The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol

“I know the very man you’re looking for,” said I.

“Who is he?”

“He’s a kind of human firework,” said I, “and his name is Aristide Pujol.”

I sketched the man – in my desire to do a good turn to Aristide, perhaps in exaggerated colour.

“Let me have a look at him,” said Blessington.

“He may be anywhere on the continent of Europe,” said I. “How long can you give me to produce him?”

“A week. Not longer.”

“I’ll do my best,” said I.

By good luck my telegram, sent off about four o’clock, found him at 213 bis Rue Saint-Honoré. He had just returned to Paris after some mad dash for fortune (he told me afterwards a wild and disastrous story of a Russian Grand-Duke, a Dancer and a gold mine in the Dolomites) and had once more resumed the dreary conduct of the Agence Pujol at the Hôtel du Soleil et de l’Ecosse. My summons being imperative, he abandoned the Agence Pujol as a cat jumps off a wall, and, leaving the guests of the Hotel guideless, to the indignation of Monsieur Bocardon, whom he had served this trick several times before, paid his good landlady, Madam Bidoux, what he owed her, took a third-class ticket to London, bought, lunatic that he was, a ripe Brie cheese, a foot in diameter, a present to myself, which he carried in his hand most of the journey, and turned up at my house at eight o’clock the next morning with absolutely empty pockets and the happiest and most fascinating smile that ever irradiated the face of man. As a matter of fact, he burst his way past my scandalized valet into my bedroom and woke me up.

“Here I am, my dear friend, and here is something French you love that I have brought you,” and he thrust the Brie cheese under my nose.

“ – ,” said I.

If you were awakened by a Brie cheese, an hour before your time, you would say the same. Aristide sat at the foot of the bed and laughed till the tears ran down his beard.

As soon as it was decent I sent him into the city to interview Blessington. Three hours afterward he returned more radiant than ever. He threw himself into my arms; before I could disentagle myself, he kissed me on both cheeks; then he danced about the room.

“Me voici,” he said, “accredited representative of the great Maison Dulau et Compagnie. I have hundreds of pounds a year. I go about. I watch. I control. I see that the Great British Public can assuage its thirst with the pure juice of the grape and not with the dregs of a laboratory. I test vintages. I count barrels. I enter them in books. I smile at Algerian wine growers and say, ‘Ha! ha! none of your petite piquette frélateé for me but good sound wine.’ It is diplomacy. It is as simple as kissing hands. And I have a sustained income. Now I can be un bon bourgeois instead of a stray cat. And all due to you, mon cher ami. I am grateful —voyons– if anybody ever says Aristide Pujol is ungrateful, he is a liar. You believe me! Say you believe me.”

He looked at me earnestly.

“I do, old chap,” said I.

I had known Aristide for some years, and in all kinds of little ways he had continuously manifested his gratitude for the trifling service I had rendered him, at our first meeting, in delivering him out of the hands of the horrific Madam Gougasse. That gratitude is the expectation of favors to come was, in the case of Aristide, a cynical and inapplicable proposition. And here, as this (as far as I can see) is the last of Aristide’s adventures I have to relate, let me make an honest and considered statement: —

During the course of an interesting and fairly prosperous life, I have made many delightful Bohemian, devil-may-care acquaintances, but among them all Aristide stands as the one bright star who has never asked me to lend him money. I have offered it times without number, but he has refused. I believe there is no man living to whom Aristide is in debt. In the depths of the man’s changeling and feckless soul is a principle which has carried him untarnished through many a wild adventure. If he ever accepted money – money to the Provençal peasant is the transcendental materialised, and Aristide (save by the changeling theory) was Provençal peasant bone and blood – it was always for what he honestly thought was value received. If he met a man who wanted to take a mule ride among the Mountains of the Moon, Aristide would at once have offered himself as guide. The man would have paid him; but Aristide, by some quaint spiritual juggling, would have persuaded him that the ascent of Primrose Hill was equal to any lunar achievement, seeing that, himself, Aristide Pujol, was keeper of the Sun, Moon and Seven Stars; and the gift to that man of Aristide’s dynamic personality would have been well worth anything that he would have found in the extinct volcano we know to be the moon.

“The only thing I would suggest, if you would allow me to do so,” said I, “is not to try to make the fortune of Messrs. Dulau & Co. by some dazzling but devastating coup of your own.”

