The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol

“If only he hasn’t stolen it,” sighed the mother.

“What does it matter, since it is sewn up there all secure?” said the old man. “No one can find it.”

The Provençal peasant is as hard-headed and practical as a Scottish miner, and if left alone by the fairies would produce no imaginative effect whatever upon his generation; but in his progeniture he is more preposterously afflicted with changelings than any of his fellows the world over, which, though ethnologically an entirely new proposition, accounts for a singular number of things and inter alia for my dragon-fly friend, Aristide Pujol.

Now, Aristide, be it said at the outset, had not stolen the money. It (and a vast amount more) had been honestly come by. He did not lie when he said that he was staying at the Hôtel de l’Europe, Aix-les-Bains, honoured by the late Queen Victoria (pedantic accuracy requires the correction that the august lady rented the annexe, the Villa Victoria, on the other side of the shady way – but no matter – an hotel and its annexe are the same thing) nor did he lie in boasting of his prodigious prosperity. Aristide was in clover. For the first, and up to now as I write, the only, time in his life he realized the gorgeous visions of pallid years. He was leading the existence of the amazing rich. He could drink champagne – not your miserable tisane at five francs a quart – but real champagne, with year of vintage and gôut américan or gôut anglais marked on label, fabulously priced; he could dine lavishly at the Casino restaurants or at Nikola’s, prince of restaurateurs, among the opulent and the fair; he could clothe himself in attractive raiment; he could step into a fiacre and bid the man drive and not care whither he went or what he paid; he could also distribute five-franc pieces to lame beggars. He scattered his money abroad with both hands, according to his expansive temperament; and why not, when he was drawing wealth out of an inexhaustible fount? The process was so simple, so sure. All you had to do was to believe in the cards on which you staked your money. If you knew you were going to win, you won. Nothing could be easier.

He had drifted into Aix-les-Bains from Geneva on the lamentable determination of a commission agency in the matter of some patent fuel, with a couple of louis in his pocket forlornly jingling the tale of his entire fortune. As this was before the days when you had to exhibit certificates of baptism, marriage, sanity and bank-balance before being allowed to enter the baccarat rooms, Aristide paid his two francs and made a bee line for the tables. I am afraid Aristide was a gambler. He was never so happy as when taking chances; his whole life was a gamble, with Providence holding the bank. Before the night was over he had converted his two louis into fifty. The next day they became five hundred. By the end of a week his garments were wadded with bank notes whose value amounted to a sum so stupendous as to be beyond need of computation. He was a celebrity in the place and people nudged each other as he passed by. And Aristide passed by with a swagger, his head high and the end of his pointed beard sticking joyously up in the air.

We see him one August morning, in the plentitude of his success, lounging in a wicker chair on the shady lawn of the Hôtel de l’Europe. He wore white buckskin shoes – I begin with these as they were the first point of his person to attract the notice of the onlooker – lilac silk socks, a white flannel suit with a zig-zag black stripe, a violet tie secured by a sapphire and diamond pin, and a rakish panama hat. On his knees lay the Matin; the fingers of his left hand held a fragrant corona; his right hand was uplifted in a gesture, for he was talking. He was talking to a couple of ladies who sat near by, one a mild-looking Englishwoman of fifty, dressed in black, the other, her daughter, a beautiful girl of twenty-four. That Aristide should fly to feminine charms, like moth to candle, was a law of his being; that he should lie, with shriveled wings, at Miss Errington’s feet was the obvious result. Her charms were of the winsome kind to which he was most susceptible. She had an oval face, a little mouth like crumpled rose petals (so Aristide himself described it), a complexion the mingling of ivory and peach blossom (Aristide again), a straight little nose, appealing eyes of the deepest blue veiled by sweeping lashes and fascinating fluffiness of dark hair over a pure brow. She had a graceful figure, and the slender foot below her white piqué skirt was at once the envy and admiration of Aix-les-Bains.

Aristide talked. The ladies listened, with obvious amusement. In the easy hotel way he had fallen into their acquaintance. As the man of wealth, the careless player who took five-hundred-louis banks at the table with the five-louis minimum, and cleared out the punt, he felt it necessary to explain himself. I am afraid he deviated from the narrow path of truth.

“What perfect English you speak,” Miss Errington remarked, when he had finished his harangue and had put the corona between his lips. Her voice was a soft contralto.

