lord'
Sigismund's mind proceeded.

Deborah bent her intelligence painfully for a moment on the riddle of
this company. Could a stranger have glanced into her mind, the scene
would have struck him as at once arid and comic. Sigismund's friends
would have appeared as a group of monoliths in a frigid moonlight, or
clowns tumbling in sacks in an empty and dark circus. Her mind would be
seen to construct only rudimentary and quasi-human shapes: but details
of a photographic precision arbitrarily occurring: bits of faces, shoes,
moustaches and arms, large hands, palm outward, scarred with red lines
of life, head and heart, all upside down. Stamped on one of these
quasi-human shapes the stranger would have read 'Socialist' in red block
letters. This was:

'Tom Fireacres. Awfully good family you know. Fire-acres. Pronounced
Furrakers. Jolly old bird. He is a queer fellow. A Socialist----' He
would shake his head of rather long political hair from time to time
over his young friend's aristocratic excess. But there was a light of
kindly mansuetude that never left his eye.

The next of these dismal shapes would be a suit of clothes, not unlike
Deborah's brother's: but a palpably insignificant social thing,
something inside it, like its spirit jerking about, and very afraid of
her. The form its fear seemed to take was that of an incessant barking,
just like a dog, with the same misunderstanding of human nature. For it
seemed to bark because it thought she liked it. This was:--

'Reddie Gribble-Smith. Been in the Army--Senior Captain. Awful nice
feller.' This particular clich propelled itself through life by means
of a sort of Army-laugh.

One of these shapes was rather disreputable. To our hypothetic observer
it would have looked like abstract Woman, Sex and its proper Tongue, in
a Rowlandson print. The reason for this would be that when she looked at
Jones--'Jones: Geoffrey Jones. Charming fellow. He was up at Oxford with
me. Very psychic. He's got a lot in him'--she always saw in his place a
woman on whose toe she had once stepped in Sloane Square. Abuse had
followed. The voice had been like an advertisement. Sounds came up from
its sex machinery that were at once rclame and aggression. She felt she
had trodden on the machinery of sex, and it had shouted in some
customary 'walk-up!' voice, 'Clumsy cat! Hulking bitch! Sauce!' Whatever
Jones said reached her, through this medium, as abuse. She did nothing:
but she threw knives at him sometimes with her eyes.

Sigismund appeared to know dense masses of such men. As far as she could
she avoided encounters. But there seemed no escape. So they all lived
together in a sort of middle-class dream. Therein she played some rle
of onerous enchantment, on account of her beautiful extraction. They
smoked bad tobacco, used funny words, their discourse was of their
destiny, that none of them could have any but the slenderest reasons for
wishing to examine. They very often appeared angry, and habitually used
a chevaleresque jargon: ill-bred, under-bred, well-bred; fellow, cad,
boor, churl, gentleman; good form, bad form, were words that came out of
them on hot little breaths of disdain, reprobation, or respect. Had she
heard some absent figure referred to as a 'swineherd,' a 'varlet,' or
'villein,' she would not have felt surprised in any way. It would have
seemed quite natural. You would have to go to Cervantes and his
self-invested knight for anything resembling the infatuation of
Sigismund and his usual companions.

In more bilious moments Deborah framed the difficult question in the
stately mill of her mind, taking a week to grind out one such statement:
_What is all this game about, and what are these people that play it?_
Deborah could not decide. She abandoned these questions as they dropped,
one by one.

