Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  I made my evening ablutions removing a Joseph’s coat of dust and paint; and came forth from my pavilion, hoping that Professor Keredec and his friend would not mind eating in the same garden with a man in a corduroy jacket and knickerbockers; but the gentlemen continued invisible to the public eye, and mine was the only table set for dinner in the garden. Up-stairs the curtains were carefully drawn across all the windows of the east wing; little leaks of orange, here and there, betraying the lights within. Glouglou, bearing a tray of covered dishes, was just entering the salon of the “Grande Suite,” and the door closed quickly after him.

  “It is to be supposed that Professor Keredec and his friend are fatigued with their journey from Paris?” I began, a little later.

  “Monsieur, they did not seem fatigued,” said Amedee.

  “But they dine in their own rooms to-night.”

  “Every night, monsieur. It is the order of Professor Keredec. And with their own valet-de-chambre to serve them. Eh?” He poured my coffee solemnly. “That is mysterious, to say the least, isn’t it?”

  “To say the very least,” I agreed.

  “Monsieur the professor is a man of secrets, it appears,” continued Amedee. “When he wrote to Madame Brossard engaging his rooms, he instructed her to be careful that none of us should mention even his name; and to-day when he came, he spoke of his anxiety on that point.”

  “But you did mention it.”

  “To whom, monsieur?” asked the old fellow blankly.

  “To me.”

  “But I told him I had not,” said Amedee placidly. “It is the same thing.”

  “I wonder,” I began, struck by a sudden thought, “if it will prove quite the same thing in my own case. I suppose you have not mentioned the circumstance of my being here to your friend, Jean Ferret of Quesnay?”

  He looked at me reproachfully. “Has monsieur been troubled by the people of the chateau?”

  “‘Troubled’ by them?”

  “Have they come to seek out monsieur and disturb him? Have they done anything whatever to show that they have heard monsieur is here?”

  “No, certainly they haven’t,” I was obliged to retract at once. “I beg your pardon, Amedee.”

  “Ah, monsieur!” He made a deprecatory bow (which plunged me still deeper in shame), struck a match, and offered a light for my cigar with a forgiving hand. “All the same,” he pursued, “it seems very mysterious — this Keredec affair!”

  “To comprehend a great man, Amedee,” I said, “is the next thing to sharing his greatness.”

  He blinked slightly, pondered a moment upon this sententious drivel, then very properly ignored it, reverting to his puzzle.

  “But is it not incomprehensible that people should eat indoors this fine weather?”

  I admitted that it was. I knew very well how hot and stuffy the salon of Madame Brossard’s “Grande Suite” must be, while the garden was fragrant in the warm, dry night, and the outdoor air like a gentle tonic. Nevertheless, Professor Keredec and his friend preferred the salon.

  When a man is leading a very quiet and isolated life, it is inconceivable what trifles will occupy and concentrate his attention. The smaller the community the more blowzy with gossip you are sure to find it; and I have little doubt that when Friday learned enough English, one of the first things Crusoe did was to tell him some scandal about the goat. Thus, though I treated the “Keredec affair” with a seeming airiness to Amedee, I cunningly drew the faithful rascal out, and fed my curiosity upon his own (which, as time went on and the mystery deepened, seemed likely to burst him), until, virtually, I was receiving, every evening at dinner, a detailed report of the day’s doings of Professor Keredec and his companion.

  The reports were voluminous, the details few. The two gentlemen, as Amedee would relate, spent their forenoons over books and writing in their rooms. Professor Keredec’s voice could often be heard in every part of the inn; at times holding forth with such protracted vehemence that only one explanation would suffice: the learned man was delivering a lecture to his companion.

  “Say then!” exclaimed Amedee— “what king of madness is that? To make orations for only one auditor!”

  He brushed away my suggestion that the auditor might be a stenographer to whom the professor was dictating chapters for a new book. The relation between the two men, he contended, was more like that between teacher and pupil. “But a pupil with gray hair!” he finished, raising his fat hands to heaven. “For that other monsieur has hair as gray as mine.”

  “That other monsieur” was farther described as a thin man, handsome, but with a “singular air,” nor could my colleague more satisfactorily define this air, though he made a racking struggle to do so.

  “In what does the peculiarity of his manner lie?” I asked.

  “But it is not so much that his manner is peculiar, monsieur; it is an air about him that is singular. Truly!”

  “But how is it singular?”

  “Monsieur, it is very, very singular.”

  “You do not understand,” I insisted. “What kind of singularity has the air of ‘that other monsieur’?”

  “It has,” replied Amedee, with a powerful effort, “a very singular singularity.”

  This was as near as he could come, and, fearful of injuring him, I abandoned that phase of our subject.

  The valet-de-chambre whom my fellow-lodgers had brought with them from Paris contributed nothing to the inn’s knowledge of his masters, I learned. This struck me not only as odd, but unique, for French servants tell one another everything, and more — very much more. “But this is a silent man,” said Amedee impressively. “Oh! very silent! He shakes his head wisely, yet he will not open his mouth. However, that may be because” — and now the explanation came— “because he was engaged only last week and knows nothing. Also, he is but temporary; he returns to Paris soon and Glouglou is to serve them.”

