The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol

“Wouldn’t you like,” said he, “to be lying on that white burnished cloud with your beloved kissing your feet?”

“What odd things you think of.”

“But wouldn’t you?” he insinuated.

Her bosom heaved and swelled on a sigh. She watched the strip of silver for a while and then murmured a wistful “Yes.”

“I can tell you of many odd things,” said Aristide. “I can tell you how flowers sing and what colour there is in the notes of birds. And how a cornfield laughs, and how the face of a woman who loves can outdazzle the sun. Chère madame,” he went on, after a pause, touching her little plump hand, “you have been hungering for beauty and thirsting for sympathy all your life. Isn’t that so?”

She nodded.

“You have always been misunderstood.”

A tear fell. Our rascal saw the glistening drop with peculiar satisfaction. Poor Mrs. Ducksmith! It was a child’s game. Enfin, what woman could resist him? He had, however, one transitory qualm of conscience, for, with all his vagaries, Aristide was a kindly and honest man. Was it right to disturb those placid depths? Was it right to fill this woman with romantic aspirations that could never be gratified? He himself had not the slightest intention of playing Lothario and of wrecking the peace of the Ducksmith household. The realization of the saint-like purity of his aims reassured him. When he wanted to make love to a woman, pour tout de bon, it would not be to Mrs. Ducksmith.

“Bah!” said he to himself. “I am doing a noble and disinterested act. I am restoring sight to the blind. I am giving life to one in a state of suspended animation. Tron de l’Air! I am playing the part of a soul-reviver! And, parbleu! it isn’t Jean or Jacques that can do that. It takes an Aristide Pujol!”

So, having persuaded himself, in his Southern way, that he was executing an almost divine mission, he continued, with a zest now sharpened by an approving conscience, to revive Mrs. Ducksmith’s soul.

The poor lady, who had suffered the blighting influence of Mr. Ducksmith for twenty years with never a ray of counteracting warmth from the outside, expanded like a flower to the sun under the soul-reviving process. Day by day she exhibited some fresh timid coquetry in dress and manner. Gradually she began to respond to Aristide’s suggestions of beauty in natural scenery and exquisite building. On the ramparts of Angoulême, daintiest of towns in France, she gazed at the smiling valleys of the Charente and the Son stretching away below, and of her own accord touched his arm lightly and said: “How beautiful!” She appealed to her husband.

“Umph!” said he.

Once more (it had become a habit) she exchanged glances with Aristide. He drew her a little farther along, under pretext of pointing out the dreamy sweep of the Charente.

“If he appreciates nothing at all, why on earth does he travel?”

Her eyelids fluttered upwards for a fraction of a second.

“It’s his mania,” she said. “He can never rest at home. He must always be going on – on.”

“How can you endure it?” he asked.

She sighed. “It is better now that you can teach me how to look at things.”

“Good!” thought Aristide. “When I leave them she can teach him to look at things and revive his soul. Truly I deserve a halo.”

As Mr. Ducksmith appeared to be entirely unperceptive of his wife’s spiritual expansion, Aristide grew bolder in his apostolate. He complimented Mrs. Ducksmith to his face. He presented her daily with flowers. He scarcely waited for the heavy man’s back to be turned to make love to her. If she did not believe that she was the most beautiful, the most ravishing, the most delicate-souled woman in the world, it was through no fault of Aristide. Mr. Ducksmith went his pompous, unseeing way. At every stopping-place stacks of English daily papers awaited him. Sometimes, while Aristide was showing them the sights of a town – to which, by the way, he insisted on being conducted – he would extract a newspaper from his pocket and read with dull and dogged stupidity. Once Aristide caught him reading the advertisements for cooks and housemaids. In these circumstances Mrs. Ducksmith spiritually expanded at an alarming rate; and, correspondingly, dwindled the progress of Mr. Ducksmith’s sock.

