Chapter 7

He went back to Paris, and a week later the trouble broke out in Narbonne.

At first it did not seem very serious. One understood vaguely that the wine-growers were in revolt. The Paris buyers had been adulterating the vintages—making one cask into a dozen—so that they came to a year when there was such a glut of this adulterated wine on the market, that the wine-growers of the South were left with wine to spill in the gutters, and wine to give to the pigs—but without bread to give to their children.

Then there arose one of those men who flame into history for a few vivid moments. A leader of men, whose words were sparks dropped among straw; who had but to say "Kill," and they would kill, until he bade them stop.

For a time, in a way essentially peculiar to France, the ludicrous prevailed. Municipalities resigned, mayors and all, and there was no giving nor taking in marriage, no registration of births or deaths. Odd stories of the despair of love—sick peasantry at postponed weddings—filled the papers; the Assiette au Beurre published a special number satirizing the situation. It was a good joke in Paris—but at Perpignan and Montpellier twenty thousand vignerons were talking of bloody revolution, and marching with blue and silver banners, and calling on the Government to put a tax on sugar, so as to make adulteration so costly that it should be profitless....

And Humphrey in the Paris office distilled a column a day from the forty columns that the French Special Correspondents sent to their papers, while Dagneau, up[333] at the Ministry of the Interior, garnered facts and official communiqués.

Work was his salvation and his solace. Everything of the past was wiped away from his mind when Humphrey worked. The personal things affecting his own private life became trivial beside the urgent importance of keeping The Day well-informed. And thus habit had fortified his power of resistance to external matters that might have disturbed a mind less trained to make itself subservient to the larger issue of duty. In a week—a brief week—he had gone through every phase of sorrow, anger, self-pity at his rejection. He thought of writing—indeed, he went so far one night as to compose a letter imploring Elizabeth for forgiveness, promising everything she wished ... but, when it was written, he tore it into little pieces. A mood of futile oaths followed. He felt that he had been balked of her by trickery. It led to violent hatred of her cold austerity, her icy splendour. He put away the thought of her from him. After all, what did it matter? They would never have been happy together. Always she was above him, distant and unattainable ... yet those fine moments, when she had stooped down and lifted him up, when gold and brilliance took the place of the dross in his mind! How she filled him with dreams of overwhelming possibilities, of ennobling achievements.... Below the crust of the selfishness and vanity of his life, there was a rich vein of good and strong desire ready to be worked, if she had only known. There were moments when his whole soul ached with an intense longing to be exalted and free from the impoverished squalor of its surroundings. He knew it, and the thought of it made him unjust to Elizabeth. She had not known of those constant conflicts which endured over years that seemed everlasting,—a guerrilla warfare with conscience.

[334]

They had not mattered. She had given his soul back to him, to do as he liked with it; she had forsaken him before he was strong enough to stand alone....

The telephone bell rang. He adjusted the metal band over his head. "Londres," said the voice of the operator. His ears heard nothing but the voice of The Day calling to him; his eyes saw nothing but the sheets of writing at his side, and everything else faded from his mind but the news of the night....

He put the receiver down, and almost immediately the telephone bell rang, and he heard a voice telling him that it was Charnac.... "Where have you been?" asked Charnac. "One has missed you." Humphrey explained his absence.

"Can you come to supper to-night," Charnac called. "Your little Desirée will be there." His voice came out of the depths of space, calling Humphrey to the gaiety of life. "Your little Desirée...." It brought to him, vividly, her thin, supple figure; those strange blue eyes that looked widely from beneath the pale eyebrows; and the lips of cherry-red. The song that she had sung that night had been lilting ever since in his mind:
"... Je perds la tête
'Suis comme une bête."

He saw her in all her alluring languor, secret, and mysterious. And it was the eternal mystery in her that attracted him. For a few moments he hesitated, indeterminately, at the telephone. "Eh bien, mon vieux," called Charnac's voice. "Will you come? 11.30 at the Chariot d'Or."

"I'll come," said Humphrey.

