The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol (American Magazine series)/The Adventure of the Foundling
THE ADVENTURE OF THE
FOUNDLING
There was a time when Aristide Pujol, in sole charge of an automobile, went gaily scuttering over the roads of France. I use the word advisedly. If you had heard the awful thing as it passed by, you would agree that it is the only word adequate to express its hideous mode of progression. It was a two-seated, scratched, battered, ramshackle, tin concern of hoary antiquity, belonging to the childhood of the race. Not only horses, but other automobiles shied at it. It was a vehicle of derision. Yet Aristide regarded it with glowing pride and drove it with such dare-deviltry that the parts must have held together only through sheer, breathless wonder. Had it not been for the car, he told me, he would not have undertaken the undignified employment in which he was then engaged—the mountebank selling of a corn-cure in the public places of small towns and villages. It was not a fitting pursuit for a late managing director of a public company and an ex-Professor of French in an English Academy for Young Ladies. He wanted to rise, ma foi, not descend in the social scale. But when hunger drives—que voulez-vous? Besides, there was the automobile. It is true he had bound himself by his contract to exhibit a board at the back bearing a flaming picture of the success of the cure and a legend, “'Guérissez vos cors,” and to display a banner with the same device, when weather permitted. But still there was the automobile.
It had been lying for many motor-ages in the shed of the proprietors of the cure, the Maison Hiéropath of Marseilles, neglected, forlorn, eaten by rust and worm, when suddenly an idea occurred to their business imagination. Why should they not use the automobile to advertise and sell the cure about the country? The apostle in charge would pay for his own petrol, take a large percentage on sales, and the usual traveler's commission on orders that he might place. But where to find an apostle? Brave and desperate men came in high hopes, looked at the car and, shaking their heads sorrowfully, went away. At last, at the loosest of ends, came Aristide. The splendor of the idea—a poet, in his way, was Aristide, and the Idea was the thing that always held him captive—the splendor of the idea of dashing up to hotels in his own automobile, dazzled him. He beheld himself doing his hundred: kilometres an hour and trailing clouds of glory whithersoever he went. To a child a motheaten rocking-horse is a fiery Arab of the plains; to Aristide Pujol this cheat of the scrapheap was a sixty-horse-power thunderer and devourer of space.
How they managed to botch up her interior so that she moved unpushed is a mystery which Aristide, not divining, could not reveal; and when and where he himself learned to drive a motor-car is also vague. I believe the knowledge came by nature. He was a fellow of many weird accomplishments. He could conjure; he could model birds and beasts out of bread-crumb; he could play the drum—so well that he had a kettle-drum hanging round his neck during most of his military service; he could make omelettes and rabbit-hutches; he could imitate any animal that ever emitted sound—a gift that endeared him to children; he could do almost anything you please—save stay in one place and acquire material possessions. The fact that he had never done a thing before was to him no proof of his inability to doit. In his superb self-confidence he would have undertaken to conduct the orchestra at Covent Garden or navigate a liner across the Atlantic. Knowing this, I cease to bother my head about so small a matter as the way in which he learned to drive a motor-car.
Behold him, then, one raw March morning, scuttering along the road that leads from Arles to Salon in Provence. He wore a goatskin coat and a goat-skin cap drawn down well over his ears. His handsome bearded face, with its lustrous laughing eyes, peeped out curiously human amid the circumambient shagginess. There was not a turn visible in the long, straight road that lost itself in the far distant mist; not a speck on it signifying cart or creature. Aristide Pujol gave himself up to the delirium of speed and urged the half-bursting engine to twenty miles an hour. In spite of the racing-track surface, the crazy car bumped and jolted; the sides of the rickety bonnet clashed like cymbals; every valve wheezed and squealed; every nut seemed to have got loose and terrifically clattered; rattling noises, grunting noises, screeching noises, escaped from every part; it creaked and clanked like an over-insured tramp in a typhoon; it lurched as though afflicted with locomotor ataxia; and noisome vapors belched forth from the open exhaust-pipe as though the car were a Tophet on wheels. But all was music in the ears of Aristide. The car was going (it did not always go), the road scudded under him and the morning air dashed stingingly into his face. For the moment he desired nothing more of life.
This road between Arles and Salon runs through one of the most desolate parts of France: a long, endless plain, about five miles broad, lying between two long, low ranges Of hills. It is strewn like a monstrous Golgotha, not with skulls, but with huge smooth pebbles, as massed together as the shingle on a beach. Rank grass shoots up in what interstices it finds; but beyond this nothing grows. Nothing can grow. On a sunless day under a lowering sky it is a land accursed. Mile after mile for nearly twenty miles stretches this stony and barren waste. No human habitation cheers the sight, for from such a soil no human hand could wrest a sustenance. Only the rare traffic going from Arles to Salon and from Salon to Arles passes along the road. The cheery passing show of the live highway is wanting; there are no children, no dogs, no ducks and hens, no men and women lounging. to their work; no red-trousered soldiers on bicycles, no blue-bloused, weather-beaten farmers jogging along in their little carts. As far as the eye can reach nothing suggestive of man meets the view. Nothing but the infinite barrenness of the plain, the ridges on either side, the long, straight, endless road cleaving through this abomination of desolation.