“I have mixed much in English society, since I was a child,” replied Aristide, in his grandest manner. “Fortune has made me know many of your county families and members of Parliament.”

Miss Errington laughed. “Our M. P.’s are rather a mixed lot, Monsieur Pujol.”

“To me an English Member of Parliament is a high-bred conservative. I do not recognize the others,” said Aristide.

“Unfortunately we have to recognize them,” said the elder lady with a smile.

“Not socially, madame. They exist as mechanical factors of the legislative machine; but that is all.” He swelled as if the blood of the Montmorencys and the Colignys boiled in his veins. “We do not ask them into our drawing rooms. We do not allow them to marry our daughters. We only salute them with cold politeness when we pass them in the street.”

“It’s astonishing,” said Miss Errington, “how strongly the aristocratic principle exists in republican France. Now, there’s our friend, the Comte de Lussigny, for instance – ”

A frown momentarily darkened the cloudless brow of Aristide Pujol. He did not like the Comte de Lussigny —

“With Monsieur de Lussigny,” he interposed, “it is a matter of prejudice, not of principle.”

“And with you?”

“The reasoned philosophy of a lifetime, mademoiselle,” answered Aristide. He turned to Mrs. Errington.

“How long have you known Monsieur de Lussigny, madame?”

She looked at her daughter. “It was in Monte Carlo the winter before last, wasn’t it, Betty? Since then we have met him frequently in England and Paris. We came across him, just lately, at Trouville. I think he’s charming, don’t you?”

“He’s a great gambler,” said Aristide.

Betty Errington laughed again. “But so are you. So is mamma. So am I, in my poor little way.”

“We gamble for amusement,” said Aristide loftily.

“I’m sure I don’t,” cried Miss Betty, with merry eyes – and she looked adorable – “When I put my despised five-franc piece down on the table I want desperately to win, and when the horrid croupier rakes it up I want to hit him – Oh! I want to hit him hard.”

“And when you win?”

“I’m afraid I don’t think of the croupier at all,” said Miss Betty.

Her mother smiled indulgently and exchanged a glance with Aristide. This pleased him; there was an agreeable little touch of intimacy in it. It confirmed friendly relations with the mother. What were his designs as regards the daughter he did not know. They were not evil, certainly. For all his southern blood, Latin traditions and devil-may-care upbringing, Aristide, though perhaps not reaching our divinely set and therefore unique English standard of morality, was a decent soul; further, partly through his pedagogic sojourn among them, and partly through his childish adoration of the frank, fair-cheeked, northern goddesses talking the quick, clear speech, who passed him by when he was a hunted little devil of a chasseur in the Marseilles café, he had acquired a peculiarly imaginative reverence for English girls. The reverence, indeed, extended to English ladies generally. Owing to the queer circumstances of his life they were the only women of a class above his own, with whom he had associated on terms of equality. He had, then, no dishonorable designs as regards Miss Betty Errington. On the other hand, the thoughts of marriage had as yet not entered his head. You see, a Frenchman and an Englishman or an American, view marriage from entirely different angles. The Anglo-Saxon of honest instincts, attracted towards a pretty girl at once thinks of the possibilities of marriage; if he finds them infinitely remote, he makes romantic love to her in the solitude of his walks abroad or of his sleepless nights, and, in her presence, is as dumb and dismal as a freshly hooked trout. The equally honest Gaul does nothing of the kind. The attraction in itself is a stimulus to adventure. He makes love to her, just because it is the nature of a lusty son of Adam to make love to a pretty daughter of Eve. He lives in the present. The rest doesn’t matter. He leaves it to chance. I am speaking, be it understood, not of deep passions – that is a different matter altogether – but of the more superficial sexual attractions which we, as a race, take so seriously and puritanically, often to our most disastrous undoing, and which the Latin light-heartedly regards as essential, but transient phenomena of human existence. Aristide made the most respectful love in the world to Betty Errington, because he could not help himself. “Tonnerre de Dieu!” he cried when from my Britannic point of view, I talked to him on the subject. “You English whom I try to understand and can never understand are so funny! It would have been insulting to Miss Betty Errington —tiens!– a purple hyacinth of spring – that was what she was – not to have made love to her. Love to a pretty woman is like a shower of rain to hyacinths. It passes, it goes. Another one comes. Qu’importe? But the shower is necessary – Ah! sacré gredin, when will you comprehend?”