Her noble attributes assumed in her mind fantastic proportions.
Everything about herself, her family, her name, became unreal. One day
she pinched Lord Victor Libyon-Bosselwood to see if he was a figment of
Sigismund's brain or a reality. She caused him, by this unprovoked
action, so much pain and surprise, that he shouted loudly. Sigismund was
in ecstasy. Obviously the war-cry of the Bosselwoods, the old piratic
yell! But Sigismund could not leave it at that. Possibly Lord Victor
was the last Bosselwood who would ever utter that particular sound. He
hesitated for some time. Then one day when Lord Victor was deeply
unconscious of his peril, Sigismund led him up to the bell-shaped funnel
of a gramophone recorder. He approached it jauntily, flower in
buttonhole, haw-hawing as he went. As his face was a few inches off the
recording mouth, Sigismund ran a large pin into his eminent relative's
leg. The mask _ la_ Spy vanished in a flash. And sure enough from a
past, but a past much further back than that of the successful pirate,
another man darted like a djinn into Lord Victor's body. This wraith
contracted the rather flaccid skin of Lord Victor's face, distended its
nostrils, stuck a demoniacal glint in each of Lord Victor's eyes, and
finally curled the skin quickly back from his teeth, and opened his
mouth to its fullest extent. Not the romantic battle-cry of the operatic
pirate, but a hyena-like yelp, smote the expectant ears of the
Boswell-like figure behind him: and the machine had recorded it for all
time. But the next moment first the machine and then Sigismund crashed
to the floor, as it took about thirty seconds for the pain to ebb and
the djinn to take his departure. This period was spent by the ferocious
nobleman in kicking the gramophone-box about the floor, then turning
upon the ingenious Sigismund, whom he kicked viciously about the head
and body. Even when no longer possessed of this dark spirit that had
entered along with Sigismund's pin, he still continued to address our
hero in a disparaging way.

'Necromancing nincompoop: what does that signify--to run a pin into a
man's leg, and then stand grinning at him like a Cheshire cat?
Half-witted, flat-faced, palm-tickling imbecile, you will get yourself
locked up if you go round sticking pins into people's legs, and telling
them to beware of gravel, that they have spatulate hands, and will be
robbed by blonde ladies!'

The doors of Lord Victor's dwelling were in future guarded against
Sigismund. He found it difficult to satisfy Deborah when she heard of
his doings.

                  *       *       *       *       *

They spent a month at Bosselwood Chase.

The first book that Sigismund picked up in the library enthralled him.
It seemed to betray such an intelligent interest in Race. He read, for
instance, aloud to Deborah the following passage:

  These luckily-born people have a delicious curve of the neck, not
  found in other kinds of men, produced by their habit of always
  gazing _back_ to the spot from which they started. Indeed they are
  trained to fix their eyes on the Past. It is untrue, even, to say
  that they are unprogressive: for they desire to progress backwards
  more acutely than people mostly desire to progress forwards. And
  when you say that they hold effort in abhorrence, more inclined to
  take things easily, that also is not true: for it requires just as
  much effort to go in one direction as in the other.

  The thoroughfares of life are sprinkled with these backward gazing
  heads, and bodies like twisted tendrils. It is the curve of grace,
  and challenges nobly the uncouth uprightness of efficiency.

  That class of men that in recent years coined the word 'Futurist'
  to describe their kind, tried to look forward, instead. This is
  absurd. Firstly, it is not practical: and, secondly, it is not
  beautiful. This heresy met with bitter opposition, curiously enough,
  from those possessing the tendril-sweep. Unnecessary bitterness!
  For there are so many more people looking _back_, than there are
  looking forward, and in any case there is something so vulgar in
  looking in front of you, the way your head grows, that of course
  they never had much success. Here and there they have caused a little
  trouble. But the people have such right feelings _fundamentally_ on
  these subjects. They realize how very uncomfortable it must be to
  hold yourself straight up like a poker. Through so many ages they
  have developed the habit of not looking where they are going. So it
  is all right. It is only those whom the attitude of grace has
  rendered a little feeble who are at all concerned at the antics of
  the devotee of this other method of progressing.

  The training of these fortunate people--ancient houses, receding
  lines of pictures, trophies, books, careful crystallization of
  memories and forms, quiet parks, large and massive dwellings--all
  is calculated to make life grow backward instead of forward,
  naturally, from birth. This is just as pleasant, and in some ways
  easier. The dead are much nicer companions, because they have
  learnt not to expect too much of existence, and have a lot of nice
  habits that only demise makes possible. Far less cunning, only to
  take one instance, is required to be dead than to live. They
  respect no one, again, for they know, what is universally
  recognized, that no one is truly great and good until he is dead:
  and about the dead, of course, they have no illusions. In spite of
  this they are not arrogant, as you might expect.

'I think that is divinely well put, don't you agree, darling?' asked
Sigismund closing the book. Deborah looked straight at him with genuine
hatred: with the look of a dog offered food about which he feels there
is some catch.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Some months later, settled in the midst of a very great establishment,
Sigismund's fancy found a new avenue of satisfaction. He resolved to
make a collection of pictures. His newly-awakened sensibility where
pictures were concerned was the servant of his ruling passion, and
admirably single-minded. His collection must be such as a nobleman would
wish to possess. And again in this fresh activity his instinct was
wonderfully right.