They arrived at Perigueux, in Perigord, land of truffles, one morning, in time for lunch. Towards the end of the meal the maître d’hôtel helped them to great slabs of pâté de foie gras, made in the house – most of the hotel-keepers in Perigord make pâté de foie gras, both for home consumption and for exportation – and waited expectant of their appreciation. He was not disappointed. Mr. Ducksmith, after a hesitating glance at the first mouthful, swallowed it, greedily devoured his slab, and, after pointing to his empty plate, said, solemnly: —

“Plou.”

Like Oliver, he asked for more.

“Tiens!” thought Aristide, astounded. “Is he, too, developing a soul?”

But, alas! there were no signs of it when they went their dreary round of the town in the usual ramshackle open cab. The cathedral of Saint-Front, extolled by Aristide and restored by Abadie – a terrible fellow who has capped with tops of pepper-castors every pre-Gothic building in France – gave him no thrill; nor did the picturesque, tumble-down ancient buildings on the banks of the Dordogne, nor the delicate Renaissance façades in the cool, narrow Rue du Lys.

“We will now go back to the hotel,” said Mr. Ducksmith.

“But have we seen it all?” asked his wife.

“By no means,” said Aristide.

“We will go back to the hotel,” repeated her husband, in his expressionless tones. “I have seen enough of Perigueux.”

This was final. They drove back to the hotel. Mr. Ducksmith, without a word, went straight into the salon, leaving Aristide and his wife standing in the vestibule.

“And you, madame,” said Aristide; “are you going to sacrifice the glory of God’s sunshine to the manufacture of woollen socks?”

She smiled – she had caught the trick at last – and said, in happy submission: “What would you have me do?”

With one hand he clasped her arm; with the other, in a superb gesture, he indicated the sunlit world outside.

“Let us drain together,” cried he, “the loveliness of Perigueux to its dregs!”

Greatly daring, she followed him. It was a rapturous escapade – the first adventure of her life. She turned her comely face to him and he saw smiles round her lips and laughter in her eyes. Aristide, worker of miracles, strutted by her side choke-full of vanity. They wandered through the picturesque streets of the old town with the gaiety of truant children, peeping through iron gateways into old courtyards, venturing their heads into the murk of black stairways, talking (on the part of Aristide) with mothers who nursed chuckling babes on their doorsteps, crossing the thresholds, hitherto taboo, of churches, and meeting the mystery of coloured glass and shadows and the heavy smell of incense.

Her hand was on his arm when they entered the flagged courtyard of an ancient palace, a stately medley of the centuries, with wrought ironwork in the balconies, tourelles, oriels, exquisite Renaissance ornaments on architraves, and a great central Gothic doorway, with great window-openings above, through which was visible the stone staircase of honour leading to the upper floors. In a corner stood a mediæval well, the sides curiously carved. One side of the courtyard blazed in sunshine, the other lay cool and grey in shadow. Not a human form or voice troubled the serenity of the spot. On a stone bench against the shady wall Aristide and Mrs. Ducksmith sat down to rest.

“Voilà!” said Aristide. “Here one can suck in all the past like an omelette. They had the feeling for beauty, those old fellows.”

“I have wasted twenty years of my life,” said Mrs. Ducksmith, with a sigh. “Why didn’t I meet someone like you when I was young? Ah, you don’t know what my life has been, Mr. Pujol.”

“Why not Aristide when we are alone? Why not, Henriette?”

He too had the sense of adventure, and his eyes were more than usually compelling and his voice more seductive. For some reason or other, undivined by Aristide – over-excitement of nerves, perhaps – she burst into tears.

“Henriette! Henriette, ne pleurez pas.”

His arm crept round her – he knew not how; her head sank on his shoulder, she knew not why – faithlessness to her lord was as far from her thoughts as murder or arson; but for one poor little moment in a lifetime it is good to weep on someone’s shoulder and to have someone’s sympathetic arm around one’s waist.

“Pauvre petite femme! And is it love she is pining for?”

She sobbed; he lifted her chin with his free hand – and what less could mortal apostle do? – he kissed her on her wet cheek.

