Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “But if you will pardon me,” I said, “where did you get the notion that Les Trois Pigeons is one of the regular sights?”

  “Ain’t it in all the books?”

  “I don’t think that it is mentioned in any of the guide-books.”

  “NO! I didn’t say it WAS, m’ friend,” he retorted with contemptuous pity. “I mean them history-books. It’s in all o’ THEM!”

  “This is strange news,” said I. “I should be very much interested to read them!”

  “Lookahere,” he said, taking a step nearer me; “in oinest now, on your woid: Didn’ more’n half them Jeanne d’Arc tamales live at that hotel wunst?”

  “Nobody of historical importance — or any other kind of importance, so far as I know — ever lived there,” I informed him. “The older portions of the inn once belonged to an ancient farm-house, that is all.”

  “On the level,” he demanded, “didn’t that William the Conker nor NONE o’ them ancient gilt-edges live there?”

  “No.”

  “Stung again!” He broke into a sudden loud cackle of laughter. “Why! the feller tole me ‘at this here Pigeon place was all three rings when it come t’ history. Yessir! Tall, thin feller he was, in a three-button cutaway, English make, and kind of red-complected, with a sandy MUS-tache,” pursued the pedestrian, apparently fearing his narrative might lack colour. “I met him right comin’ out o’ the Casino at Trouville, yes’day aft’noon; c’udn’ a’ b’en more’n four o’clock — hol’ on though, yes ’twas, ’twas nearer five, about twunty minutes t’ five, say — an’ this feller tells me—” He cackled with laughter as palpably disingenuous as the corroborative details he thought necessary to muster, then he became serious, as if marvelling at his own wondrous verdancy. “M’ friend, that feller soitn’y found me easy. But he can’t say I ain’t game; he passes me the limes, but I’m jest man enough to drink his health fer it in this sweet, sound ole-fashioned cider ‘at ain’t got a headache in a barrel of it. He played me GUD, and here’s TO him!”

  Despite the heartiness of the sentiment, my honest tourist’s enthusiasm seemed largely histrionic, and his quaffing of the beaker too reminiscent of drain-the-wine-cup-free in the second row of the chorus, for he absently allowed it to dangle from his hand before raising it to his lips. However, not all of its contents was spilled, and he swallowed a mouthful of the sweet, sound, old-fashioned cider — but by mistake, I was led to suppose, from the expression of displeasure which became so deeply marked upon his countenance as to be noticeable, even in the feeble lamplight.

  I tarried no longer, but bidding this good youth and the generations of Baudry good-night, hastened on to my belated dinner.

  “Amedee,” I said, when my cigar was lighted and the usual hour of consultation had arrived; “isn’t that old lock on the chest where Madame Brossard keeps her silver getting rather rusty?”

  “Monsieur, we have no thieves here. We are out of the world.”

  “Yes, but Trouville is not so far away.”

  “Truly.”

  “Many strange people go to Trouville: grand-dukes, millionaires, opera singers, princes, jockeys, gamblers—”

  “Truly, truly!”

  “And tourists,” I finished.

  “That is well known,” assented Amedee, nodding.

  “It follows,” I continued with the impressiveness of all logicians, “that many strange people may come from Trouville. In their excursions to the surrounding points of interest—”

  “Eh, monsieur, but that is true!” he interrupted, laying his right forefinger across the bridge of his nose, which was his gesture when he remembered anything suddenly. “There was a strange monsieur from Trouville here this very day.”

  “What kind of person was he?”

  “A foreigner, but I could not tell from what country.”

  “What time of day was he here?” I asked, with growing interest.

  “Toward the middle of the afternoon. I was alone, except for Glouglou, when he came. He wished to see the whole house and I showed him what I could, except of course monsieur’s pavilion, and the Grande Suite. Monsieur the Professor and that other monsieur had gone to the forest, but I did not feel at liberty to exhibit their rooms without Madame Brossard’s permission, and she was spending the day at Dives. Besides,” added the good man, languidly snapping a napkin at a moth near one of the candles, “the doors were locked.”