To walk through it would be a task as depressing as mortal could execute. But to the speed-drunken motorist it is a realization of dim and tremulous visions of Paradise. What need to look to right or left when you are swallowing up free mile after mile of dizzying road? Aristide looked neither to right nor left, and knew this was heaven at last.
Suddenly, however, he became aware of a small black spot far ahead in the very middle of the unencumbered track. As he drew near it looked like a great stone. He swerved as he passed it and, looking, saw that it was a bundle wrapped in a striped blanket. It seemed so odd that it should be lying there that, his curiosity being aroused, he pulled up and walked back a few yards to examine it. The nearer he approached the less did it resemble an ordinary bundle. He bent down and lo! between the folds of the blanket peeped the face of a sleeping child.
“Nom de Dieu!” cried Aristide. “Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!”
He ought not to have said it, but his atonishment was great. He stared at the baby, then up and down the road, then swept the horizon. Not a soul was visible. How did the baby get there? The heavens, according to history, have rained many things in their time: bread, quails, blood, frogs and what not; but there is no mention of their ever having rained babies. It could not, therefore, have come from the clouds. It could not even have fallen from the tail of a cart, for then it would have been killed, or at least have broken its bones and generally been rendered a different baby from the sound, chubby mite sleeping as peacefully as though the Aceldama of Provence had been its cradle from birth. It could not have come there accidentally. Deliberate hands had laid it down; in the center of the road, too. Why not by the side, where it would have been out of the track of thundering automobiles? When the murderous intent became obvious, Aristide shivered and felt sick. He breathed fierce and honest anathema on the heads of the bowelless fiends who had abandoned the babe to its doom. Then he stooped and picked up the bundle tenderly in his arms.
The wee face puckered for a moment and the wee limbs shot out vigorously; then the blue eyes opened and stared Aristide solemnly and wonderingly in the face. So must the infant Remus have first regarded his she-wolf mother. Having ascertained, however, that it was not going to be devoured, it began to cry lustily, showing two little white specks of teeth in the lower gum.
“Mon pauvre petit, you are hungry,” said Aristide, carrying it to the car racked by the vibrating and clattering engine. “I wonder when you last tasted food. If I only had a little biscuit and wine to give you; but alas! there's nothing but petrol and corn-cure, neither of which, I believe, are good for babies. Wait, wait, mon chéri, until we get to Salon. There I promise you proper nourishment.”
He danced the baby up and down in his arms and made half-remembered and insane noises, which eventually had the effect of reducing it to its original calm stare of wonderment.
"Voilà,” said Aristide, delighted. “Now we can advance.”
He deposited it on the vacant seat, clambered up behind the wheel, and started. But not at the break-neck speed of twenty miles an hour. He went slowly and carefully, his heart in his mouth at every lurch of the afflicted automobile, fearful lest the child should be precipitated from its slippery resting-place. But alas! he did not proceed far. At the end of a kilometre the engine stopped dead. He leaped out to see what had happened, and, after a few perplexed and exhausting moments, remembered. He had not even petrol to offer to the baby, having omitted—most feather-headed of mortals—to fill up his tank before starting, and forgotten to bring a spare tin. There was nothing to be done save wait patiently until another motorist should pass by from whom he might purchase the necessary amount of essence to carry him on to Salon. Meanwhile, the baby would go breakfastless. Aristide clambered back to his seat, took the child on his knees and commiserated it profoundly. Sitting there on his apparently home-made vehicle, in the midst of the unearthly silence of the sullen and barren wilderness, attired in his shaggy goatskin cap and coat, he resembled an up-to-date Robinson Crusoe dandling an infant Friday.
The disposal of the child at Salon would be simple. After having it fed and tended at a hotel, he would make his deposition to the police, who would take it to the Enfants Trouvés, the department of state which provides fathers and mothers and happy homes for foundlings at a cost to the country of twenty-five francs a month per foundling. It is true that the parents so provided think more of the twenty-five francs than they do of the foundling. But that was the affair of the state, not of Aristide Pujol. In the meanwhile he examined the brat curiously. It was dressed in a coarse calico jumper, very unclean. The striped blanket was full of holes and stank abominably. Some sort of toilet appeared essential. He got down and from his valise took what seemed necessary to the purpose. The jumper and blanket he threw far on the pebbly waste. The baby, stark naked for a few moments, crowed and laughed and stretched like a young animal, revealing itself to be a sturdy boy about nine months old. When he seemed fit to be clad, Aristide tied him up in the lower part of a suit of pajamas, cutting little holes in the sides for his tiny arms; and, further, with a view to cheating his hunger, provided him with a shoe-horn. The defenseless little head he managed to squeeze into the split mouth of a woollen sock. Aristide regarded him in triumph. The boy chuckled gleefully. Then Aristide folded him warm in his traveling rug and entered into an animated conversation.