It was ten-thirty. Ripples of unrest stirred his mind; he felt deeply agitated. He knew that he was on the brink of a new and complex development in[335] his life; and the future stretched before him, vague and impenetrable, full of a promise of mournful and fierce delights, of happiness inconceivable, and sorrow inexperienced. No scruples retarded him now, and the voice of conscience was stilled, but despite all this, an indefinable mist of melancholy clouded his soul.

Dagneau came briskly into the office. Humphrey ceased brooding, and swung round in his chair.

"Lamb," he said, "I'm going out to supper to-night."

"Oh! la! la!" Dagneau laughed. "Who's the lucky lady?"

"Not for the likes of little lambs that have to stay in the office and keep the fort."

Dagneau made a grimace. "I suppose it isn't safe for both of us to leave," he said.

"No fear," Humphrey replied. "There's no knowing what these fellows mayn't be up to in the South. Anyhow, if anything urgent happens, come along to me. I shall be in the Chariot d'Or until one o'clock."

Dagneau was a good fellow, thought Humphrey, as his cab climbed the hill to Montmartre. It was jolly decent of him not to mind. He forgot the office now, and thought only of the night's adventuring. There was fully a half-hour to spare, so he idled it away on the terrace of a café sipping at a liqueur. Every variety of street hawker came to persuade sous from him: they had plaster figures for sale, or wanted to cut his silhouette in black paper, or draw a portrait of him in pastels, or sell him ballads and questionable books, bound in pink, pictorial covers. The toy of the moment, frankly indecent, yet offered with a childlike innocence that made it impossible for one to be disgusted with the vendors, was thrust before him fifty times. They showed him how it worked, and when he refused, they brought from inner pockets picture-postcards which[336] they tried to show him covertly, until he drove them away with the argot he had learned from Dagneau.

At the time appointed a cab climbed the steep Rue Pigalle, and drew up before the Chariot d'Or. Charnac sat in the middle comfortably squeezed in between Margot and Desirée. They waved a cheery greeting as they saw Humphrey, and he helped them down. Without any question he linked his arm in Desirée's, and led her up the brilliant scarlet staircase to the supper-room. Her meek acceptance of him, and the touch of her, gave him a strong sense of possession. This woman acknowledged his right of mastery over her, without a word being spoken, without any pleading, or the bitter pain of uncertainty. From that moment he felt she was his completely and unquestionably. There was no need to woo her and win her; she was to be taken, and she would yield herself up, as women were taken and women yielded themselves up in the earliest days of the earth.

They went to their table. He had no eyes for anyone but Desirée. She threw off her wrap, with a gesture of her shoulders, and as it tumbled from them, they shone white and shapely, and a rose was crushed to her bosom, making a splash of scarlet on her white bodice. She laughed and looked at him frankly, as if there were to be no secrets between them, and once, while the supper was being ordered, her thin hand rested in his, and he was stirred to wild, delicious emotion. Yes, she was all as he had imagined her; she had not changed at all, and her yellow hair and pale eyebrows and thin face culminating in her pointed chin, reminded him of an Aubrey Beardsley picture—those slanting eyes, and red lips eternally shaped for a kiss, and the slender throat that rippled below the white surface of its skin when she spoke, the thin bare arms, and her hands, balanced on delicate wrists—those hands[337] with their long dainty fingers and exquisite finger-tips. The sight of her inflamed him.

Their conversation was commonplace. Why, she wanted to know, did he run away the last time they met. He lied to her, and pleaded a headache.

"And you won't run off this time?" she asked, with a childish note of appeal in her voice.

He sought her hand and held it in his own. She drew it away with a little grimace. "You're hurting me," she said.

Occasionally Margot cut into their conversation. She lacked the beauty of her sister, her figure was stouter, and her face was not well made-up. She treated Charnac with good-natured tolerance.

During the supper—again the famous mussels—Desirée asked Humphrey many questions about himself—they were not questions which penetrated deeply into his private life, indeed, she showed no desire to pry into his surroundings. She wanted to know his tastes, and his likes and dislikes, and when, sometimes, he said anything that showed that they had something in common, she laughed delightedly at the discovery.