He looked at me in his bright, shrewd way. “You think it time I restrained my imagination?”

“Exactly.”

“I will read The Times and buy a family Bible,” said Aristide.

A week after he had taken up his work in the City, under my friend Blessington, I saw the delighted and prosperous man again. It was a Saturday and he came to lunch at my house.

“Tiens!” said he, when he had recounted his success in the office, “it is four years since I was in England?”

“Yes,” said I, with a jerk of memory. “Time passes quickly.”

“It is three years since I lost little Jean.”

“Who is little Jean?” I asked.

“Did I not tell you when I saw you last in Paris?”

“No.”

“It is strange. I have been thinking about him and my heart has been aching for him all the time. You must hear. It is most important.” He lit a cigar and began.

It was then that he told me the story of which I have already related in these chronicles:1 how he was scouring France in a ramshackle automobile as the peripatetic vendor of a patent corn cure and found a babe of nine months lying abandoned in the middle of that silent road through the wilderness between Salon and Arles; how instead of delivering it over to the authorities, he adopted it and carried it about with him from town to town, a motor accessory sometimes embarrassing, but always divinely precious; how an evil day came upon him at Aix-en-Provence when, the wheezing automobile having uttered its last gasp, he found his occupation gone; how, no longer being able to care for le petit Jean, he left him with a letter and half his fortune outside the door of a couple of English maiden ladies who, staying in the same hotel, had manifested great interest in the baby and himself; and how, in the dead of the night, he had tramped away from Aix-en-Provence in the rain, his pockets light and his heart as heavy as lead.

“And I have never heard of my little Jean again,” said Aristide.

“Why didn’t you write?” I asked.

“I knew their names, Honeywood; Miss Janet was the elder, Miss Anne the younger. But the name of the place they lived at I have never been able to remember. It was near London – they used to come up by train to matinées and afternoon concerts. But what it is called, mon Dieu, I have racked my brain for it. Sacré mille tonnerres!” He leaped to his feet in his unexpected, startling way, and pounced on a Bradshaw’s Railway Guide lying on my library table. “Imbecile, pig, triple ass that I am! Why did I not think of this before? It is near London. If I look through all the stations near London on every line, I shall find it.”

“All right,” said I, “go ahead.”

I lit a cigarette and took up a novel. I had not read very far when a sudden uproar from the table caused me to turn round. Aristide danced and flourished the Bradshaw over his head.

“Chislehurst! Chislehurst! Ah, mon ami, now I am happy. Now I have found my little Jean. You will forgive me – but I must go now and embrace him.”

He held out his hand.

“Where are you off to?” I demanded.

“The Chislehurst, where else?”

“My dear fellow,” said I, rising, “do you seriously suppose that these two English maiden ladies have taken on themselves the responsibility of that foreign brat’s upbringing?”

“Mon Dieu!” said he taken aback for the moment, hypothesis having entered his head. Then, with a wide gesture, he flung the preposterous idea to the winds. “Of course. They have hearts, these English women. They have maternal instincts. They have money.” He looked at Bradshaw again, then at his watch. “I have just time to catch a train. Au revoir, mon vieux.”

“But,” I objected, “why don’t you write? It’s the natural thing to do.”

“Write? Bah! Did you ever hear of a Provençal writing when he could talk?” He tapped his lips, and in an instant, like a whirlwind, he passed from my ken.

Aristide on his arrival at Chislehurst looked about the pleasant, leafy place – it was a bright October afternoon and the wooded hillside blazed in russet and gold – and decided it was the perfect environment for Miss Janet and Miss Anne, to say nothing of little Jean. A neat red brick house with a trim garden in front of it looked just the kind of a house wherein Miss Janet and Miss Anne would live. He rang the bell. A parlour-maid, in spotless black and white, tutelary nymph of Suburbia, the very parlour-maid who would minister to Miss Janet and Miss Anne, opened the door.

“Miss Honeywood?” he inquired.

“Not here, sir,” said the parlour-maid.

“Where is she? I mean, where are they?”

“No one of that name lives here,” said the parlour-maid.

“Who does live here?”

“Colonel Brabazon.”

“And where do the two Miss Honeywood live?” he asked with his engaging smile.

But English suburban parlour-maids are on their guard against smiles, no matter how engaging. She prepared to shut the door.

