The Girl Philippa
shouldn't dare face your wife."
Then they both laughed heartily. They were already on excellent terms.
Already acquaintance was becoming an unembarrassed friendship.
Warner flourished his whip and continued to laugh:
"I have no serious use for women. To me the normal and healthy woman is
as naive as the domestic and blameless cat, whose first ambition is for
a mate, whose second is to be permanently and agreeably protected, and
whose ultimate aim is to acquire a warm basket by the fireside and fill
it full of kittens! ... No; I'm not married. Don't worry, Halkett."
He whistled another bar of his lively song:
"Women? Ha! By the way, I've a bunch of them here in Sais, all
painting away like the devil and all, no doubt laying plans for that
fireside basket. It's the only thing a woman ever really thinks about,
no matter what else she pretends to be busy with. I suppose it's
natural; also, it's natural for some men to shy wide of such things.
I'm one of those men. So, Halkett, as long as you live, you need never
be afraid of offending any wife of mine!"
"Your sentiments," said Halkett, mockingly serious, "merely reveal
another bond between us. I thank God frequently that I am a bachelor."
"Good," said Warner with emphasis. And he chanted gayly, as he drove,
"Gai, gai, marions-nous--" in a very agreeable baritone voice, while the
lights of Sais grew nearer and brighter among the trees below.
"I never saw a girl worth the loss of my liberty," he remarked. "Did
you, Halkett? And," he continued, "to be tied up to a mentally
deficient appendage with only inferior intellectual resources, and no
business or professional occupation--to be tied fast to something that
sits about to be entertained, and that does nothing except nourish
itself and clothe itself, and have babies!--It's unthinkable, isn't it?"
"It's pretty awful.... Of course if a woman came along who combined
looks and intellect and professional self-sufficiency----"
"You don't find them combined. Take a slant at my class. That's the
only sort who even pretend to anything except vacuous idleness. There
are no Portias, Halkett. There never were. If there were, I'd take a
chance myself, I think. But a man who marries the young girl of today
has on his hands an utterly useless incubus. No wonder he sometimes
makes experiments elsewhere. No wonder he becomes a rainbow chaser. But
he's like a caged squirrel in a wheel; the more he runs around looking
for consolation the less progress he makes.
"No, Halkett, this whole marriage business is a pitiable fizzle. Until
both parties to a marriage contract are financially independent,
intellectually self-sufficient, and properly equipped to earn their own
livings by a business or a trade or a profession--and until, if a
mistake has been made, escape from an ignoble partnership is made
legally easy--marriage will remain the sickly, sentimental, pious fraud
which a combination of ignorance, superstition, custom, and orthodoxy
have made it.
"I'm rather eloquent on marriage, don't you think so?"
"Superbly!" said Halkett, laughing. "But, do you know, Warner, your
very eloquence betrays the fact that you have thought as much about it
as the unfortunate sex you have so eloquently indicted."
"What's that?" demanded Warner wrathfully.
"I'm sorry to say it, but you are exactly the sort of man to fall with a
tremendous flop."
"If ever I fall----"
"You fell temporarily this afternoon."
"With that painted, grey-eyed----"
"Certainly, with the girl Philippa. Come, old chap, you were out with
her a long while! What did you two talk about? Love?"
"No, you idiot----"
"You didn't even mention the word 'love'? Be honest, old chap!"
Warner began to speak, checked himself.
"Didn't you or she even mention the subject?" persisted Halkett with
malicious delight.
But Warner was too angry to speak, and the Englishman's laughter rang
out boyishly under the stars. To look at them one would scarcely believe
they had been a target for bullets within the hour.
"You don't suppose," began Warner, "that----"
"No, no!" cried Halkett. "--Not with that girl. I'm merely proving my
point. You're too eloquent concerning women not to have spent a good
deal of time in speculating about them. You even speculated concerning
Philippa. The man who mourns the scarcity of Portias wouldn't be likely
to care for one if he met her. You're just the man to fall in love with
everything you denounce in a girl. And I have no doubt I shall live to
witness that sorrowful spectacle."
Warner had to laugh.
"You are rather a terrifying psychologist," he said. "You almost make me
believe I have a streak of romance in me."
"Oh, we all have that, Warner. We call it by other names--cleverness,
logic, astuteness, intelligence--but we all have it in us, and it is
revealed in every man who marries a woman for love.... Believe me, no
normal man ever lived who was not, at some brief moment in his life, in
love with some woman. Maybe he ignored it and it never came again;
maybe he strangled it and went on about more serious business; maybe it
died a natural but early death. But once, before he died, he must have
had a faint, brief glimpse of it. And that was the naissance of the
latent germ of romance in him--ephemeral, perhaps, but inevitably to be
born before it died."
Warner waved his whip and snapped it maliciously:
"So you have been in love, have you?"
"Why? Because I, also, am suspiciously eloquent?"
"That's the reason--according to you."
Halkett smiled slightly.
"Perhaps I have been," he said.... "Hello! Is this your inn?" as they
drew up before the lighted windows of a two-story building standing
close to the left-hand edge of the highway, under the stars.