Now it happened that, at the most interesting point of the talk, the baby clutched Aristide's finger in his little brown hand. The tiny fingers clung strong. A queer thrill ran through the impressionable man. The tiny fingers seemed to close round his heart. .
It was a bonny, good-natured, gurgling scrap—and the pure blue eyes looked trustfully into his soul.
“Poor little wretch,” said Aristide, who, peasant's son that he was, knew what he was talking about. “Poor little wretch, if you go into the Enfants Trouvés, you'll have a devil of a time of it.”
The tiny clasp tightened. As if the babe understood, the chuckle died from his face.
“You'll be cuffed and kicked and half starved, while your adopted mother pockets her twenty-five francs a month, and you'll belong to nobody, and wonder why the deuce you're alive, and wish you were dead; and, if you remember to-dav, you'll curse me for not having had the decency to run over you.”
The clasp relaxed, puckers appeared at the corners of the dribbling mouth, and a myriad tiny horizontal lines of care marked the sock-capped brow.
“HE BURST INTO A LOUD LAUGH, CLAPPED HIS HANDS AND DANCED BEFORE THE DELIGHTED BABE”
“Poor little devil,” said Aristide. “My heart bleeds for you, especially now that you're dressed in my sock and pajama, and are sucking the only shoe-horn I ever possessed.”
A welcome sound caused Aristide to leap into the middle of the road. He looked ahead, and there in a cloud of dust a thing like a torpedo came swooping down. He held up both his arms, the signal of a motorist in distress. The torpedo approached with slackened speed, and stopped. It was an evil looking, drab, high-powered racer, and two bears with goggles sat in the midst thereof. The bear at the wheel raised his cap and asked courteously:
“What can we do for you, Monsieur?”
At that moment the baby broke into heart-rending cries. Aristide took off his goatskin cap and, remaining uncovered, looked at the bear, then at the baby, then at the bear again.
“Monsieur,” said he, “I suppose it's useless to ask you whether you have any milk and a feeding-bottle.”
“Mais dites donc!” shouted the bear furiously, his hand on the brake. “Stop an automobile like this on such a pretext”
Aristide held up a protesting hand and fixed the bear with the irresistible roguery of his eyes.
“Pardon, Monsieur, I am also out of petrol. Forgive a father's feelings. The baby wants milk and I want petrol, and I don't know whose need is the more imperative. But if you could sell me enough petrol to carry me to Salon, I should be most grateful.”
The request for petrol is not to be refused. To supply it, if possible, is the unwritten law of motordom. The second bear slid from his seat and extracted a tin from the recesses of the torpedo, and stood by. while Aristide filled his tank, a process that necessitated laying the baby on the ground. He smiled.
“You seem amused,” said Aristide.
“Parbleu!” said the motorist. “You have at the back of your auto a placard telling people to cure their corns, and in front you carry a baby.”
“That,” replied Aristide, “is easily understood. I am the agent of the Maison Hiéropath of Marseilles, and the baby, whom I, its father, am carrying from a dead mother to an invalid aunt, I am using as an advertisement. As he luckily has no corns, I can exhibit his feet as a proof of the efficacy of the corn-cure.”'
The bear laughed and joined his companion and the torpedo thundered away. Aristide replaced the baby and with a complicated arrangement of string fastened it securely to the seat. The baby, having ceased crying, clutched his beard as he bent over, and “goo'd” pleasantly. The tug was at his heartstrings. How could he give so fascinating, so valiant a mite over to the Enfants Trouvés? Besides, it belonged to him. Had he not in jest claimed paternity? It had given him a new importance. He could say “mon fils,” just as he could say (with equal veracity) “mon automobile.” A generous thrill ran through him. He burst into a loud laugh, clapped his hands and-danced before the delighted babe.
“Mon petit Jean,” said he, with humorous tenderness, “for I suppose your name is Jean; I will rend-myself in pieces before I let the Administration board you out among the wolves. You shall not to go the Enfants Trouvés. I myself will adopt you, mon petit Jean.'
As Aristide had no fixed abode whatever, the address-printed on his visiting card, “270 bis Rue St. Honoré, Paris,” being that of an old greengrocer woman of his acquaintance, who received and forwarded his letters, there was a certain amount of rashness in the undertaking. But when was Aristide otherwise than rash? Had prudence been his guiding principle through life, he would not have been selling corn-cure for the Maison Hiéropath, and consequently would not have discovered little Jean at all.