“I don’t know.”

“How can I find out?”

“You might enquire among the tradespeople.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle, you are a most intelligent young – ”

The door shut in his face. Aristide frowned. She was a pretty parlour-maid, and Aristide didn’t like to be so haughtily treated by a pretty woman. But his quest being little Jean and not the eternal feminine, he took the maid’s advice and made enquiries at the prim and respectable shops.

“Oh, yes,” said a comely young woman in a fragrant bakers’ and confectioners’. “They were two ladies, weren’t they? They lived at Hope Cottage. We used to supply them. They left Chislehurst two years ago.”

“Sacré nom d’un chien!” said Aristide.

“Beg pardon?” asked the young woman.

“I am disappointed,” said Aristide. “Where did they go to?”

“I’m sure I can’t tell you.”

“Do you remember whether they had a baby?”

“They were maiden ladies,” said the young woman rebukingly.

“But anybody can keep a baby without being its father or mother. I want to know what has become of the baby.”

The young woman gazed through the window.

“You had better ask the policeman.”

“That’s an idea,” said Aristide, and, leaving her, he caught up the passing constable.

The constable knew nothing of maiden ladies with a baby, but he directed him to Hope Cottage. He found a pretty half-timber house lying back from the road, with a neat semi-circular gravelled path leading to a porch covered thick with Virginia creeper. Even more than the red brick residence of Colonel Brabazon did it look, with its air of dainty comfort, the fitting abode of Miss Janet and Miss Anne. He rang the bell and interviewed another trim parlour-maid. More susceptible to smiles than the former, she summoned her master, a kindly, middle-aged man, who came out into the porch. Yes, Honeywood was the name of the previous tenants. Two ladies, he believed. He had never seen them and knew nothing about a child. Messrs. Tompkin & Briggs, the estate agents in the High Street, could no doubt give him information. Aristide thanked him and made his way to Messrs. Tompkin & Briggs. A dreary spectacled youth in resentful charge of the office – his principals, it being Saturday afternoon, were golfing the happy hours away – professed blank ignorance of everything. Aristide fixed him with his glittering eye and flickered his fingers and spoke richly. The youth in a kind of mesmeric trance took down a battered, dog’s eared book and turned over the pages.

“Honeywood – Miss – Beverly Stoke – near St. Albans – Herts. That’s it,” he said.

Aristide made a note of the address. “Is that all you can tell me?”

“Yes,” said the youth.

“I thank you very much, my young friend,” said Aristide, raising his hat, “and here is something to buy a smile with,” and, leaving a sixpence on the table to shimmer before the youth’s stupefied eyes, Aristide strutted out of the office.

“You had much better have written,” said I, when he came back and told me of his experiences. “The post-office would have done all that for you.”

“You have no idea of business, mon cher ami” – (I – a successful tea-broker of twenty-five years’ standing! – the impudence of the fellow!) – “If I had written to-day, the letter would have reached Chislehurst on Monday morning. It would be redirected and reach Hertfordshire on Tuesday. I should not get any news till Wednesday. I go down to Beverly Stoke to-morrow, and then I find at once Miss Janet and Miss Anne and my little Jean! The secret of business men, and I am a business man, the accredited representative of Dulau et Compagnie – never forget that – the secret of business is no delay.”

He darted across the room to Bradshaw.

“For God’s sake,” said I, “put that nightmare of perpetual motion in your pocket and go mad over it in the privacy of your own chamber.”

“Very good,” said he, tucking the brain-convulsing volume under his arm. “I will put it on top of The Times and the family Bible and I will say ‘Ha! now I am British. Now I am very respectable!’ What else can I do?”

“Rent a pew in a Baptist chapel,” said I.

After a three-mile trudge from St. Albans Aristide, following directions, found himself on a high road running through the middle of a straggy common decked here and there with great elms splendid in autumn bravery, and populated chiefly by geese, who when he halted in some perplexity – for on each side, beyond the green, were indications of a human settlement – advanced in waddling flocks towards him and signified their disapproval of his presence. A Sundayfied youth in a rainbow tie rode past on a bicycle. Aristide took off his hat. The youth nearly fell off the bicycle, but British doggedness saved him from disaster.