"Here we are at the Golden Peach," nodded Warner, as the door opened and
a smiling peasant lad came out with a: "Bon soir, Monsieur Warner! Bon
soir, messieurs!" And he took the horse's head while they descended.
That night, lying awake on his bed in the Inn of the Golden Peach,
Halkett heard the heavy rush of a southbound automobile passing under
his window with the speed of an express train.
And he wondered whether the spongy morass by the little brook still held
the long, grey touring car imprisoned.
He got up, went to his window and leaned out. Far away down the road
the tail lamps of the machine twinkled, dwindled to sparks, and were
engulfed in the invisible.
"More trouble south of me," he thought. But he returned to his bed and
lay there, tranquil in the knowledge that when he started south alone on
the morrow the envelope would not be on his person.
After a while he rose again, walked to the door connecting his room with
Warner's, and opened it cautiously.
"I'm awake," said Warner in a low voice.
"Did you hear that car?"
"Yes. Was it the one that chased us?"
"I only guess so. Listen, Warner! When I go south tomorrow, what are
you going to do with that envelope until I send a man back for it?"
"I've thought it all out, old chap. I shall take one of my new
canvases, lay the envelope on it, cover envelope and canvas with a
quarter of an inch of Chinese White, and when the enamel is dry I shall
paint on it. By the way, did you do your telephoning to your
satisfaction?"
"Entirely, thank you."
"You got your man?"
"I did," said Halkett. "He's on his way here now. Good night. I'll
sleep like a fox, old chap!"
"Good night," said Warner cheerily, enamored with his invention for the
safety of the envelope, as well as with the entire adventure.
That night, while they both slept, far away southward, on a lonely road
in the Vosges, the car which had rushed by under their windows was now
drawn up on the edge of the road.
Four men sat in it, waiting.
Just as dawn broke, what they awaited came up out of the south--a far,
faint rattle announced it, growing rapidly louder; and a motor cyclist,
riding without lights, shot out of the grey obscurity, trailing a
comet's tail of dust.
Head-on he came, like a streak, caught sight suddenly of the motionless
car and of four men standing up in it, ducked and flattened out over his
handlebars as four revolvers poured forth streams of fire.
Motor cycle and rider swerved into the ditch with a crash; the latter,
swaying wide in his saddle, was hurled a hundred feet further through
the air, landing among the wild flowers on the bank above.
He was the man to whom Halkett had telephoned.
He seemed to be very young--an Englishman--with blood on his fair hair,
and his blue eyes partly open.
They searched him thoroughly; and when they could find nothing more they
lifted him between two of them; two others carried the wrecked motor
cycle out across the fields toward the slope of a wooded mountain.
After ten minutes or so, two of the men returned to the car, drew a
couple of short, intrenching spades from the tool box, and went away
again across the fields toward the misty woods.
A throstle in a thorn bush had been singing all the while.
*CHAPTER V*
Halkett had not slept well; all night long in the garden under his
window the nightingales had been very noisy. When he slept, sinister
dreams had assailed him; cocks crowed at sunrise, cowbells tinkled,
outside his drawn blinds a refreshed and garrulous world was awakening;
and the happy tumult awoke him, too.
He was bathed, shaved, and dressed, and downstairs before Warner awoke
at all; and he began to rove about the place which, by daylight, did not
look at all like what he had imagined it to be the night before.
The Inn of the Golden Peach was one of those cream-tinted stucco houses
built into and around a series of haphazard garden walls which inclosed
flower and fruit gardens, cow-barns and stables. Its roof and wall
copings were covered with red tiles, weather-faded to a salmon tint; two
incredible climbing rosebushes nearly covered the front with delicate,
salmon-pink blossoms, and, in the rear, flowers bloomed along
stone-edged borders--masses of white clove pinks, rockets, poppies,
heliotrope, reseda, portulaca, and pansies--a careless riot of color,
apparently, yet set with that instinctive good taste which seldom fails
in France and is common alike to aristocrat and peasant.
Beyond the strawberry beds were fruit trees, peach, cherry, plum, and
apricot--the cherries hanging ripe and deeply crimson among dark green
leaves, the apricots already golden, peaches and plums delicately
painted with a bloom which promised approaching maturity.
Everywhere the grass grew thick and intensely green, though it was not
very neatly kept; water ran out of a stone trough and made a dancing
little rivulet over a bed of artificially set stones among which grew
ferns. Beyond stood a trellised summerhouse, with iron tables and chairs
painted green.
On the edge of the watering trough, Halkett seated himself in the sun.
An immaculate tiger cat sat on the garden walk a few paces away,
polishing her countenance with the velvet side of one forepaw, and
occasionally polishing the paw with a delicate pink tongue.
Once or twice she looked at Halkett without any apparent interest; now
and then she glanced up with more interest at the side of the house
where, under the kitchen door, in a big basket-cage, a jay hopped about,
making a scuffling noise among his cracked maize and rye straw.
However, the cat proved entirely susceptible to flattery, responded
graciously to polite advances, and presently relapsed into a purring
doze on his knee.
It was very still in the garden, too early even for butterflies to be
abroad. The kitchen door remained closed; smoke had just begun to rise
from one chimney.