A bellow like that of an angry bull caused them to start asunder. They looked up, and there was Mr. Ducksmith within a few yards of them, his face aflame, his rabbit’s eyes on fire with rage. He advanced, shook his fists in their faces.

“I’ve caught you! At last, after twenty years, I’ve caught you!”

“Monsieur,” cried Aristide, starting up, “allow me to explain.”

He swept Aristide aside like an intercepting willow-branch, and poured forth a torrent of furious speech upon his wife.

“I have hated you for twenty years. Day by day I have hated you more. I’ve watched you, watched you, watched you! But, you sly jade, you’ve been too clever for me till now. Yes; I followed you from the hotel. I dogged you. I foresaw what would happen. Now the end has come. I’ve hated you for twenty years – ever since you first betrayed me – ”

Mrs. Ducksmith, who had sat with overwhelmed head in her hands, started bolt upright, and looked at him like one thunderstruck.

“I betrayed you?” she gasped, in bewilderment. “My God! When? How? What do you mean?”

He laughed – for the first time since Aristide had known him – but it was a ghastly laugh, that made the jowls of his cheeks spread horribly to his ears; and again he flooded the calm, stately courtyard with the raging violence of words. The veneer of easy life fell from him. He became the low-born, petty tradesman, using the language of the hands of his jam factory. No, he had never told her. He had awaited his chance. Now he had found it. He called her names…

Aristide interposed, his Southern being athrob with the insults heaped upon the woman.

“Say that again, monsieur,” he shouted, “and I will take you up in my arms like a sheep and throw you down that well.”

The two men glared at one another, Aristide standing bent, with crooked fingers, ready to spring at the other’s throat. The woman threw herself between them.

“For Heaven’s sake,” she cried, “listen to me! I have done no wrong. I have done no wrong now – I never did you wrong, so help me God!”

Mr. Ducksmith laughed again, and his laugh re-echoed round the quiet walls and up the vast staircase of honour.

“You’d be a fool not to say it. But now I’ve done with you. Here, you, sir. Take her away – do what you like with her; I’ll divorce her. I’ll give you a thousand pounds never to see her again.”

“Goujat! Triple goujat!” cried Aristide, more incensed than ever at this final insult.

Mrs. Ducksmith, deadly white, swayed sideways, and Aristide caught her in his arms and dragged her to the stone bench. The fat, heavy man looked at them for a second, laughed again, and sped through the porte-cochère. Mrs. Ducksmith quickly recovered from her fainting attack, and gently pushed the solicitous Aristide away.

“Merciful Heaven!” she murmured. “What is to become of me?”

The last person to answer the question was Aristide. For once in his adventurous life resource failed him. He stared at the woman for whom he cared not the snap of a finger, and who, he knew, cared not the snap of a finger for him, aghast at the havoc he had wrought. If he had set out to arouse emotion in these two sluggish breasts he had done so with a vengeance. He had thought he was amusing himself with a toy cannon, and he had fired a charge of dynamite.

He questioned her almost stupidly – for a man in the comic mask does not readily attune himself to tragedy. She answered with the desolate frankness of a lost soul. And then the whole meaning – or the lack of meaning – of their inanimate lives was revealed to him. Absolute estrangement had followed the birth of their child nearly twenty years ago. The child had died after a few weeks. Since then he saw – and the generous blood of his heart froze as the vision came to him – that the vulgar, half-sentient, rabbit-eyed bloodhound of a man had nursed an unexpressed, dull, implacable resentment against the woman. It did not matter that the man’s suspicion was vain. To Aristide the woman’s blank amazement at the preposterous charge was proof enough; to the man the thing was real. For nearly twenty years the man had suffered the cancer to eat away his vitals, and he had watched and watched his blameless wife, until now, at last, he had caught her in this folly. No wonder he could not rest at home; no wonder he was driven, Io-wise, on and on, although he hated travel and all its discomforts, knew no word of a foreign language, knew no scrap of history, had no sense of beauty, was utterly ignorant, as every single one of our expensively State-educated English lower classes is, of everything that matters on God’s earth; no wonder that, in the unfamiliarity of foreign lands, feeling as helpless as a ballet-dancer in a cavalry charge, he looked to Cook, or Lunn, or the Agence Pujol to carry him through his uninspired pilgrimage. For twenty years he had shown no sign of joy or sorrow or anger, scarcely even of pleasure or annoyance. A tortoise could not have been more unemotional. The unsuspected volcano had slumbered. To-day came disastrous eruption. And what was a mere laughing, crying child of a man like Aristide Pujol in front of a Ducksmith volcano?