All this to make as clear as an Englishman, in the confidence of a changeling child of Provence can hope to do, the attitude of Aristide Pujol towards the sweet and innocent Betty Errington with her mouth like crumpled rose-petals, her ivory and peach-blossom complexion, her soft contralto voice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as per foregoing bald description, and as per what can, by imaginative effort, be pictured from the Pujolic hyperbole, by which I, the unimportant narrator of these chronicles, was dazzled and overwhelmed.

“I’m afraid I don’t think of the croupier at all,” said Betty.

“Do you think of no one who brings you good fortune?” asked Aristide. He threw the Matin on the grass, and, doubling himself up in his chair regarded her earnestly. “Last night you put five louis into my bank – ”

“And I won forty. I could have hugged you.”

“Why didn’t you? Ah!” His arms spread wide and high. “What I have lost!”

“Betty!” cried Mrs. Errington.

“Alas, Madame,” said Aristide, “that is the despair of our artificial civilization. It prohibits so much spontaneous expression of emotion.”

“You’ll forgive me, Monsieur Pujol,” said Mrs. Errington dryly, “but I think our artificial civilization has its advantages.”

“If you will forgive me, in your turn,” said Aristide, “I see a doubtful one advancing.”

A man approached the group and with profuse gestures took off a straw hat which he thrust under his right arm, exposing an amazingly flat head on which the closely cropped hair stood brush-fashion upright. He had an insignificant pale face to which a specious individuality was given by a moustache with ends waxed up to the eyes and by a monocle with a tortoise shell rim. He was dressed (his valet had misjudged things – and valets like the rest of us are fallible) in what was yesterday a fairly white flannel suit.

“Madame – Mademoiselle.” He shook hands with charming grace. “Monsieur.” He bowed stiffly. Aristide doffed his Panama hat with adequate ceremony. “May I be permitted to join you?”

“With pleasure, Monsieur de Lussigny,” said Mrs. Errington.

Monsieur de Lussigny brought up a chair and sat down.

“What time did you get to bed, last night?” asked Betty Errington. She spoke excellently pure French, and so did her mother.

“Soon after we parted, mademoiselle, quite early for me but late for you. And you look this morning as if you had gone to bed at sundown and got up at dawn.”

Miss Betty’s glance responsive to the compliment filled Aristide with wrath. What right had the Comte de Lussigny, a fellow who consorted with Brazilian Rastaquouères and perfumed Levantine nondescripts, to win such a glance from Betty Errington?

“If Mademoiselle can look so fresh,” said he, “in the artificial atmosphere of Aix, what is there of adorable that she must not resemble in the innocence of her Somersetshire home?”

“You cannot imagine it, Monsieur,” said the Count; “but I have had the privilege to see it.”

“I hope Monsieur Pujol will visit us also in our country home, when we get back,” said Mrs. Errington with intent to pacificate. “It is modest, but it is old-world and has been in our family for hundreds of years.”

“Ah, these old English homes!” said Aristide.

“Would you care to hear about it?”

“I should,” said he.

He drew his chair courteously a foot or so nearer that of the mild lady; Monsieur de Lussigny took instant advantage of the move to establish himself close to Miss Betty. Aristide turned one ear politely to Mrs. Errington’s discourse, the other ragingly and impotently to the whispered conversation between the detached pair.

Presently a novel fell from the lady’s lap. Aristide sprang to his feet and restored it. He remained standing. Mrs. Errington consulted a watch. It was nearing lunch time. She rose, too. Aristide took her a pace or two aside.

“My dear Mrs. Errington,” said he, in English. “I do not wish to be indiscreet – but you come from your quiet home in Somerset and your beautiful daughter is so young and inexperienced, and I am a man of the world who has mingled in all the society of Europe – may I warn you against admitting the Comte de Lussigny too far into your intimacy.”

She turned an anxious face. “Monsieur Pujol, is there anything against the Count?”

Aristide executed the large and expressive shrug of the Southerner.

“I play high at the tables for my amusement – I know the principal players, people of high standing. Among them Monsieur de Lussigny’s reputation is not spotless.”

“You alarm me very much,” said Mrs. Errington, troubled.