But Deborah grew blacker day by day. The dumb animal from the sacred
Past felt by now that there was something exceedingly queer about her
husband. The fabulous sums of money that Sigismund got through in the
prosecution of his new fad awoke at last her predatory instincts. Solid
bullion and bank balances was what she had wedded: not a crowd of
fantastic and rather disturbing scenes. She secretly consulted with Lord
Victor.

However, Sigismund proceeded to fill the house with pictures,
engravings, drawings and pieces of sculpture. They all had some bearing
on the Past. Many were historical pieces. They showed you Henry VIII.,
the king of the playing card, divorcing Catherine. He appeared, in the
picture, to be trying to blow her away. They disclosed the barons after
their celebrated operation at Runnymede, thundering off with the
Charter: or William the Conqueror tripping up as he landed. There were
pictures celebrating Harry Page's doings, 'Arripay': episodes on the
Spanish main. There was an early lord earning his book-rights with an
excellent ferocity: and a picture of a lonely geneat on his way to the
manor with his lenten tribute of one lamb.

A rather special line depicted a runaway labourer being branded upon the
forehead with a hot iron, at the time of the Labour Statutes of the
fourteenth century: and sailors being bastinadoed after unusually
violent mutinies. Stock and thumbscrew scenes. There was a picture of a
Kentish churchyard, John Ball preaching to a rough crowd. As Sigismund
gazed at this terrible picture, he experienced perhaps his richest
thrill.

            When Adam delved and Eve span
            Who was then the gentleman?

He could see these unhallowed words coming out of the monk's lips and
the crowd capering to them.

He had the six English regiments at Minden, mechanical red and accoutred
waves, disposing of the French cavalry: and Hawke in Quiberon Bay,
pointing with a grand remote pugnacity to the French flagship: the old
ceremonious ships, caught in a rather stormy pathos of the painter's,
who had half attempted, by his colouring and arrangement, to find the
formula for an event very remote in time from the day of the artist
depicting it.

Charles II. dying--('do not let poor Nelly starve')--Sigismund's model of
how to die: 'forgive me, Deborah, for protracting this insignificant
scene.' He was not sure about 'insignificant' and sometimes substituted
'tedious.' The word 'unconscionable,' he felt, was the prerogative of
dying princes.

The masked executor holding up the head of Charles I., whose face, in
the picture, although severed from the body, still wore a look of great
dignity and indifference to the little trick that had been played upon
it by the London Magnificos. ('Eikon Basilike' drew as many tears from
Sigismund's susceptible lids as it did from many honest burgesses at the
time of its publication.)

Mary Queen of Scots over and over again: Fotheringay: many perfect
deaths: the Duke of Cumberland holding the candle for the surgeon
amputating his leg.

Gildas, Kemble's 'Saxons in England,' the life of Wilfrid, by Eddi, were
three of his favourite books. And pictures dealing with this period he
concentrated in a room, which he called the 'Saxon' room. In these
pieces were seen:

The Crowning of Cedric.

Guthlac of Crowland vomiting at the sight of a bear.

The Marriage of Ethelbert with Bertha, daughter of King Charibert.

The Merchants telling Gregory that the angelic slaves came from 'Deira.'

Constantine on the chalk cliffs, Minster below, knees jutting out, for
the first time, in a bluff english breeze; and Ethelbert, polite,
elevated, but postponing his conversion with regal procrastination, or
possibly leisureliness.

Eumer's dagger reaching Edwine through Lilla's body.

Coifi, the priest, at Godmanham, making his unexpected attack on an
obsolete temple.

Aidan with a bag of hairy converts in the wilds of Bernicia.

Penda looking at the snowy fist blessed by Aidan after he had defeated
the Northumbrians.

Alfred singing psalms and turning cakes, and Caedmon writing verses in
his stable.

These were only a few of the many scenes that Sigismund roamed amongst:
standing in front of them (when he could prevail on her to come with
him) with his arm round Deborah's waist.