In great delight at this satisfactory settlement of little Jean's destiny, he started the ramshackle engine and drove triumphantly on his way. Jean, fatigued by the emotions of the last half hour, slumbered peacefully.
“The little angel,” said Aristide.
The sun was shining when they arrived at Salon, the gayest, the most coquettish, the mést laughing little town in Provence. It is a place all trees, and open spaces, and fountains and caíés, and smiling, sauntering people. The only thing grim about it is the solitary machicolated tower in the main street, the last vestige of ancient ramparts; and even that, close cuddled on each side by prosperous houses with shops beneath, looks like an old, old, wrinkled grandmother smiling amid her daintier grandchildren. Everyone seemed to be in the open air. Those who kept shops stood at the doorways. The prospect augured well for the Maison Hiéropath.
Aristide stopped before a hotel, disentangled Jean, to the mild interest of the passers-by, and, carrying him in, delivered him into the arms of the landlady.
“Madame,” said he, “this is my son. I am taking him from his mother, who is dead, to an aunt who is an invalid. So he is alone on my hands. He is very hungry and I beseech you to feed him at once.'
The motherly woman received the babe instinctively and cast aside the traveling rug in which he was enveloped. Then she nearly dropped him.
“Mon dieu! Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?”
She stared in stupefaction at the stocking cap and at the long flannel pajama legs that depended from the body of the infant around whose neck the waist was tightly drawn. Never since the world began had babe masqueraded in such attire. Aristide smiled his most engaging smile. | .
“My son's luggage has unfortunately been lost. His portmanteau, pauvre petit, was so small. A poor widower, I did what I could. I am but a mere man, Madame.”
“Evidently,” said the woman, with some asperity.
Aristide took a louis from his purse. “If you will purchase him some necessary articles of costume while I fulfil my duties towards the Maison Hiéropath of Marseilles, which I represent, you will be doing me a kindness.”
The landlady took the louis in a bewildered way. Allowing for the baby portmanteau to have gone astray, what, she asked, had become of the clothes he was wearing? Aristide entered upon a picturesque and realistic explanation. The landlady was stout, she was stupid, she could not grasp the fantastic.
“Mon Dieu,” she said. “To think that there are Christians who dress their children like this!” She sighed exhaustively, and holding the grotesque infant close to her breast, disappeared indignantly to administer the very greatly needed motherment.
Aristide breathed a sigh of relief, and after a well-earned déjeuner, went forth with the car into the Place des Arbres and prepared to ply his trade. First he unfurled the Hiéropath banner, which floated proudly in the breeze. Then on a folding table he displayed his collection of ointment-boxes (together with pills and a toothache killer which he sold on his own account) and a wax model of a human foot on which were grafted putty corns in every stage of callosity. As soon as half-a-dozen idlers collected, he commenced his harangue. When their numbers increased he performed prodigies of chiropody on the putty corns and demonstrated the proper application of the cure. He talked incessantly all the while. He has told me, in the grand manner, that this phase of his career was distasteful to him. But I scarcely believe it. If ever a man loved to talk, it was Aristide Pujol; and what profession, save that of an advocate, offers more occasion for wheedling loquacity than that of a public vendor of quack medicaments? As a matter of fact he reveled in it. When he offered a free box of the cure to the first lady who would confess the need thereof, and a blushing wench came forward, the rascal reveled in the opportunity for badinage which set the good-humored crowd in a roar. He loved to exert his half-mesmeric power. He had not the soul of a mountebank, for Aristide's soul had its high and generous dwelling-place; but he had the Puckish swiftness and mischief of which the successful mountebank is made. And he was a success, because he treated it as an art, thinking nothing during its practice of the material gain, laughing whole-heartedly like his great predecessor Tabarin of imperishable memory, and satisfying to the full his instinct for the dramatic. On the other hand, ever since he started life in the steel buttoned shell jacket of a chasseur in a Marseilles café, and dreamed dreams of the fairy-tale lives of the clients who came in accompanied by beautifully dressed ladies, he had social ambitions—and the social status of the mountebank is, to say the least of it, ambiguous. Ah, me! What would man be without the unattainable? An incredible cynic at my elbow says: “A jolly, happy fellow!”
Aristide pocketed his takings, struck his flag, dismantled his table and visited the shops of Salon in the interests of the Maison Hiéropath. The day's work over, he returned to inquire for his supposititious offspring. The landlady, all smiles, presented him with a transmogrified Jean, cleansed and powdered, arrayed in the smug panoply of bourgeois babyhood. Shoes with a pompon adorned his feet and a rakish cap, decorated with white satin ribbons, crowned his head. He also wore an embroidered frock and a pelisse trimmed with rabbit-fur. Jean grinned and dribbled self-consciously, and showed his two little teeth to the proudest father in the world. The landlady invited the happy parent into her little dark parlor beyond the office, and there exhibited a parcel containing garments and implements whose use was a mystery to Aristide. She also demanded the greater part of another louis. Aristide began to learn that fatherhood is expensive. But what did it matter?