  “This person was a tourist?” I asked, after a pause during which Amedee seemed peacefully unaware of the rather concentrated gaze I had fixed upon him. “Of a kind. In speaking he employed many peculiar expressions, more like a thief of a Parisian cabman than of the polite world.”

  “The devil he did!” said I. “Did he tell you why he wished to see the whole house? Did he contemplate taking rooms here?”

  “No, monsieur, it appears that his interest was historical. At first I should not have taken him for a man of learning, yet he gave me a great piece of information; a thing quite new to me, though I have lived here so many years. We are distinguished in history, it seems, and at one time both William the Conqueror and that brave Jeanne d’Arc—”

  I interrupted sharply, dropping my cigar and leaning across the table:

  “How was this person dressed?”

  “Monsieur, he was very much the pedestrian.”

  And so, for that evening, we had something to talk about besides “that other monsieur”; indeed, we found our subject so absorbing that I forgot to ask Amedee whether it was he or Jean Ferret who had prefixed the “de” to “Armand.”

  CHAPTER VII

  THE CAT THAT fell from the top of the Washington monument, and scampered off unhurt was killed by a dog at the next corner. Thus a certain painter-man, winged with canvases and easel, might have been seen to depart hurriedly from a poppy-sprinkled field, an infuriated Norman stallion in close attendance, and to fly safely over a stone wall of good height, only to turn his ankle upon an unconsidered pebble, some ten paces farther on; the nose of the stallion projected over the wall, snorting joy thereat. The ankle was one which had turned aforetime; it was an old weakness: moreover, it was mine. I was the painter-man.

  I could count on little less than a week of idleness within the confines of Les Trois Pigeons; and reclining among cushions in a wicker long-chair looking out from my pavilion upon the drowsy garden on a hot noontide, I did not much care. It was cooler indoors, comfortable enough; the open door framed the courtyard where pigeons were strutting on the gravel walks between flower-beds. Beyond, and thrown deeper into the perspective by the outer frame of the great archway, road and fields and forest fringes were revealed, lying tremulously in the hot sunshine. The foreground gained a human (though not lively) interest from the ample figure of our maitre d’hotel reposing in a rustic chair which had enjoyed the shade of an arbour about an hour earlier, when first occupied, but now stood in the broiling sun. At times Amedee’s upper eyelids lifted as much as the sixteenth of an inch, and he made a hazy gesture as if to wave the sun away, or, when the table-cloth upon his left arm slid slowly earthward, he adjusted it with a petulant jerk, without material interruption to his siesta. Meanwhile Glouglou, rolling and smoking cigarettes in the shade of a clump of lilac, watched with button eyes the noddings of his superior, and, at the cost of some convulsive writhings, constrained himself to silent laughter.

  A heavy step crunched the gravel and I heard my name pronounced in a deep inquiring rumble — the voice of Professor Keredec, no less. Nor was I greatly surprised, since our meeting in the forest had led me to expect some advances on his part toward friendliness, or, at least, in the direction of a better acquaintance. However, I withheld my reply for a moment to make sure I had heard aright.

  The name was repeated.

  “Here I am,” I called, “in the pavilion, if you wish to see me.”

  “Aha! I hear you become an invalid, my dear sir.” With that the professor’s great bulk loomed in the doorway against the glare outside.
“I have come to condole with you, if you allow it.”

  “To smoke with me, too, I hope,” I said, not a little pleased.

  “That I will do,” he returned, and came in slowly, walking with perceptible lameness. “The sympathy I offer is genuine: it is not only from the heart, it is from the latissimus dorsi” he continued, seating himself with a cavernous groan. “I am your confrere in illness, my dear sir. I have choosed this fine weather for rheumatism of the back.”

  “I hope it is not painful.”

  “Ha, it is so-so,” he rumbled, removing his spectacles and wiping his eyes, dazzled by the sun. “There is more of me than of most men — more to suffer. Nature was generous to the little germs when she made this big Keredec; she offered them room for their campaigns of war.”