The pictures that Deborah hated most were those most economically
noxious. These were pictures by masters contemporary with the Past. Van
Dyck was his great favourite, at once a knight, a Belgian, and a
painter. He reflected with uncertainty, 'a foreign title, obviously!'
Contemporary painters who were at the same time knights, or even lords,
he thought less of, it may be mentioned in passing: though he never
grudged them, on account of their good fortune, the extra money he had
to pay for their pictures.

His instinct manifested itself more subtly, though, in his choice of
modern works. Burne-Jones was perhaps his favourite artist not
belonging, except in spirit, to the wonderful Past. He recognized the
tendril or twist he had read about in the book found at Bosselwood.
Also the unquestionable proclivity to occupy himself with very famous
knights and queens struck Sigismund as a thing very much in his favour.
But our hero was an incomparable touchstone. His psychic qualities had
their part in this. You could have taken him up to a work of art,
watched his behaviour, and placed the most entire confidence in the
infallibility of his taste in deciding as to the really noble qualities,
or the reverse, of the artist. The Man in the Savage State propensity
always met with a response. And you would not be surprised, if going
further along the gallery with Sigismund, you came upon a work by the
same painter of a very tender description, showing you some lady
conceived on a plane of rhetorical spirituality. The Animal and the
Noble, you would know, are not so far apart: and the savage or
sentimental and the impulses to high-falute very contiguous.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Suffocated by this avalanche of pictorial art, Deborah had been
constantly sending up S.O.S.'s, and Lord Victor had hurried to her
assistance, unknown to Sigismund. This very 'natural' female splinter
from a remote eruption grew more violent every day. The more animal she
grew the better pleased was Sigismund. One day when as usual he strolled
round his galleries, he was only able to examine his acquisitions with
one eye, the other having been 'poached' overnight by his wife.

Then one day the end came with a truly savage unexpectedness.

Sigismund lay along the wall, nails in his mouth, on a pair of library
steps. He was filling up the last space in his room of Prints with an
engraving showing Ben White running his Bulldog Tumbler and Lady
Sandwich's Bess at the head of Bill Gibbons' Bull. He was startled a
little at the sound of a distant hurly-burly, and a bellow that
something told him must be Deborah. Shrieks then rose, it seemed of
dismay. Then a very deep silence ensued.

Sigismund scratched his head, and blinked discontentedly. But as the
silence remained so dead as to be in the full technical sense a dead
silence, he stepped down to the floor, and went out into the vast
passages and saloons of his establishment, looking for the cause of this
mortuary hush.

Deborah was nowhere to be found. But a group of servants at the foot of
the main staircase were gathered round her prostrate maid. He was
informed that this young lady was dead, having been flung from the top
of the stairs with great force by his wife. A doctor had been telephoned
for: the police were to be notified.

Sigismund was enraptured. He dissimulated his feelings as best he could.
There was indeed a Bosselwood for you! ('The police' meant nothing to
him. He never read Oppenheim.) He stood with a sweet absorption gazing
at the inanimate form of the maid. He was brought to a consciousness of
his surroundings by a tap on his shoulder. A strange man, two strange
men, had in some way insinuated themselves amongst his retainers. The
first man whispered in his ear: he was evidently under the impression
that Sigismund was the author of this tragedy. He modestly disclaimed
all connexion with it. But the man smiled, and he could not be sure, but
he thought _winked_ at him.

What was this fellow murmuring? If he had annihilated his entire
domestic staff, he seemed to be saying, with a chuckle, it would have
been all the same! Privilege, something about privilege: 'last little
fling,' ha! ha! 'Fling' referred, he supposed, to the act of 'flinging'
the maid. He held strange views, this newcomer! He was drawing Sigismund
aside. He wanted to have a word with him apart. He was rather a nice
sort of man, for he seemed to take quite a different sort of view of the
accident from the servants. Where was he going? He wanted to show
Sigismund something outside. Sell him a car? At a moment like this? No,
he could not buy any more cars: and he must see Deborah at once. What
was this strange fellow doing? He had actually pushed him inside the
car.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Lord Victor had plotted with Deborah for some weeks past. But he had not
counted on the Bosselwood fierceness manifesting itself almost
simultaneously with the Libyon cunning. A few minutes after Sigismund
had been driven off to an asylum, Deborah was also removed to a jail.
After a trial that Sigismund would have keenly enjoyed (many a feudal
flower in the gallery; the court redolent of the Past, and thundering to
the great name of Libyon-Bosselwood), she also found her way to an
asylum.

