The golden journey of Mr. Paradyne
the fact of the fair at Chartres. The child still held out her hand
and murmured her claim for six sous. A plunge into his trousers pocket
brought up a handful of French money. He gave her a franc and waved her
away. She ran off somewhat scared by his madness, but exuberant at his
generosity.
‘I give it up,’ said Cosmo Paradyne.
But he didn’t. In the breast-pocket of his golfing jacket he found
the travelling wallet which he had filled that Saturday night at
Ealing. He examined its contents. One first-class ticket for London to
Boulogne--that was obviously the one destined for Martha; his own he
must have used; three ten-pound notes--he had put ten into the wallet;
so he must have changed seventy pounds English money. A wad of French
hundred-franc notes. Cards and prescriptions. The soiled Chemin de Fer
card. Also a new document or two. One, a dirty piece of coarse paper
which he unfolded, was a receipt in French, villainously written and
spelled, for the purchase of the caravan, stock and horse. It was
made out in his name, Monsieur Cosmo Paradyne. It was duly stamped,
signed Galéo Gaspard, and dated the twelfth of June. He scratched a
puzzled head. That was Tuesday in Whitsun week. The dates in his mind
were clear. The Courts rose on the eighth. He had decided to start
for Le Touquet on the fifth. The night when he went forth from his
house, key in pocket, was that of Saturday the second of June. Ten days
therefore had elapsed between his midnight walk and his purchase of
this ridiculous outfit.
Another document, stamped with the stamp of the Republic, was a
hawker’s licence.
He sighed and entered the caravan, hung, roof and sides, with pots and
pans and gaudy scarves and encumbered with battered cases of cheap
cutlery, and perceived at the end a cupboard, which, when opened, he
found to be stored with food and cooking utensils. There was half a
vast circular loaf; eggs, butter, coffee, a good twelve inches of
mighty sausage. On the floor stood a tin ewer filled with water. He
found also an elementary toilet equipment which, certainly, had never
seen Ealing.
For Cosmo Paradyne the history of the next hour or two was surprise
piled on astonishment. A glimpse in a small hanging mirror showed a
bronzed almost youthful face and clear eyes. His hands were brown and
the palms curiously hardened. To make coffee and boil eggs for the
satisfaction of an unprecedented hunger seemed a matter of everyday
habit. He ate the food with extraordinary relish. As he shaved and
washed, there lurked at the back of his mind a dim consciousness of
having gone through the same performances amid the same surroundings
for a long time past. He seemed to know that stuffed away at the bottom
of the cupboard were his golf stockings and knickerbockers and cap. A
prescient glance around showed him on a ledge a coarse, peasant’s straw
hat with a floppy brim which he recognized as his ordinary daily wear.
He put it on and went out into the early morning sunshine and drew
great breaths of the sweet air.
He laughed, exhilarated by a new sensation as though he had undergone
a radical physical change. What was it? It took him some time to
realize that never before had he been conscious of such supreme and
exhilarating health. It was a joy to feel the spring in his mere tread.
He lit his pipe and hands in pockets stared, with proprietary air,
over the illimitable landscape of La Beauce. Then he walked round his
perambulating property. A big-boned brown horse ceased his munching as
he approached and thrust forth a questing muzzle. At the back of the
vehicle he found a bag of provender and a wooden pail of water from
which he administered to the animal’s needs.
He reflected for a moment. There was a horse, there was a thing on
wheels. The logical procedure was to harness the horse and travel on,
all the more because no earthly purpose could be served by remaining
stationary in the wilderness. It was only when he had attached the
animal, in the most business-like way, between the shafts, that he
began to wonder how the deuce he had managed to do it. His life had
been passed remote from horses. Never had he driven or ridden, still
less, harnessed one. It was amazing.
Stooping down he picked up the silver flageolet which he had all but
forgotten. How went the air which he had played that morning and which
had brought back those clear pictures of his garden in Ealing? He could
not remember. Even with the instrument to his lips and his fingers on
the stops he could not recall it. It had gone like elfin music heard in
a dream.
‘It’s all damned queer,’ said he.
For a while past there had been a scant traffic along the endless road;
farmers’ carts, lumbering waggons and here and there a brisk little
ramshackle motor-car. He clambered to the platform above the shafts,
took the reins and the horse moved on at a sober walk. He lit another
pipe and reconstructed his elusive history. And now, having got
his brain into working order, he concentrated it on the facts such
as he knew them. The key in his pocket, the singularly unclean shirt
that he was wearing, proved that he had journeyed straight from Ealing
to his present position near Chartres. He had therefore mysteriously
disappeared from his home. He grasped at the sudden realization of what
this must have meant to Martha.
He dropped the reins and sat, feet dangling, horror-stricken, while
the horse plodded stolidly on. For the twenty years of their married
life, during his brief and rare absences from home, she had never been
without full news of his whereabouts. She must have been, must still
be, frantic with anxiety. He must telegraph to her at once. Why not
leave this ridiculous gipsy van on the road and beg a lift from the
first passing car to Chartres? Possibly, if one had passed just then,
he would have obeyed the impulse. But these were days long before the
war, when small busy cars were not yet as ants along the roads of
France.