“Beverly Stoke? Will you have the courtesy – ”

“Here,” bawled the youth, with a circular twist of his head, and, eager to escape from a madman, he rode on furiously.

Aristide looked to left and right at the little houses beyond the green – some white and thatched and dilapidated, others horridly new and perky – but all poor and insignificant. As his eyes became accustomed to the scene they were aware of human forms dotted sparsely about the common. He struck across and accosted one, an elderly woman with a prayer-book. “Miss Honeywood? A lady from London?”

“That house over there – the third beyond the poplar.”

“And little Jean – a beautiful child about four years old?”

“That I don’t know, sir. I live at Wilmer’s End, a good half mile from here.”

Aristide made for the third house past the poplar. First there was a plank bridge across a grass-grown ditch; then a tiny patch of garden; then a humble whitewashed cottage with a small leaded casement window on each side of the front door. Unlike Hope Cottage, it did not look at all the residence of Miss Janet and Miss Anne. Its appearance, indeed, was woe-begone. Aristide, however, went up to the door; as there was neither knocker nor bell, he rapped with his knuckles. The door opened, and there, poorly dressed in blouse and skirt, stood Miss Anne.

She regarded him for a moment in a bewildered way, then, recognizing him, drew back into the stone flagged passage with a sharp cry.

“You? You – Mr. Pujol?”

“Oui, Mademoiselle, c’est moi. It is I, Aristide Pujol.”

She put her hands on her bosom. “It is rather a shock seeing you – so unexpectedly. Will you come in?”

She led the way into a tiny parlour, very clean, very simple with its furniture of old oak and brass, and bade him sit. She looked a little older than when he had seen her at Aix-en-Provence. A few lines had marred the comely face and there was here and there a touch of grey in the reddish hair, and, though still buxom, she had grown thinner. Care had set its stamp upon her.

“Miss Honeywood,” said Aristide. “It is on account of little Jean that I have come – ”

She turned on him swiftly. “Not to take him away!”

“Then he is here!” He jumped to his feet and wrung both her hands and kissed them to her great embarrassment. “Ah, mademoiselle, I knew it. I felt it. When such an inspiration comes to a man, it is the bon Dieu who sends it. He is here, actually here, in this house?”

“Yes,” said Miss Anne.

Aristide threw out his arms. “Let me see him. Ah, le cher petit! I have been yearning after him for three years. It was my heart that I ripped out of my body that night and laid at your threshold.”

“Hush!” said Miss Anne, with an interrupting gesture. “You must not talk so loud. He is asleep in the next room. You mustn’t wake him. He is very ill.”

“Ill? Dangerously ill?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Mon Dieu,” said he, sitting down again in the oak settle. To Aristide the emotion of the moment was absorbing, overwhelming. His attitude betokened deepest misery and dejection.

“And I expected to see him full of joy and health!”

“It is not my fault, Mr. Pujol,” said Miss Anne.

He started. “But no. How could it be? You loved him when you first set eyes on him at Aix-en-Provence.”

Miss Anne began to cry. “God knows,” said she, “what I should do without him. The dear mite is all that is left to me.”

“All? But there is your sister, the dear Miss Janet.”

Miss Anne’s eyes were hidden in her handkerchief. “My poor sister died last year, Mr. Pujol.”

“I am very sorry. I did not know,” said Aristide gently.

There was a short silence. “It was a great sorrow to you,” he said.

“It was God’s will,” said Anne. Then, after another pause, during which she dried her eyes, she strove to smile. “Tell me about yourself. How do you come to be here?”

Aristide replied in a hesitating way. He was in the presence of grief and sickness and trouble; the Provençal braggadocio dropped from him and he became the simple and childish creature that he was. He accounted very truthfully, very convincingly, for his queer life; for his abandonment of little Jean, for his silence, for his sudden and unexpected appearance. During the ingenuous apologia pro vita sua Miss Anne regarded him with her honest candour.

“Janet and I both understood,” she said. “Janet was gifted with a divine comprehension and pity. The landlady at the hotel, I remember, said some unkind things about you; but we didn’t believe them. We felt that you were a good man – no one but a good man could have written that letter – we cried over it – and when she tried to poison our minds we said to each other: ‘What does it matter? Here God in his mercy has given us a child.’ But, Mr. Pujol, why didn’t you take us into your confidence?”