On thinking matters over in his new but very comfortable quarters,
Sigismund concluded that that was what the two islands meant: and that
that was also the signification of the star upon Jupiter.




YOU BROKE MY DREAM
OR AN EXPERIMENT WITH TIME


Do not burst, or let us burst, into Will Blood's room! (I will tell you
why afterwards.) Having flashed our eyes round the passages with which
this sanctuary is surrounded, lurched about in our clumsy endeavours, as
unskilled ghosts, not to get into the one door that interests us, we do
at last blunder in (or are we blown in; or are we perhaps sucked in?)
and there we stand at Will Blood's bedside.

You are surprised, I hope, at the elegant eton-cropped purity of the
young painter's head (he has been a young painter now for many years, so
his head is a young painter's head). It lies serenely upon the dirty
pillow, a halo of darkish grey, where the hair-oil has stained the
linen, enhancing its pink pallor. Its little hook-nose purrs, its mouth
emits regularly the last participle of the french irregular verb
'pouvoir,' as though training for an exam. The puckered lids give the
eye-sockets a look of dutiful mirth.

However, his lips twitch, his eyelids strain like feeble butterflies
stuck together in some flowery contretemps, then deftly part. The play
begins. Will's dream bursts, and out pops Will; a bright enough little
churlish flower to win a new encomium every morning from his great
Creator! But the truth is, that he has been a slight disappointment to
his Creator, on account of his love for Art, and general Will-fulness.
Therefore this great Gardener frowns always as he passes the bed where
Will modestly blows. Will has to depend on stray sensitive young ladies.
But they are usually not very moved by him. The fact is that he does not
smell very nice. Quite satisfactory as regards shape, indeed a roguish
little bobbing bud of a boy, his smell is not that of a thing of beauty,
but is more appropriate to a vegetable. This causes a perpetual
deception in the path, the thorny path, in which Will blows.

The Creator has given him this smell as a sign of his displeasure,
because of his fondness for Art, and his Will-fulness! But that is a
figure.

As his eyes open, the pupils rolling down into the waking position, Will
violently closes them again, tightly holding them shut. For a few
minutes he lies quite still, then cautiously slips his hand beneath the
pillow, searches a moment, draws out a small notebook and pencil. Now he
circumspectly opens his eyes, and, propped upon his elbow, turning over
several leaves, he begins writing in his notebook.

'A dark wood,' he writes--'I am lying in the shadow of an oak. I want to
get up. I find I cannot. I attempt to find out why.--Children are
playing in the meadow in front of me. One is tall and one short. One is
full of sex. The other has less sex. Both girls. They are picking
dandelions--pissenlits.--I find I can get on my hands and knees. I begin
crawling into the wood. This makes me feel like an animal. I turn out to
be an anteater. I attempt to make water. This owing to lack of practice
is unsuccessful. I wake up.'

Poised above the notebook, he strains. Then at top speed he dashes down:
'_A man with a hump._'

He snaps-to the notebook and tosses it on to a chair at his bedside.
Sliding two sensitive pink little feet out of the clothes, they hang
stockstill above the carpet for a moment, then swoop daintily, and he is
up. Pertly and lightheartedly he moves in dainty semi-nudity hither and
thither. With a rustle, no more, he dresses extempore. He is soon ready,
the little black-curled, red-bearded bird of talent, in his neat black
suit, his blue eyes drawing him constantly to the mirror, and rolling
roguishly about like kittens there. Oh, how he wondered what to do with
them! A blue eye! Why should his lucky craftsman's eye be blue? All his
visions of things accouched on a blue bed! The red road he knows through
his blue eye! Who had had the job of pigmenting that little window? Some
grandmother, at the back of yesterday, who brought her red cavalier to
bed through her azure casement. No doubt that was it, or it was the
result of some confusion in a ghetto, something sturdy and swarthy
ravished by something pink and alert. A pity that Mr. Dunne's
time-tracts are so circumscribed, thinks he, or I'd find out for myself!

But where was his waist-strap?