“ARISTIDE, IN TERROR LEST HE SHOULD AWAKEN THE WHOLE HOTEL, WALKED HIM ABOUT THE ROOM CHANTING LULLABIES”
After all, here was a babe equipped to face the exigencies of a censorious world; in looks and apparel a credit to any father. As the afternoon was fine, and as it seemed a pity to waste satin and rabbit-fur on the murky interior of the hotel, Aristide borrowed a perambulator from the landlady, and, joyous as a schoolboy, wheeled the splendid infant through the sunny avenues of Salon.
That evening a bed was made up for the child in Aristide's room, which until its master retired for the night was haunted by the landlady, the chambermaids and all the kitchen wenches in the hotel. Aristide had to turn them out and lock his door.
“This is excellent,” said he, apostrophising the thoroughly fed, washed, and now sleeping child. “This is superb. As in every hotel there are women, and as every woman thinks she can be a much better mother than I, so in every hotel we visit we shall find a staff of trained and enthusiastic nurses. Jean, you will live like a little coq en pâte.”
The night passed amid various excursions on the part of Aristide and alarms on the part of Jean. Sometimes the child lay so still that Aristide arose to see whether he was alive. Sometimes he gave such proofs of vitality that Aristide, in terror lest he should awaken the whole hotel, walked him about the room chanting lullabies. This was in accordance with Jean's views on luxury. He “goo'd” with joy. When Aristide put him back to bed, he howled. Aristide snatched him up and he “goo'd” again. At last Aristide fed him desperately, dandled him eventually to sleep and returned to an excited pillow. It is a fearsome thing for a man to be left alone in the dead of night with a young baby.
“I'll get used to it,” said Aristide.
The next morning he purchased a basket which he lashed ingeniously on the left hand seat of the car, and a cushion which he fitted into the basket. The berth prepared, he deposited the sumptuously appareled Jean therein and drove away, amid the perplexed benisons of the landlady and her satellites.
Thus began the oddest Odyssey on which ever mortals embarked. The man with the automobile, the corn-cure and the baby grew to be legendary in the villages of Provence. When the days were fine, Jean in his basket assisted at the dramatic performance in the market-place. Becoming a magnet for the women, and being of a good-humored and rollicking nature, he helped on the sale of the cure prodigiously. He earned his keep, as Aristide declared in exultation. Soon Aristide formed a collection of his tricks and doings wherewith he would entertain the chance acquaintances of his vagabondage. To a permanent companion he would have grown insufferable. He invented him a career from the day of his birth, chronicled the coming of the first tooth, wept over the demise of the fictitious mother, and, in his imaginative way, convinced himself of his fatherhood. And every day the child crept deeper into the man's sunny heart.
Together they had many wanderings and many adventures. The wheezy, crazy mechanism of the car went to bits in unexpected places. They tobogganed down hills without a brake at the imminent peril of their lives. They suffered the indignity of being towed by wine-wagons. They spent hours by the way- side while Aristide took her to pieces and, sometimes with the help of a passing motorist, put her together again. Sometimes, too, an inn boasted no landlady; only a disheveled and overdriven chambermaid who refused to wash Jean. Aristide washed and powdered Jean himself, the landlord lounging by, pipe in mouth, administering suggestions. Once Jean grew ill and Aristide in terror summoned the doctor, who told him that he had filled the child up with milk to bursting point. Yet, in spite of heterogeneous nursing and exposure to sun and rain and piercing Mistral, Jean throve exceedingly and, to Aristide's delight, began to cut another tooth. The vain man began to regard himself as an expert in denticulture.
At the end of a fairly wide circuit, Aristide, with empty store boxes and pleasantly full pockets, arrived at the little town of Aix-en-Provence. He had arrived there not without difficulty. On the outskirts, the car, which had been coaxed reluctantly along for many weary kilometres, had groaned, rattled, whirred, given a couple of convulsive leaps and stood stock still. This was one of her pretty ways. He was used to them and hitherto he had been able to wheedle her into resumed motion. But this time, with all his cunning and perspiration, he could not induce another throb in the tired engines. A friendly motorist towed them to the Hótel de Paris in the Cours Mirabeau. Having arranged for his room and given Jean in charge of the landlady, he procured some helping hands and pushed the car to the nearest garage. There he gave orders for the car to be put into running condition for the following morning, and returned to the hotel.