Her eyes held a wonderful knowledge in them, but the boldness of their gaze did not suggest immodesty to him. Her eyes seemed to say: "There are certain things in life we never talk about. But I understand them all, and I know that you know I understand." It made him feel that there was nothing artificial about their friendship; in one bound they had attained perfect understanding, and it was miraculous to him.

It was miraculous to him to sit there, with the music surging in his veins, and to look upon this delicately-wrought creature, beautiful, perfect in body, knowing that when he wished he could take her in his arms, and she would give herself to him without any hesitation. She was utterly strange to him, and yet, by this miracle, their[338] lives were already commingled in swift intimacy. He thought of the other two women who had influenced his life: though he had kissed them, and spent long hours with them, they seemed now irrevocably distant from him, and never had he penetrated to the stratum of full comprehension that lay below the surface of misunderstandings....

He looked back on the years that were past, and he could only see himself struggling and pleading and breaking his heart to win that which was won now without any contest at all. Was it love or passion that he wanted from them. Ah! if we would only be frank with ourselves, and admit that there is no love without passion, there is no passion without love: that by separating passion from love, it has become a degraded and hidden thing.

And Humphrey wanted love: the desire for love, love inseparable from passion, had made a turbulent underflow beneath the stream of his life. Twice he had tried to grasp love, twice it had eluded him. He had been despoiled by circumstance ... cheated by his own conscience.

It was miraculous to him now, that he should be able to wrest his prize from life with so little struggle after all. He looked at Desirée, and her eyes smiled—how incredibly near they seemed to one another, how the unattainable drew close to him and smiled....

He became aware of his name spoken aloud, and he looked up and saw a waiter looking round the room, with Dagneau at his side. Dagneau's face was strained and anxious. He seemed out of breath. Suddenly he caught sight of Humphrey, and hurried towards him. He raised his hat to the group. "Pardon, mad'm'selle," he said to Desirée, as he put a telegram before Humphrey.

[339]

The blue slips pasted on the paper danced before his eyes.

"Qu'est que c'est?" Margot asked, fussily.

"Ferrol wants you to go to Narbonne," Dagneau said. "There's been shooting there.... I looked up the trains. You can catch the one o'clock from the Gare d'Orsay if you hurry."

Humphrey stared stupidly at the telegram, and Desirée touched him with her hand.

"C'est quelque chose de grave?" she asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. "Narbonne," he said to Charnac, laconically.

"Oh! nom d'un nom—to-night?" asked Charnac. "C'est embêtant, ?a."

And, suddenly, Humphrey grew peaceful again, and all the turbulence of his thoughts calmed down and flowed towards the one desire that he had made paramount in his life—the desire of the journalist for news, the longing of the historian for history.

Fleet Street called to him from those blue strips with their printed message. "Go Narbonne immediately cover riots," and the signature that symbolized Fleet Street—"Ferrol"—held in it all the power that had made him a puppet of Fate.

But Narbonne.... From all parts of Europe the Special Correspondents would be converging on the town. There would be great doings to describe, new interests to make him forget rapidly.

Dagneau helped him on with his coat. "Send on my bag," he said, glancing at his watch. "I'm awfully sorry," he added to Charnac. "You'll understand. Explain to them, won't you? Dagneau, stop and finish my supper."

He forgot everything else ... what else mattered?

"Dis donc," Desirée said, "are you going again?" How surprisingly unimportant she seemed at this[340] moment. Her expression was half-suppliant, half-petulant. "If you go," she said distinctly, "I will never speak to you again—never."

As if she could hold him back when others had failed! But he was moved to show her tenderness. A momentary pang of regret shot across him because he had to leave her. "Don't be cross," he whispered. "I shall be back in three days."

She turned her head away impetuously. And he realized that there never had been, nor ever could be, anything in common between them.

Once, when he was dozing in the train speeding southwards to Bordeaux, he woke up and laughed as he remembered the ludicrous amazement on the face of Desirée as he left her suddenly and gladly to take up his work.