    _'Goot heavens, Archivelt,
     Vere is your Knicker-belt?'--
     'I haf no Knicker-belt,'
     The little Archie said._

These famous lines passed off the unacceptable hitch: else he might
certainly have displayed temper; for he was shrewish when thwarted by
things, as who will not be at times. But, once assembled, they fitted
him to perfection.

He crossed his fat short legs and made his tie. Out to the A.B.C. for
the first snack of the day. The top of the morning to the Norma Talmadge
of the new Buszard's counter. He felt as lively on his springy legs as a
squirrel. Now for the A.B.C.

A.B.C. The alphabet of a new day! A child was Will. Tootytatoot, for the
axe-edged morning, the break of day! Was it an amateur universe after
all, as so many believed? Oh, I say! is it an amateur world? It muddled
along and made itself, did it, from day to day? At night it slept. He
at least believed that was it. Believing _that_, you could not go far
wrong. Every morning he comes up as fresh as paint: it is evidently
_creative_, is all-things. Oh, it is decidedly a novel, a great
creative, rough-and-ready affair: about that there can be no mistake. He
throws his hat up in dirty Kentish Town air, as he dances forward. 'Give
me the daybreak!' his quick actions say as plain as words. Any one could
see he was just up. It is ten o'clock. 'Isn't this the time for rogues,'
says he, 'not the night, but the day?'--He feels roguish and fine, and
is all for painting the first hours red, in his little way. And also he
must remember Mr. Dunne.

The A.B.C. is cold. It has been sluiced by the chars, it faces north,
its tiles marble and china repel the heat. It is an agreeable chill. He
faces north, pauses and flings himself south and downwards on to the
black leather seat at the bottom of the smoking-room. For some minutes
he rides the springs, gentle as a bird on the wave, the most buoyant
customer ever seen there.--A few black-sacks round the fire, like
seamews on a Cornish Sabbath surveying their chapel of rock. Slovenly
forces moved black skirts like wings. He is a force, but of course he
needs his A.B.C.

But who will bring Will his burning eggs and hot brown tea? Who will
bring the leaden fruit, the boiling bullet from the inoffensive
serpentine backside of the farmyard fowl? Why, Gladys, the dreary
waitress, in her bored jazz.

'I--hi! Gladys, what bonny thought for my name day?'

'What is your name?'

'Will, you know.'

Oh, what a peppery proud girl she is, with her cornucopia of hair the
colour of a new penny. He observes it as a molten shell, balanced on the
top of the black trunk. He models her with his blue eye into a bomb-like
shape at once, associating with this a disk--a marble table--and a few
other objects in the neighbourhood.

'Will!' What's in a name? Little for the heart of the mechanical
slattern who bears the burning fruit of the fowl where it can be eaten
by sweet Will Blood.

Will's a sprucer, thinks May, and tells Gladys so, as they sit side by
side, like offended toys, at the foot of the stairs.

'I don't think he's right,' says Gladys. A combative undulation
traverses her with dignity from toe to head. Her legs lie rather
differently after its passage. She pushes down the shortened apron, upon
her black silk sticks.

'He's balmy.' May cocks her eye Willwards, and lowers her voice.
'Yesterday he came to my table. 'Ere! What do you think he had the sauce
to ask me?'

They eye each other with drifting baby-gazes.

'He asked me to go to his studio-flat, and be his nude-model!'

'I should say so! Then you wake up!' Gladys tossed her chin and
nose-tip. 'He hasn't half got a sauce! I know what _I_ should have
said.'

'Chance would be a fine thing, I said: and he said he'd--I couldn't keep
a straight face--there was an old girl at the next table who heard what
he said. She didn't half give me a look----!' A few faint contortions
ruffled May tenderly. She sheltered her mouth for a moment with her
hand. 'He said he'd give me a strawberry leaf if I was a shy girl! He
said all artists kept a stock, all different sizes.' May falls into
faint convulsions.

'Soppy-fool! I told you he's not right. I'd soon tell him off if he came
any of it with me. I do hate artists. They're all rotters. Young Minnie
works with an artist now--you know, Minnie Edmunds.'

'_He's_ not an artist. He's sprucing. He's a student. Ernie says he's in
the hospital.'

'In the hospital? Noaa! That's not right. Was that Ernie told you that?
He must have meant he was a patient.'