He found Jean in the vestibule, sprawling sultanesquely on the landlady's lap, the center of an admiring circle which consisted of two little girls in pigtails, an ancient peasant woman and two English ladies of obvious but graceful spinsterhood.
“Here is the father,” said the landlady.
“WHEN THE DAYS WERE FINE, JEAN IN HIS BASKET ASSISTED AT THE DRAMATIC PERFORMANCE IN THE MARKET-PLACE
He had already explained Jean to the startled woman—landladies were always startled at Jean's unconventional advent. “Madame,” he had said, according to rigid formula, “this is my son. I am taking him from his mother, who is dead, to an aunt who is an invalid, so he is alone on my hands. I beseech you to let some kind woman attend to his necessities.”
There was no need of further explanation. Aristide, thus introduced, bowed politely, removed his Crusoe cap, and smiled luminously at the assembled women. They resumed their antiphonal chorus of worship. The brown, merry, friendly brat had something of Aristide's personal charm. He had a bubble and a goo for everyone. Aristide looked on in great delight. Jean was a son to be proud of.
“Ah! qu'il est fort—fort comme un Turc.”
“Regardez ses dents.”
“The darling thing!”
“Il est—oh dear!—il est ravissante!”—with a disastrous plunge into gender.
“Tiens! il rit. C'est moi qui le fais rire.”
“To think,” said the younger Englishwoman to her sister, “of this wee mite traveling about in an open motor.”
“He's having the time of his life. He enjoys it as much as I do,” said Aristide in his excellent English.
The lady started. She was a well-bred, good-humored woman in the middle thirties, stout, with reddish hair and irregular though comely features. Her sister was thin, faded, sandy and kind-looking.
“I thought you were French,” she said, apologetically.
“So I am,” replied Aristide. “Provençal of Provence, Méridional of the Midi, Marseillais of Marseilles.”
“But you talk English perfectly.”
“I've lived in your beautiful country,” said Aristide.
“You have the bonniest boy,” said the elder lady. “How old is he?”
- Nine months three weeks and a day,” said Aristide promptly.
The younger lady bent over the miraculous infant.
“Can I take him? Est-ce que je puis—oh dear'—” she turned a whimsical face to Aristide.
He translated. The landlady surrendered the babe. The lady danced him with the spinster's charming awkwardness, yet with instinctive feminine security, about the hall, while the little girls in pigtails, daughters of the house, followed like adoratory angels in an altar piece, and the old peasant woman looked benignly on, a myriad-wrinkled Saint Elizabeth. Aristide had seen Jean dandled by dozens of women, during their brief comradeship; he had thought little of it, as it was the natural thing for women to do; but when this sweet English lady mothered Jean, it seemed to matter a great deal. She lifted Jean and himself to a higher plane. Her touch was a consecration.
It was the hour of the day when infants of nine months should be washed and put to bed. The landlady, announcing the fact, held out her arms. Jean clung to his English nurse, who played the fascinating game of pretending to eat his hand. The landlady had not that accomplishment. She was dull and practical.
“Come and be washed,” she said.
“Oh, do let me come too,” cried the English lady.
“Bien volontiers, Mademoiselle,” said the other. “C'est par ici.”
The English lady held Jean out for the paternal good night, Aristide kissed the child in her arms. The action brought about, for the moment, a curious and sweet intimacy.
“My sister is passionately fond of children,” said the elder lady, in smiling apology.
“And you?”
“I too. But Anne—my sister—will not let me have a chance when she is by.”
After dinner Aristide went up, as usual, to his room to see that Jean was alive, painless and asleep. Finding him awake, he sat by his side, and with the earnestness of a nursery-maid, patted him off to slumber. Then he went out on tiptoe and went downstairs. Outside the hotel he came upon the two sisters sitting on a bench and drinking coffee. The night was fine, the terraces of the neighboring cafés were filled with people, and all the life of Aix, not at the cafés, promenaded up and down the wide and pleasant avenue. The ladies smiled. How was the boy? He gave the latest news. Permission to join them at their coffee was graciously given. A waiter brought a chair and he sat down. Conversation drifted from the baby to general topics. The ladies told the simple story of their tour. They had been to Nice and Marseilles, and they were going on the next day to Avignon. They also told their name—Honeywood. He gathered that the elder was Janet, the younger Anne. They lived at Chiselhurst when they were in England, and often came up to London to attend the Queen's Hall Concerts and the dramatic performances at His Majesty's Theatre. As guileless, though as self-reliant gentlewomen as sequestered England could produce. Aristide, impressionable and responsive, fell at once into the key of their talk. He has told me that their society produced on him the effect of the cool hands of saints against his cheek.
At last the conversation inevitably returned to Jean. The landlady had related the tragic history of the dead mother and the invalid aunt. They deplored the orphaned state of the precious babe. For he was precious, they declared. Miss Anne had taken him to her heart.