  I ascertained that although “that other monsieur” had gray hair, he was by no means a person of great age; indeed, Glouglou, who had seen him oftener than any other of the staff, maintained that he was quite young. Amedee’s own opportunities for observation had been limited. Every afternoon the two gentlemen went for a walk; but they always came down from the gallery so quickly, he declared, and, leaving the inn by a rear entrance, plunged so hastily into the nearest by-path leading to the forest, that he caught little more than glimpses of them. They returned after an hour or so, entering the inn with the same appearance of haste to be out of sight, the professor always talking, “with the manner of an orator, but in English.” Nevertheless, Amedee remarked, it was certain that Professor Keredec’s friend was neither an American nor an Englishman. “Why is it certain?” I asked.

  “Monsieur, he drinks nothing but water, he does not smoke, and Glouglou says he speaks very pure French.”

  “Glouglou is an authority who resolves the difficulty. ‘That other monsieur’ is a Frenchman.”

  “But, monsieur, he is smooth-shaven.”

  “Perhaps he has been a maitre d’hotel.”

  “Eh! I wish one that I know could hope to dress as well when he retires! Besides, Glouglou says that other monsieur eats his soup silently.”

  “I can find no flaw in the deduction,” I said, rising to go to bed. “We must leave it there for to-night.”

  The next evening Amedee allowed me to perceive that he was concealing something under his arm as he stoked the coffee-machine, and upon my asking what it was, he glanced round the courtyard with histrionic slyness, placed the object on the table beside my cap, and stepped back to watch the impression, his manner that of one who declaims: “At last the missing papers are before you!”

  “What is that?” I said.

  “It is a book.”

  “I am persuaded by your candour, Amedee, as well as by the general appearance of this article,” I returned as I picked it up, “that you are speaking the truth. But why do you bring it to me?”

  “Monsieur,” he repl
ied, in the tones of an old conspirator, “this afternoon the professor and that other monsieur went as usual to walk in the forest.” He bent over me, pretending to be busy with the coffee-machine, and lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper. “When they returned, this book fell from the pocket of that other monsieur’s coat as he ascended the stair, and he did not notice. Later I shall return it by Glouglou, but I thought it wise that monsieur should see it for himself.”

  The book was Wentworth’s Algebra — elementary principles. Painful recollections of my boyhood and the binomial theorem rose in my mind as I let the leaves turn under my fingers. “What do you make of it?” I asked.

  His tone became even more confidential. “Part of it, monsieur, is in English; that is plain. I have found an English word in it that I know — the word ‘O.’ But much of the printing is also in Arabic.”

  “Arabic!” I exclaimed.

  “Yes, monsieur, look there.” He laid a fat forefinger on “(a + b)2 = a2 + 2ab + b2.” “That is Arabic. Old Gaston has been to Algeria, and he says that he knows Arabic as well as he does French. He looked at the book and told me it was Arabic. Truly! Truly!”

  “Did he translate any of it for you?”

  “No, monsieur; his eyes pained him this afternoon. He says he will read it to-morrow.”

  “But you must return the book to-night.”

  “That is true. Eh! It leaves the mystery deeper than ever, unless monsieur can find some clue in those parts of the book that are English.”

  I shed no light upon him. The book had been Greek to me in my tender years; it was a pleasure now to leave a fellow-being under the impression that it was Arabic.

  But the volume took its little revenge upon me, for it increased my curiosity about Professor Keredec and “that other monsieur.” Why were two grown men — one an eminent psychologist and the other a gray-haired youth with a singular air — carrying about on their walks a text-book for the instruction of boys of thirteen or fourteen?

  The next day that curiosity of mine was piqued in earnest. It rained and I did not leave the inn, but sat under the great archway and took notes in colour of the shining road, bright drenched fields, and dripping sky. My back was toward the courtyard, that is, “three-quarters” to it, and about noon I became distracted from my work by a strong self-consciousness which came upon me without any visible or audible cause. Obeying an impulse, I swung round on my camp-stool and looked up directly at the gallery window of the salon of the “Grande Suite.”

  A man with a great white beard was standing at the window, half hidden by the curtain, watching me intently.

  He perceived that I saw him and dropped the curtain immediately, a speck of colour in his buttonhole catching my eye as it fell.

  The spy was Professor Keredec.

  But why should he study me so slyly and yet so obviously? I had no intention of intruding upon him. Nor was I a psychological “specimen,” though I began to suspect that “that other monsieur” WAS.

  CHAPTER V

  I HAD BEEN painting in various parts of the forest, studying the early morning along the eastern fringe and moving deeper in as the day advanced. For the stillness and warmth of noon I went to the very woodland heart, and in the late afternoon moved westward to a glade — a chance arena open to the sky, the scene of my most audacious endeavours, for here I was trying to paint foliage luminous under those long shafts of sunshine which grow thinner but ruddier toward sunset. A path closely bordered by underbrush wound its way to the glade, crossed it, then wandered away into shady dingles again; and with my easel pitched in the mouth of this path, I sat at work, one late afternoon, wonderful for its still loveliness.