Will has the two waitresses in his bright-eye-closet, where he makes
them up into a new pattern. He sees them twittering their cowardly
scandal, he flattens their cheeks meanwhile, matches their noses, cuts
out their dresses into unexpected shapes at every living moment.

The attention of May and Gladys drifts to the extremity of the shop
farthest from Will. May's head slowly turns back, vacillates a little,
veers a few points either way, then swings back sharply on to Will.
Gladys is nudged by May.

'Look at him counting his mouldy coppers!'

Will arranges two columns on the marble table, silver and copper.

'Solidi: Ten. Denarii: Eleven. Must go to the Belge for lunch: supply
myself with the pounds--the pence will look after themselves.'

He signs to May, who nudges Gladys. Gladys looks at May.

'He wants you.'

The great copper-red queen of the A.B.C. approaches with majestic
reluctance.

'Goot heavens, Archivelt,
Vere ist you Knicker-pelt!'

(She says, in her mind, to May: 'He said something about my knickers, in
poetry. I gave him such a look.')

Standing at the side of the table, she traces perfunctory figures on her
ticket-block. She redraws them blacker.

'I say, Miss. One of those eggs you brought me smelt high.'

('He said: one of the eggs was high. I said I would have got him another
if he'd said.')

'It was blue.'

('Blue, he said it was.')

'We don't often have the customers complain of the eggs,' she observed.

'That was a red egg. Red eggs are always a bit off.'

('He said his egg was red. All red eggs is a bit off, he said. He's
crackers.')

'I like them a little _faisand_.'

('He said something in latin, he gave me a funny look. If he gave me
much of his old buck----!')

'All people should be a little _faisand_, I think, don't you: so why
not eggs?'

'I don't see the conjunction.'

'Not between eggs and people? She sees no connection between eggs and
people! Oh, lucky girl, oh, how I envy you! where ignorance is bliss!'

_Ignorant!_ Blood rushes to the face of the proud and peppery girl.

'I should be sorry to be as ignorant as some people! Do you want another
egg?'

'Oh, don't be angry, Mabel. I admire your style of beauty.' He drops a
bashful eye into his teacup, computing the percentage of vegetable dregs
in what remains. 'I can imagine you quite easily in a beautiful oriental
bath, surrounded by slaves. You step in. I am your eunuch.'

'Fancy goes a long way, as Nancy said when she kissed the cow.'

'I could easily be your eunuch. I don't understand your last remark.
What cow?'

A bright and sudden light flashes in Will's eye. He leaps up. The blood
has left the cheek of Gladys, and she steps back with apprehension.

'_Cow!_ You've broken my dream! What colour was it?'

With a gesture with her fingers as though to bore into her temple, the
haughty waitress returns to her chair by the side of May. Will follows
eagerly. Standing over May and Gladys he exclaims:

'You broke my dream! What sort of cow was it?'

Gladys half looks disdainfully at May.

'He's not right.'

Will touches a variety of brakes; he has rushed into an impasse. He
turns slowly round. That dream-double has been flustered, she who holds
the secret of life and death. 'Gently does it!' thinks he and hoods his
eyes. 'How horribly he squints!' thinks Gladys. Slowly up on to the
surface steals a dark sugary grin. He leans against a table,
nonchalant, crosses one shoe stealthily over the other shoe.

'I know it must sound funny to you, Miss Marsh.' (May smiles, and Gladys
pricks up her languid ears. Miss Marsh! the sauce!) 'But you did say
something about _kissing a cow_, didn't you, just now? It's this way. I
dreamt last night _I kissed a cow_. I know it _is_ a funny thing to
dream. But that's why I sort of want to know, being of an enquiring
turn. The cow I kissed last night is my first cow. That's important.
Don't run away with the idea, Miss Marsh, that _every_ night----!'

'Oh, no'oo!' Lofty withering lady.

'That's right, don't run away.'

May laughs and peers at Gladys. 'Oh, how I hate that man!' thinks
Gladys, for he has put her in the wrong with all these cows.

'Of course I made a note of it when I woke up.'

Oh, what a hateful man! and that cat May. What's the girl looking at me
for, I should like to know?

'You broke my dream!'

'Oh! fancy that!'

A customer calls and May jumps up: away she hurries, for what, she
wonders, has that Gladys been saying about kissing a cow?

Gladys looks after May. She has been put in the wrong. Why does he stop
there? Why doesn't he go, I should like to know? he's got his bill.