“If only you had seen him in his bath, Janet!”
She turned to Aristide. “I'm afraid,” she said very softly, hesitating a little—“I'm afraid this must be a sad journey for you.”
He made a wry mouth. The sympathy was so sincere, so womanly. That which was generous in him revolted against acceptance.
“Mademoiselle,” said he, “I can play a farce with landladies—it happens to be convenient—in fact, necessary. But with you—no. You are different. Jean is not my child, and who his parents are I've not the remotest idea.”
“Not your child?” They looked at him incredulously.
“I will tell you—in confidence,” said he.
Jean's history was related in all its picturesque details; the horrors of the life of an enfant trouvé luridly depicted. The sisters listened with tears in their foolish eyes. Behind the tears Anne's grew bright. When he had finished she stretched out her hand impulsively.
“Oh, I call it splendid of you!”
He took the hand, and in his graceful French fashion, touched it with his lips. She flushed, having expected in her English way, that he would grasp it.
“Your commendation, Mademoiselle, is sweet to hear,” said he.
“I hope he will grow up to be a true comfort to you, Monsieur Pujol,” said Miss Janet.
“I can understand a woman doing what you've done, but scarcely a man,” said Miss Anne.
“But, dear Mademoiselle,” cried Aristide, with a large gesture, “cannot a man have his heart touched, his—his—ses entrailles, enfin—stirred by baby fingers? Why should love of the helpless and the innocent, of a forsaken and hapless child be denied him?”
“JEAN'S HISTORY WAS RELATED IN ALL ITS PICTURESQUE DETAILS; THE HORRORS OF THE LIFE OF AN ENFANT TROUVÉ LURIDLY DEPICTED”
“Why indeed?” said Miss Janet.
Miss Anne said humbly: “I only meant that your devotion to Jean was all the more beautiful, Monsieur Pujol.”
Soon after this they parted, the night air having grown chill. Both ladies shook hands with him warmly. Anne's lingered the fraction of a second longer in his than Janet's. She had seen Jean in his bath.
Aristide wandered down the gay avenue into the open road and looked at the stars, reading in their splendor a brilliant destiny for Jean. He felt, in his sensitive way, that the two sweet-souled English women had deepened and sanctified his love for Jean. When he returned to the hotel, he kissed his incongruous room-mate with the gentleness of a woman.
In the morning he went round to the garage. The foreman mechanician advanced to meet him.
“Well?”
“There's nothing to be done, Monsieur.”
“What do mean by 'nothing to be done'?” asked Aristide.
The other shrugged his sturdy shoulders.
“She is worn out. She needs new carburation, new cylinders, new water-circulation, new lubrication, new valves, new brakes, new ignition, new gears, new bolts, new nuts, new everything. In short, she is not repairable.”
Aristide listened in incredulous amazement. His automobile, his wonderful, beautiful, clashing, dashing automobile unrepairable! It was impossible. But a quarter of an hour's demonstration by the foreman convinced him. The car was dead. The engine would never whirr again. All the petrol in the world would not stimulate her into life. Never again would he sit behind that wheel rejoicing in the insolence of speed. The car, which in spite of her manifold infirmities, he had fondly imagined to be immortal, had run her last course. Aristide felt faint.
“And there is nothing to be done?”
“Nothing, Monsieur. Fifty francs is all that she is worth.”
“At any rate,” said Aristide, “send the basket to the Hôtel de Paris.”
He went out of the garage like a man in a dream. At the door he turned to take a last look at the Pride of his Life. Her stern was towards him and all he saw of her was the ironical legend: “Cure your Corns.”
At the hotel he found the bench outside occupied chiefly by Jean. One of the little girls in pigtails was holding him, while Miss Anne administered the feeding-bottle. Provincial France is the happiest country in the world in that you can live your intimate, domestic life in public, and nobody heeds.
“I hope you've not come to tell Jean to boot and saddle,” said Miss Anne, a smile on her roughly-hewn, comely face.
“Alas!” said Aristide, cheered by the charming spectacle before him. “I don't know when we can get away. My auto has broken down hopelessly. I ought to go at once to my firm in Marseilles” (he spoke as if he were a partner in the Maison Hiéropath) “but I don't quite know what to do with Jean.”
“Oh, I'll look after Jean.”
“But you said you were leaving for Avignon to-day.”
She laughed, holding the feeding-bottle. “The Palace of the Popes has been standing for six centuries, and it will be still standing to-morrow; whereas Jean—” here Jean, for some reason known to himself, grinned wet and wide—“Isn't he the most fascinating thing of the Twentieth Century?” she cried, logically inconsequential, like most of her sex. “You go to Marseilles, Monsieur Pujol.”