“What is to become of me?” wailed Mrs. Ducksmith again.

“Ma foi!” said Aristide, with a shrug of his shoulders. “What’s going to become of anyone? Who can foretell what will happen in a minute’s time? Tiens!” he added, kindly laying his hand on the sobbing woman’s shoulder. “Be comforted, my poor Henriette. Just as nothing in this world is as good as we hope, so nothing is as bad as we fear. Voyons! All is not lost yet. We must return to the hotel.”

She weepingly acquiesced. They walked through the quiet streets like children whose truancy had been discovered and who were creeping back to condign punishment at school. When they reached the hotel, Mrs. Ducksmith went straight up to the woman’s haven, her bedroom.

Aristide tugged at his Vandyke beard in dire perplexity. The situation was too pregnant with tragedy for him to run away and leave the pair to deal with it as best they could. But what was he to do? He sat down in the vestibule and tried to think. The landlord, an unstoppable gramophone of garrulity, entering by the street-door and bearing down upon him, put him to flight. He, too, sought his bedroom, a cool apartment with a balcony outside the French window. On this balcony, which stretched along the whole range of first-floor bedrooms, he stood for a while, pondering deeply. Then, in an absent way, he overstepped the limit of his own room-frontage. A queer sound startled him. He paused, glanced through the open window, and there he saw a sight which for the moment paralyzed him.

Recovering command of his muscles, he tiptoed his way back. He remembered now that the three rooms adjoined. Next to his was Mr. Ducksmith’s, and then came Mrs. Ducksmith’s. It was Mr. Ducksmith whom he had seen. Suddenly his dark face became luminous with laughter, his eyes glowed, he threw his hat in the air and danced with glee about the room. Having thus worked off the first intoxication of his idea, he flung his few articles of attire and toilet necessaries into his bag, strapped it, and darted, in his dragon-fly way, into the corridor and tapped softly at Mrs. Ducksmith’s door. She opened it. He put his finger to his lips.

“Madame,” he whispered, bringing to bear on her all the mocking magnetism of his eyes, “if you value your happiness you will do exactly what I tell you. You will obey me implicitly. You must not ask questions. Pack your trunks at once. In ten minutes’ time the porter will come for them.”

She looked at him with a scared face. “But what am I going to do?”

“You are going to revenge yourself on your husband.”

“But I don’t want to,” she replied, piteously.

“I do,” said he. “Begin, chère madame. Every moment is precious.”

In a state of stupefied terror the poor woman obeyed him. He saw her start seriously on her task and then went downstairs, where he held a violent and gesticulatory conversation with the landlord and with a man in a green baize apron summoned from some dim lair of the hotel. After that he lit a cigarette and smoked feverishly, walking up and down the pavement. In ten minutes’ time his luggage with that of Mrs. Ducksmith was placed upon the cab. Mrs. Ducksmith appeared trembling and tear-stained in the vestibule.

The man in the green baize apron knocked at Mr. Ducksmith’s door and entered the room.

“I have come for the baggage of monsieur,” said he.

“Baggage? What baggage?” asked Mr. Ducksmith, sitting up.

“I have descended the baggage of Monsieur Pujol,” said the porter in his stumbling English, “and of madame, and put them in a cab, and I naturally thought monsieur was going away, too.”

“Going away!” He rubbed his eyes, glared at the porter, and dashed into his wife’s room. It was empty. He dashed into Aristide’s room. It was empty, too. Shrieking inarticulate anathema, he rushed downstairs, the man in the green baize apron following at his heels.