She won't say, thinks little Will, that she said 'kissed a cow.' I've
torn it. I shouldn't have seemed so anxious. Now I've put her back up.
Something else must be found. Let's see. He looks round inside his mind.
Ah, ha, the very thing! for he catches sight of a red egg, blue inside,
and at the same time a faint familiar smell glides into his nostril. He
coughs.

'Did you charge me with that egg?'

Gladys immediately alters: her colour jumps up, her eyes fill with
dignity. She is back in her classy shell instanter.

'Yes. But if you like I'll deduct it, as you say it was bad.'

'No, please don't: it's quite all right, Miss Marsh.'

'Not at all. If you're not satisfied, I'll deduct it.'

With great dignity she rises and holds out her hand for the check.

'No, I really couldn't let you do that. I meant I hoped that you _had_
charged me. That's what I meant.'

'Yes, I did. But I'll deduct it,' she drawls. Every minute she is
farther off. He looks at her with his sheep's grin of foolish offence:
she bridles and gazes away. He is baffled. What next?

May returns: she settles herself stealthily.

'Won't you tell me before I go about the cow?' Gladys does not mind,
she _did_ say 'kiss the cow.' She looks away from May, very bored.

'It's an old country saying. My mother uses it. Haven't you ever heard
it?'

'So you _did_ say "kiss the cow"?' he shouts, standing on tip-toe.

Glady's best proud manner is not proof against his shout quite. She will
not relax towards May, but she cannot keep her eyes from casting a quick
glance. That cat May's laugh, I do think it's soppy! 'No, I said "kissed
the cow."'

May acts a spasm of pent-up mirth, the potty cat: 'kissed the cow!
kissed the cow!' she rocks herself from side to side, droning to
herself, she dies of laughing; she is dead.

'That's what I wanted to know.--Well, I must pony up with your firm,
now. That's another old expression! Tralala!'

'Is it really!' A lady's simple bored reply, the last shot.

May has developed hysteria. Gladys rises in offended silence and goes
over to the table. Will has left. But Will darts swiftly to the desk. An
amiable oblique jewish face that has only one flat side at a time, or
else is an animated projecting edge, receives with flattering vampish
slowness his ticket on which the half-crown lies, and bakes him slowly
with a cinema smile. 'A nice morning, isn't it? _Thank you_,' softly
sliding three coppers and a shilling towards him.

He thanks the innocent bird in her cage at the receipt of custom, and
darts erect through the door, out on to the shining pavement, where he
skids through the dazzling light to the nearby P.O. Buying a postcard,
he goes to the writing-desk and fills in the morning bulletin:

     Last night I dreamt that in crossing a tiny meadow I met two
     dappled cows. As I passed the second of the two I took its
     muzzle in my hands, and before it could say _knife_, I had
     kissed it between the horns. Going as usual this morning to the
     A.B.C. for my breakfast, I happened to engage in conversation
     there with a waitress, known as Miss Gladys Marsh. (I can
     obtain her address if you require it.) Being quite full of
     blarney, since it was so early in the day, I remarked to this
     high-spirited girl that I could see in my mind's eye her
     graceful perfumed form in a turkish setting descending into a
     beautiful bath. I represented myself as a eunuch (not to alarm
     her) participating in this spectacle at a discreet distance. At
     this she remarked:

     'Fancy goes a long way, as Nancy said _when she kissed the cow_!'

     For the accuracy of this statement I am prepared to vouch. Time
     is vindicated! I offer you my warmest congratulations. It is
     certain that in our dreams the future is available for the
     least of us. Time is the reality. It is as fixed as fixed.
     Past, Present and Future is a territory over which what we
     call _I_ crawls, and in its dreams it goes backwards and
     forwards at will. Again, my congratulations! Hip! Hip!--Further
     Bulletin tomorrow.
                                          _Signed_, William Blood.

This he addressed to
                  R. Dunne, Esq.




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

The following changes were made to the original text:
Page 238: progess ==> progress
Page 242: like ==> liked
Page 256: hoodlam ==> hoodlum

Other than the addition of a missing period, an opening bracket and two
missing single quote marks, minor variations in spelling and punctuation
have been preserved.




[End of The Wild Body, by Wyndham Lewis]