  “You’ll take a cigarette?”

  “I thank you; if you do not mind, I smoke my pipe.”

  He took from his pocket a worn leather case, which he opened, disclosing a small, browned clay bowl of the kind workmen use; and, fitting it with a red stem, he filled it with a dark and sinister tobacco from a pouch. “Always my pipe for me,” he said, and applied a match, inhaling the smoke as other men inhale the light smoke of cigarettes. “Ha, it is good! It is wicked for the insides, but it is good for the soul.” And clouds wreathed his great beard like a storm on Mont Blanc as he concluded, with gusto, “It is my first pipe since yesterday.”

  “That is being a good smoker,” I ventured sententiously; “to whet indulgence with abstinence.”

  “My dear sir,” he protested, “I am a man without even enough virtue to be an epicure. When I am alone I am a chimney with no hebdomadary repose; I smoke forever. It is on account of my young friend I am temperate now.”

  “He has never smoked, your young friend?” I asked, glancing at my visitor rather curiously, I fear.

  “Mr. Saffren has no vices.” Professor Keredec replaced his silver-rimmed spectacles and turned them upon me with serene benevolence. “He is in good condition, all pure, like little children — and so if I smoke near him he chokes and has water at the eyes, though he does not complain. Just now I take a vacation: it is his hour for study, but I think he looks more out of the front window than at his book. He looks very much from the window” — there was a muttering of subterranean thunder somewhere, which I was able to locate in the professor’s torso, and took to be his expression of a chuckle— “yes, very much, since the passing of that charming lady some days ago.”

  “You say your young friend’s name is Saffren?”

  “Oliver Saffren.” The benevolent gaze continued to rest upon me, but a shadow like a faint anxiety darkened the Homeric brow, and an odd notion entered my mind (without any good reason) that Professor Keredec was wondering what I thought of the name. I uttered some commonplace syllable of no moment, and there ensued a pause during which the seeming shadow upon my visitor’s forehead became a reality, deepening to a look of perplexity and trouble. Finally he said abruptly: “It is about him that I have come to talk to you.”

  “I shall be very glad,” I murmured, but he brushed the callow formality aside with a gesture of remonstrance.

  “Ha, my dear sir,” he cried; “but you are a man of feeling! We are both old enough to deal with more than just these little words of the mouth! It was the way you have received my poor young gentleman’s excuses when he was so rude, which make me wish to talk with you on such a subject; it is why I would not have you believe Mr. Saffren and me two very suspected individuals who hide here like two bad criminals!”

  “No, no,” I protested hastily. “The name of Professor Keredec—”

  “The name of NO man,” he thundered, interrupting, “can protect his reputation when he is caught peeping from a curtain! Ha, my dear sir! I know what you think. You think, ‘He is a nice fine man, that old professor, oh, very nice — only he hides behind the curtains sometimes! Very fine man, oh, yes; only he is a spy.’ Eh? Ha, ha! That is what you have been thinking, my dear sir!”

  “Not at all,” I laughed; “I thought you might fear that I was a spy.”

  “Eh?” He became sharply serious upon the instant. “What made you think that?”

  “I supposed you might be conducting some experiments, or perhaps writing a book which you wished to keep from the public for a time, and that possibly you might imagine that I was a reporter.”

  “So! And THAT is all,” he returned, with evident relief. “No, my dear sir, I was the spy; it is the truth; and I was spying upon you. I confess my shame. I wish very much to know what you were like, what kind of a man you are. And so,” he concluded with an opening of the hands, palms upward, as if to show that nothing remained for concealment, “and so I have watched you.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “The explanation is so simple: it was necessary.”

  “Because of — of Mr. Saffren?” I said slowly, and with some trepidation.

  “Precisely.” The professor exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Because I am sensitive for him, and because in a certain way I am — how should it be said? — perhaps it is near the truth to say, I am his guardian.”

  “I see.”

  “Forgive me,” he rejoined quickly, “but I am afraid you do not see. I am not his guardian by the law.”