Not a soul was in the vestibule. No cab was at the door. Mr. Ducksmith turned upon his stupefied satellite.

“Where are they?”

“They must have gone already. I filled the cab. Perhaps Monsieur Pujol and madame have gone before to make arrangements.”

“Where have they gone to?”

“In Perigueux there is nowhere to go to with baggage but the railway station.”

A decrepit vehicle with a gaudy linen canopy hove in sight. Mr. Ducksmith hailed it as the last victims of the Flood must have hailed the Ark. He sprang into it and drove to the station.

There, in the salle d’attente, he found Aristide mounting guard over his wife’s luggage. He hurled his immense bulk at his betrayer.

“You blackguard! Where is my wife?”

“Monsieur,” said Aristide, puffing a cigarette, sublimely impudent and debonair, “I decline to answer any questions. Your wife is no longer your wife. You offered me a thousand pounds to take her away. I am taking her away. I did not deign to disturb you for such a trifle as a thousand pounds, but, since you are here – ”

He smiled engagingly and held out his curved palm. Mr. Ducksmith foamed at the corners of the small mouth that disappeared into the bloodhound jowls.

“My wife!” he shouted. “If you don’t want me to throw you down and trample on you.”

A band of loungers, railway officials, peasants, and other travellers awaiting their trains, gathered round. As the altercation was conducted in English, which they did not understand, they could only hope for the commencement of physical hostilities.

“My dear sir,” said Aristide, “I do not understand you. For twenty years you hold an innocent and virtuous woman under an infamous suspicion. She meets a sympathetic soul, and you come across her pouring into his ear the love and despair of a lifetime. You have more suspicion. You tell me you will give me a thousand pounds to go away with her. I take you at your word. And now you want to stamp on me. Ma foi! it is not reasonable.”

Mr. Ducksmith seized him by the lapels of his coat. A gasp of expectation went round the crowd. But Aristide recognized an agonized appeal in the eyes now bloodshot.

“My wife!” he said hoarsely. “I want my wife. I can’t live without her. Give her back to me. Where is she?”

“You had better search the station,” said Aristide.

The heavy man unconsciously shook him in his powerful grasp, as a child might shake a doll.

“Give her to me! Give her to me, I say! She won’t regret it.”

“You swear that?” asked Aristide, with lightning quickness.

“I swear it, by God! Where is she?”

Aristide disengaged himself, waved his hand airily towards Perigueux, and smiled blandly.

“In the salon of the hotel, waiting for you to prostrate yourself on your knees before her.”

Mr. Ducksmith gripped him by the arm.

“Come back with me. If you’re lying I’ll kill you.”

“The luggage?” queried Aristide.

“Confound the luggage!” said Mr. Ducksmith, and dragged him out of the station.

A cab brought them quickly to the hotel. Mr. Ducksmith bolted like an obese rabbit into the salon. A few moments afterwards Aristide, entering, found them locked in each other’s arms.

They started alone for England that night, and Aristide returned to the directorship of the Agence Pujol. But he took upon himself enormous credit for having worked a miracle.

“One thing I can’t understand,” said I, after he had told me the story, “is what put this sham elopement into your crazy head. What did you see when you looked into Mr. Ducksmith’s bedroom?”

“Ah, mon vieux, I did not tell you. If I had told you, you would not have been surprised at what I did. I saw a sight that would have melted the heart of a stone. I saw Ducksmith wallowing on his bed and sobbing as if his heart would break. It filled my soul with pity. I said: ‘If that mountain of insensibility can weep and sob in such agony, it is because he loves – and it is I, Aristide, who have reawakened that love.’”

“Then,” said I, “why on earth didn’t you go and fetch Mrs. Ducksmith and leave them together?”

He started from his chair and threw up both hands.

“Mon Dieu!” cried he. “You English! You are a charming people, but you have no romance. You have no dramatic sense. I will help myself to a whisky and soda.”