“I only put you on your guard,” said he.

The others who had risen and followed, caught them up. At the entrance to the hotel the ladies left the men elaborately saluting. The latter, alone, looked at each other.

“Monsieur.”

“Monsieur.”

Each man raised his hat, turned on his heel and went his way. Aristide betook himself to the café on the Place Carnot on the side of the square facing the white Etablissement des Bains, with a stern sense of having done his duty. It was monstrous that this English damask rose should fall a prey to so detestable a person as the Comte de Lussigny. He suspected him of disgraceful things. If only he had proof. Fortune, ever favoring him, stood at his elbow. She guided him straight to a table in the front row of the terrace where sat a black-haired, hard-featured though comely youth deep in thought, in front of an untouched glass of beer. At Aristide’s approach he raised his head, smiled, nodded and said: “Good morning, sir. Will you join me?”

Aristide graciously accepted the invitation and sat down. The young man was another hotel acquaintance, one Eugene Miller of Atlanta, Georgia, a curious compound of shrewdness and simplicity, to whom Aristide had taken a fancy. He was twenty-eight and ran a colossal boot-factory in partnership with another youth and had a consuming passion for stained-glass windows. From books he knew every square foot of old stained-glass in Europe. But he had crossed the Atlantic for the first time only six weeks before, and having indulged his craving immoderately, had rested for a span at Aix-les-Bains to recover from æsthetic indigestion. He had found these amenities agreeable to his ingenuous age. He had also, quite recently, come across the Comte de Lussigny. Hence the depth of thought in which Aristide discovered him. Now, the fact that North is North and South is South and that never these twain shall meet is a proposition all too little considered. One of these days when I can retire from the dull but exacting avocation of tea-broking in the City, I think I shall write a newspaper article on the subject. Anyhow, I hold the theory that the Northerners of all nations have a common characteristic and the Southerners of all nations have a common characteristic, and that it is this common characteristic in each case that makes North seek and understand North and South seek and understand South. I will not go further into the general proposition; but as a particular instance I will state that the American of the South and the Frenchman of the South found themselves in essential sympathy. Eugene Miller had the unfearing frankness of Aristide Pujol.

“I used rather to look down upon Europe as a place where people knew nothing at all,” said he. “We’re sort of trained to think it’s an extinct volcano, but it isn’t. It’s alive. My God! It’s alive. It’s Hell in the shape of a Limburger cheese. I wish the whole population of Atlanta, Georgia, would come over and just see. There’s a lot to be learned. I thought I knew how to take care of myself, but this tortoise-shell-eyed Count taught me last night that I couldn’t. He cleaned me out of twenty-five hundred dollars – ”

“How?” asked Aristide, sharply.

“Ecarté.”

Aristide brought his hand down with a bang on the table and uttered anathemas in French and Provençal entirely unintelligible to Eugene Miller; but the youth knew by instinct that they were useful, soul-destroying curses and he felt comforted.

“Ecarté! You played ecarté with Lussigny? But my dear young friend, do you know anything of ecarté?”

“Of course,” said Miller. “I used to play it as a child with my sisters.”

“Do you know the jeux de règle?”

“The what?”

“The formal laws of the game – the rules of discards – ”

“Never heard of them,” said Eugene Miller.

“But they are as absolute as the Code Napoléon,” cried Aristide. “You can’t play without knowing them. You might as well play chess without knowing the moves.”

“Can’t help it,” said the young man.

“Well, don’t play ecarté any more.”

“I must,” said Miller.

“Comment?”

“I must. I’ve fixed it up to get my revenge this afternoon – in my sitting room at the hotel.”

“But it’s imbecile!”

The sweep of Aristide’s arm produced prismatic chaos among a tray-full of drinks which the waiter was bringing to the family party at the next table. “It’s imbecile,” he cried, as soon as order was apologetically and pecuniarily restored. “You are a little mutton going to have its wool taken off.”

“I’ve fixed it up,” said Miller. “I’ve never gone back on an engagement yet in my own country and I’m not going to begin this side.”

Aristide argued. He argued during the mechanical absorption of four glasses of vermouth-cassis– after which prodigious quantity of black currant syrup he rose and took the Gadarene youth to Nikola’s where he continued the argument during déjeuner. Eugene Miller’s sole concession was that Aristide should be present at the encounter and, backing his hand, should have the power (given by the rules of the French game) to guide his play. Aristide agreed and crammed his young friend with the jeux de règle and pâté de foie gras.