  “I had not supposed that you were,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because, though he puzzled me and I do not understand his case — his case, so to speak, I have not for a moment thought him insane.”

  “Ha, my dear sir, you are right!” exclaimed Keredec, beaming on me, much pleased. “You are a thousand times right; he is as sane as yourself or myself or as anybody in the whole wide world! Ha! he is now much MORE sane, for his mind is not yet confused and becobwebbed with the useless things you and I put into ours. It is open and clear like the little children’s mind. And it is a good mind! It is only a little learning, a little experience, that he lacks. A few months more — ha, at the greatest, a year from now — and he will not be different any longer; he will be like the rest of us. Only” — the professor leaned forward and his big fist came down on the arm of his chair— “he shall be better than the rest of us! But if strange people were to see him now,” he continued, leaning back and dropping his voice to a more confidential tone, “it would not do. This poor world is full of fools; there are so many who judge quickly. If they should see him now, they might think he is not just right in his brain; and then, as it could happen so easily, those same people might meet him again after a while. ‘Ha,’ they would say, ‘there was a time when that young man was insane. I knew him!’ And so he might go through his life with those clouds over him. Those clouds are black clouds, they can make more harm than our old sins, and I wish to save my friend from them. So I have brought him here to this quiet place where nobody comes, and we can keep from meeting any foolish people. But, my dear sir” — he leaned forward again, and spoke emphatically— “it would be barbarous for men of intelligence to live in the same house and go always hiding from one another! Let us dine together this evening, if you will, and not only this evening but every evening you are willing to share with us and do not wish to be alone. It will be good for us. We are three men like hermits, far out of the world, but — a thousand saints! — let us be civilised to one another!”

  “With all my heart,” I said.

  “Ha! I wish you to know my young man,” Keredec went on. “You will like him — no man of feeling could keep himself from liking him — and he is your fellow-countryman. I hope you will be his friend. He should make friends, for he needs them.”

  “I think he has a host of them,” said I, “in Professor Keredec.”

  My visitor looked at me quizzically for a moment, shook his head and sighed. “That is only one small man in a big body, that Professor Keredec. And yet,” he went on sadly, “it is all the friends that poor boy has in this world. You will dine with us to-night?”

  Acquiescing cheerfully, I added: “You will join me at the
table on my veranda, won’t you? I can hobble that far but not much farther.”

  Before answering he cast a sidelong glance at the arrangement of things outside the door. The screen of honeysuckle ran partly across the front of the little porch, about half of which it concealed from the garden and consequently from the road beyond the archway. I saw that he took note of this before he pointed to that corner of the veranda most closely screened by the vines and said:

  “May the table be placed yonder?”

  “Certainly; I often have it there, even when I am alone.”

  “Ha, that is good,” he exclaimed. “It is not human for a Frenchman to eat in the house in good weather.”

  “It is a pity,” I said, “that I should have been such a bugbear.”

  This remark was thoroughly disingenuous, for, although I did not doubt that anything he told me was perfectly true, nor that he had made as complete a revelation as he thought consistent with his duty toward the young man in his charge, I did not believe that his former precautions were altogether due to my presence at the inn.

  And I was certain that while he might fear for his friend some chance repute of insanity, he had greater terrors than that. As to their nature I had no clew; nor was it my affair to be guessing; but whatever they were, the days of security at Les Trois Pigeons had somewhat eased Professor Keredec’s mind in regard to them. At least, his anxiety was sufficiently assuaged to risk dining out of doors with only my screen of honeysuckle between his charge and curious eyes. So much was evident.

  “The reproach is deserved,” he returned, after a pause. “It is to be wished that all our bugbears might offer as pleasant a revelation, if we had the courage, or the slyness” — he laughed— “to investigate.”

  I made a reply of similar gallantry and he got to his feet, rubbing his back as he rose.

  “Ha, I am old! old! Rheumatism in warm weather: that is ugly. Now I must go to my boy and see what he can make of his Gibbon. The poor fellow! I think he finds the decay of Rome worse than rheumatism in summer!”