  The path debouched abruptly on the glade and was so narrow that when I leaned back my elbows were in the bushes, and it needed care to keep my palette from being smirched by the leaves; though there was more room for my canvas and easel, as I had placed them at arm’s length before me, fairly in the open. I had the ambition to paint a picture here — to do the whole thing in the woods from day to day, instead of taking notes for the studio — and was at work upon a very foolish experiment: I had thought to render the light — broken by the branches and foliage — with broken brush-work, a short stroke of the kind that stung an elder painter to swear that its practitioners painted in shaking fear of the concierge appearing for the studio rent. The attempt was alluring, but when I rose from my camp-stool and stepped back into the path to get more distance for my canvas, I saw what a mess I was making of it. At the same time, my hand, falling into the capacious pocket of my jacket, encountered a package, my lunch, which I had forgotten to eat, whereupon, becoming suddenly aware that I was very hungry, I began to eat Amedee’s good sandwiches without moving from where I stood.

  Absorbed, gazing with abysmal disgust at my canvas, I was eating absent-mindedly — and with all the restraint and dignity of a Georgia darky attacking a watermelon — when a pleasant voice spoke from just behind me.

  “Pardon, monsieur; permit me to pass, if you please.”

  That was all it said, very quietly and in French, but a gunshot might have startled me less.

  I turned in confusion to behold a dark-eyed lady, charmingly dressed in lilac and white, waiting for me to make way so that she could pass.

  Nay, let me leave no detail of my mortification unrecorded: I have just said that I “turned in confusion”; the truth is that I jumped like a kangaroo, but with infinitely less grace. And in my nervous haste to clear her way, meaning only to push the camp-stool out of the path with my foot, I put too much valour into the push, and with horror saw the camp-stool rise in the air and drop to the ground again nearly a third of the distance across the glade.

  Upon that I squeezed myself back into the bushes, my ears singing and my cheeks burning.

  There are women who will meet or pass a strange man in the woods or fields with as finished an air of being unaware of him (particularly if he be a rather shabby painter no longer young) as if the encounter took place on a city sidewalk; but this woman was not of that priggish kind. Her straightforward glance recognised my existence as a fellow-being; and she further acknowledged it by a faint smile, which was of courtesy only, however, and admitted no reference to the fact that at the first sound of her voice I had leaped into the air, kicked a camp-stool twenty feet, and now stood blushing, so shamefully stuffed with sandwich that I dared not speak.

  “Thank you,” she said as she went by; and made me a little bow so graceful that it almost consoled me for my caperings.

  I stood looking after her as she crossed the clearing and entered the cool winding of the path on the other side.

  I stared and wished — wished that I could have painted her into my picture, with the thin, ruddy sunshine flecking her dress; wished that I had not cut such an idiotic figure. I stared until her filmy summer hat, which was the last bit of her to disappear, had vanished. Then, discovering that I still held the horrid remains of a sausage-sandwich in my hand, I threw it into the underbrush with unnecessary force, and, recovering my camp-stool, sat down to work again.

  I did not immediately begin.

  The passing of a pretty woman anywhere never comes to be quite of no moment to a man, and the passing of a pretty woman in the greenwood is an episode — even to a middle-aged landscape painter.

  “An episode?” quoth I. I should be ashamed to withhold the truth out of my fear to be taken for a sentimentalist: this woman who had passed was of great and instant charm; it was as if I had heard a serenade there in the woods — and at thought of the jig I had danced to it my face burned again.

  With a sigh of no meaning, I got my eyes down to my canvas and began to peck at it perfunctorily, when a snapping of twigs underfoot and a swishing of branches in the thicket warned me of a second intruder, not approaching by the path, but forcing a way toward it through the underbrush, and very briskly too, judging by the sounds.

  He burst out into the glade a few paces from me, a tall man in white flannels
, liberally decorated with brambles and clinging shreds of underbrush. A streamer of vine had caught about his shoulders; there were leaves on his bare head, and this, together with the youthful sprightliness of his light figure and the naive activity of his approach, gave me a very faunlike first impression of him.

  At sight of me he stopped short.

  “Have you seen a lady in a white and lilac dress and with roses in her hat?” he demanded, omitting all preface and speaking with a quick eagerness which caused me no wonder — for I had seen the lady.

  What did surprise me, however, was the instantaneous certainty with which I recognised the speaker from Amedee’s description; certainty founded on the very item which had so dangerously strained the old fellow’s powers.

  My sudden gentleman was strikingly good-looking, his complexion so clear and boyishly healthy, that, except for his gray hair, he might have passed for twenty-two or twenty-three, and even as it was I guessed his years short of thirty; but there are plenty of handsome young fellows with prematurely gray hair, and, as Amedee said, though out of the world we were near it. It was the new-comer’s “singular air” which established his identity. Amedee’s vagueness had irked me, but the thing itself — the “singular air” — was not at all vague. Instantly perceptible, it was an investiture; marked, definite — and intangible. My interrogator was “that other monsieur.”

  In response to his question I asked him another:

  “Were the roses real or artificial?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered, with what I took to be a whimsical assumption of gravity. “It wouldn’t matter, would it? Have you seen her?”