The Count looked rather black when he found Aristide Pujol in Miller’s sitting room. He could not, however, refuse him admittance to the game. The three sat down, Aristide by Miller’s side, so that he could overlook the hand and, by pointing, indicate the cards that it was advisable to play. The game began. Fortune favored Mr. Eugene Miller. The Count’s brow grew blacker.

“You are bringing your own luck to our friend, Monsieur Pujol,” said he, dealing the cards.

“He needs it,” said Aristide.

“Le roi,” said the Count, turning up the king.

The Count won the vole, or all five tricks, and swept the stakes towards him. Then, fortune quickly and firmly deserted Mr. Miller. The Count besides being an amazingly fine player, held amazingly fine hands. The pile of folded notes in front of him rose higher and higher. Aristide tugged at his beard in agitation. Suddenly, as the Count dealt a king as trump card, he sprang to his feet knocking over the chair behind him.

“You cheat, monsieur. You cheat!”

“Monsieur!” cried the outraged dealer.

“What has he done?”

“He has been palming kings and neutralizing the cut. I’ve been watching. Now I catch him,” cried Aristide in great excitement. “Ah, sale voleur! Maintenant je vous tiens!”

“Monsieur,” said the Comte de Lussigny with dignity, stuffing his winnings into his jacket pocket. “You insult me. It is an infamy. Two of my friends will call upon you.”

“And Monsieur Miller and I will kick them over Mont Revard.”

“You cannot treat gens d’honneur in such a way, monsieur.” He turned to Miller, and said haughtily in his imperfect English, “Did you see the cheat, you?”

“I can’t say that I did,” replied the young man. “On the other hand that torch-light procession of kings doesn’t seem exactly natural.”

“But you did not see anything! Bon!”

“But I saw. Isn’t that enough, hein?” shouted Aristide brandishing his fingers in the Count’s face. “You come here and think there’s nothing easier than to cheat young foreigners who don’t know the rules of ecarté. You come here and think you can carry off rich young English misses. Ah, sale escroc! You never thought you would have to reckon with Aristide Pujol. You call yourself the Comte de Lussigny. Bah! I know you – ” he didn’t, but that doesn’t matter – “your dossier is in the hands of the prefect of Police. I am going to get that dossier. Monsieur Lepine is my intimate friend. Every autumn we shoot together. Aha! You send me your two galley-birds and see what I do to them.”

The Comte de Lussigny twirled the tips of his moustache almost to his forehead and caught up his hat.

“My friends shall be officers in the uniform of the French Army,” he said, by the door.

“And mine shall be two gendarmes,” retorted Aristide. “Nom de Dieu!” he cried, after the other had left the room. “We let him take the money!”

“That’s of no consequence. He didn’t get away with much anyway,” said young Miller. “But he would have if you hadn’t been here. If ever I can do you a return service, just ask.”

Aristide went out to look for the Erringtons. But they were not to be found. It was only late in the afternoon that he met Mrs. Errington in the hall of the hotel. He dragged her into a corner and in his impulsive fashion told her everything. She listened white faced, in great distress.

“My daughter’s engaged to him. I’ve only just learned,” she faltered.

“Engaged? Sacrebleu! Ah, le goujat!” – for the second he was desperately, furiously, jealously in love with Betty Errington. “Ah, le sale type! Voyons! This engagement must be broken off. At once! You are her mother.”

“She will hear of nothing against him.”

“You will tell her this. It will be a blow; but – ”

Mrs. Errington twisted a handkerchief between helpless fingers. “Betty is infatuated. She won’t believe it.” She regarded him piteously. “Oh, Monsieur Pujol, what can I do? You see she has an independent fortune and is over twenty-one. I am powerless.”

“I will meet his two friends,” exclaimed Aristide magnificently – “and I will kill him. Voilà!”

“Oh, a duel? No! How awful!” cried the mild lady horror-stricken.

He thrust his cane dramatically through a sheet of a newspaper, which he had caught up from a table. “I will run him through the body like that” – Aristide had never handled a foil in his life – “and when he is dead, your beautiful daughter will thank me for having saved her from such an execrable fellow.”