“My dear Miss Anne,” said Aristide, “we of the South do things impulsively, by lightning flashes. An idea comes suddenly. Vlan! we carry it out in two seconds. We are not less human than the Northerner, who reflects two months.”

“That is almost what dear, wise Janet told me,” said Miss Anne.

“Then you know in your heart,” said Aristide, after a while, “that if I had not been only a football at the feet of fortune, I should never have deserted little Jean?”

“I do, Mr. Pujol. My sister and I have been footballs, too.” She added with a change of tone: “You tell me you saw our dear home at Chislehurst?”

“Yes,” said Aristide.

“And you see this. There is a difference.”

“What has happened?” asked Aristide.

She told him the commonplace pathetic story. Their father had left them shares in the company of which he had been managing director. For many years they had enjoyed a comfortable income. Then the company had become bankrupt and only a miserable ninety pounds a year had been saved from the wreckage. The cottage at Beverly Stoke belonging to them – it had been their mother’s – they had migrated thither with their fallen fortunes and little Jean. And then Janet had died. She was delicate and unaccustomed to privation and discomfort – and the cottage had its disadvantages. She, Anne herself, was as strong as a horse and had never been ill in her life, but others were not quite so hardy. “However” – she smiled – “one has to make the best of things.”

“Parbleu,” said Aristide.

Miss Anne went on to talk of Jean, a miraculous infant of infinite graces and accomplishments. Up to now he had been the sturdiest and merriest fellow.

“At nine months old he saw that life was a big joke,” said Aristide. “How he used to laugh.”

“There’s not much laugh left in him, poor darling,” she sighed. And she told how he had caught a chill which had gone to his lungs and how the night before last she thought she had lost him.

She sat up and listened. “Will you excuse me for a moment?”

She went out and presently returned, standing at the doorway. “He is still asleep. Would you like to see him? Only” – she put her fingers on her lips – “you must be very, very quiet.”

He followed her into the next room and looked about him shyly, recognizing that it was Miss Anne’s own bedroom; and there, lying in a little cot beside the big bed, he saw the sleeping child, his brown face flushed with fever. He had a curly shock of black hair and well formed features. An old woolly lamb nose to nose with him shared his pillow. Aristide drew from his pocket a Teddy bear, and, having asked Miss Anne’s permission with a glance, laid it down gently on the coverlid.

His eyes were wet when they returned to the parlour. So were Miss Anne’s. The Teddy bear was proof of the simplicity of his faith in her.

After a while, conscious of hunger, he rose to take leave. He must be getting back to St. Albans. But might he be permitted to come back later in the afternoon? Miss Anne reddened. It outraged her sense of hospitality to send a guest away from her house on a three-mile walk for food. And yet —

“Mr. Pujol,” she said bravely, “I would ask you to stay to luncheon if I had anything to offer you. But I am single handed, and, with Jean’s illness, I haven’t given much thought to housekeeping. The woman who does some of the rough work won’t be back till six. I hate to let you go all those miles – I am so distressed – ”

“But, mademoiselle,” said Aristide. “You have some bread. You have water. It has been a banquet many a day to me, and this time it would be the most precious banquet of all.”

“I can do a little better than that,” faltered Miss Anne. “I have plenty of eggs and there is bacon.”

“Eggs – bacon!” cried Aristide, his bright eyes twinkling and his hands going up in the familiar gesture. “That is superb. Tiens! you shall not do the cooking. You shall rest. I will make you an omelette au lard—ah!” – he kissed the tips of his fingers – “such an omelette as you have not eaten since you were in France – and even there I doubt whether you have ever eaten an omelette like mine.” His soul simmering with omelette, he darted towards the door. “The kitchen – it is this way?”

“But, Mr. Pujol – !” Miss Anne laughed, protestingly. Who could be angry with the vivid and impulsive creature?

“It is the room opposite Jean’s – not so?”

She followed him into the clean little kitchen, half amused, half flustered. Already he had hooked off the top of the kitchen range. “Ah! a good fire. And your frying-pan?” He dived into the scullery.

“Please don’t be in such a hurry,” she pleaded. “You will have made the omelette before I’ve had time to lay the cloth, and it will get cold. Besides, I want to learn how to do it.”

“Trés bien,” said Aristide, laying down the frying-pan. “You shall see how it is made – the omelette of the universe.”