By the time one rattled by, his exact mind had grappled with
the circumstances. That he should be the hero of a ‘mysterious
disappearance’ was incredible. Martha, a capable woman, would at once
have put the police on his track. A well-known man dressed in golf
clothes and without any luggage couldn’t make his way from London to
Folkestone to Boulogne, without leaving behind him a thousand traces of
his passing. People didn’t disappear in such simple and casual fashion.
The sensitive network of civilization rendered it an impossibility. If
he had been wandering about suffering from loss of memory, some tactful
messenger would have discovered him and brought him home.
Well, he would send his telegram, give the caravan to the first blind
beggar, and start at once for England. How he should manage to account
for his defection in the matter of ‘Phillibert _v._ Phillibert, Cohen
& Smith,’ he did not know. But he surely could get back in time
for the re-opening of the Courts--the Trinity sittings--and leave the
necessary excuses to the wit of his excellent clerk. He had a heavy
couple of months before him. The old sixteen hours a day grind. Loss of
memory or not, he must have had a marvellous holiday to put him in this
pink of physical condition.
‘Poor old Martha _must_ know,’ said he.
He found himself all at once in a low, whitewashed village straggling
on each side of the road. Outside an _estaminet_ decorated with the
double dice box indicating that it was also a _débit de tabac_ hung a
row of newspapers in a tin file. It struck him that he had not seen a
paper for some days. He descended and bought one.
It bore the date of the tenth of September.
The horse, without his conscious guidance, took the bewildered man to
Chartres. There he pulled new-found wits together. He took his midday
meal in the _salle à manger_ of a humble inn full of country folk who
had come for the morrow’s fair. His caravan he had left by the wayside
on the entrance avenue of plane-trees, in charge of a shock-headed boy,
one of a family owning a yellow-and-red-striped caravan, apparently in
an analogous line of business with his own. In those far-off blissful
days, a five-franc piece shone vast and silvery before lowly eyes....
He had entered the humble inn instinctively, as one accustomed to such
accommodation, without giving a thought to the pretentious Hôtel du
Grand Monarque on the _great_ place, where the refined of all nations
naturally sought their sustenance.
He sat down at a crowded table between a wizened, blue-bloused peasant
with a cropped white head and a neck like that of a moulting parrot
craning over a dingy white collar around which was tied a half-inch
of black ribbon by way of cravat, and a buxom farm-wife in spotless
head-gear, brilliant silk neckerchief and great gold earrings. They
ate lusciously with great clatter and prestidigitation of knives, and
drank the little grey stony wine, and talked of crops and cattle and
marriages and deaths.
And Paradyne, as brown and dusty and with as little outer pretensions
to gentility as any of them, found himself talking to his neighbours
of these elemental things with a familiarity born of custom. And then
from the lady: ‘Monsieur was a stranger in the _pays_?’ Yes, he was
a _marchand forain_, a hawker. He sold a bit of everything and went
where he thought the market was best. She opined that one must make
_pas mal_--a tidy bit--of money. But for herself she did not like the
adventurous life. Not that she had tried it. She could not conceive
happiness outside the family. _Tiens_, she had a husband--she made a
movement of her head towards a food-absorbing male by her side--and
five children. She lived at Gallardon eighteen kilometres off, and had
no desire to travel. Once had she been to Paris; but _oh, là, là!_
No, truly the family was the only thing. But he must have a family
somewhere?
Like Peter he denied instantly. No, he was alone, taking his food
where he could find it. In her Gaulish fashion she twitted him with
having families scattered along the highroads of France. This delicate
impeachment he again denied, whereupon the lady, with a laughing glance
out of dark eyes, and an ‘_allons donc!_’ thrust an arch elbow into his
ribs. And when her husband claimed her attention, he talked to the old
farmer about weather and wheat and apples and _rillettes_, the sausages
that were served to them, and all the other wonders of La Beauce. And
Cosmo Paradyne knew that for three months he had been leading this life
of open air and earth and primitive interests, and, in some odd way,
had fallen victim to its fascination.
On a hurried, worried holiday some years before he had visited Chartres
with his wife, and had made his intellectual man’s pilgrimage to the
cathedral.
Be it insisted on here, by the way, that no haggis was more tightly
stuffed with giblets and oatmeal than was Cosmo Paradyne with
knowledge. From pre-Winchester days onwards he had been the paragon
of examinees. His career had been one of meteoric brilliance. In his
course he had made himself easy master of three foreign languages,
German, Italian and French; his musical ear, his one æsthetic gift, had
caught and assimilated the accents; after a day or two among a foreign
peasantry he could reproduce their intonations, and his marvellous
memory could store the patois words which he picked up.... So was he
master of the historical or archæological side of the arts of painting
and architecture. His mind had ever been receptive of facts, and,
tenaciously holding them, of co-ordinating them into an imperishable