So Aristide took the train to Marseilles—a half hour's journey—and in a quarter of the city resembling a fusion of Jarrow, an unfashionable part of St. Louis and a brimstone-manufacturing suburb of Gehenna, he interviewed the high authorities of the Maison Hiéropath. His cajolery could lead men into diverse lunacies, but it could not induce the hard-bitten manufacturer of quack remedies to provide a brand new automobile. The old auto had broken down. The manufacturer shrugged his shoulders. The mystery was that it had lasted as long as it did. The idea had originally been that of the junior partner, a scatter-brained youth whom at times they humored. Meanwhile, there being no be-placarded and be-flagged automobile, there could be no advertisement; therefore they had no further use for Monsieur Pujol's services.
“Good,” said Aristide when he reached the evil thoroughfare. “It was a degraded occupation and I am glad I am out of it. Meanwhile, here is Marseille before me, and it will be astonishing if I do not find some fresh road to fortune before the day is out.”
Aristide tramped and tramped all day through the streets of Marseilles, but the road he sought he did not find. He returned to Aix in dire perplexity. He was used to finding himself suddenly cut off from a means of livelihood. It was his chronic state of being. His gay resourcefulness had always carried him through. But then there had been only himself to think of. Now there was Jean. For the first time for many years the dragon-fly's wings grew limp.
Jean had already gone to sleep when he arrived. All day he had been as good as gold; so Miss Anne declared. For herself, she had spent the happiest day of her liíe.
“I don't wonder at your being devoted to him, Monsieur Pujol,” she said. “He has the most loving ways of any baby I ever met.”
Miss Janet joined them in the hall. They went in to dinner, Aristide sitting at the central table d'hôte, the ladies at a little table by themselves. After dinner they met again outside the hotel, and drank coffee and talked the evening away. He was not as bright a companion as on the night before. His gaiety was forced. He talked about everything else in the world but Jean. The temptation to pour his domestic troubles into the sympathetic ears of these two dear women he resisted. They regarded him as on a social equality, as a man of means engaged in some sort of business at Marseilles; they had invited him to bring Jean to see them at Chiselhurst. Pride forbade him to confess himself a homeless, penniless vagabond.
They retired early. Aristide again sought the message of the stars; but the sky was clouded over and soon a fine rain began to fall. A bock at a café brought him neither comfort nor inspiration. He returned to the hotel, and eluding a gossip-seeking landlady, went up to his room.
What could be done? Neither the sleeping babe nor himself could offer any suggestion. One thing was grimly inevitable. He and Jean must part. To carry him about like an infant prince in an automobile, had, after all, been a simple matter; to drag him through Heaven knew what hardships in his makeshift existence, was impossible. In his childlike, impulsive fashion he had not thought of the future when he adopted Jean. Aristide felt that the end of the world had come. His pacing to and fro awoke the child, who demanded, in his own way, the soothing rocking of his father's arms. There he bubbled and coo'd, till Aristide's heart nearly broke.
“What can I do with you, mon petit Jean?”
The Enfants Trouvés, after all? He thought of it with a shudder.
The child asleep again, he laid it on its bed, and then sat far into the night thinking barrenly. At last one of his sudden gleams of inspiration illuminated his mind. It was the only way. He took out his watch. It was four o'clock. What had to be done must be done swiftly.
In the traveling basket, which had been sent from the garage, he placed a pillow, and on to the pillow he transferred with breathless care the sleeping Jean, and wrapped him up snug and warm in bedclothes. Then he folded the tiny day garments that lay on a chair, collected the little odds and ends belonging to the child, took from his valise the rest of Jean's little wardrobe, and laid it at the foot of the basket. The most miserable man in France then counted up his money, divided it into two parts, wrote a hasty letter, which with the bundle of notes he enclosed in an envelope.
“My little Jean,” said he, laying the envelope on the child's breast. “Here is a little more than half my fortune. Half is for yourself and the little more to pay your wretched father's hotel bill. Good-bye, my little Jean. Je t'aime bien, tu sais—and don't reproach me.”
About an hour afterwards Miss Anne awoke and listened, and in a moment or two Miss Janet awoke also.
“Janet, do you hear that?”
“It's a child crying. It's outside the door.”
“It sounds like Jean.”
“Nonsense, my dear!”
But Anne switched on the light and went to see for herself; and there, in the tiny ante-room that separated the bedroom from the corridor, she found the basket—a new Pharaoh's daughter before a new little Moses in the bulrushes. In bewilderment she brought the ark into the room, and read the letter addressed to Janet and herself. She burst into tears. All she said was:
“Oh, Janet, why couldn't he have told us?”
And then she fell to hugging the child to her bosom.
Meanwhile Aristide Pujol, clad in his goatskin cap and coat, valise in hand, was plodding through the rain in scarch of the elusive phantom, fortune; gloriously certain that he had assured Jean's future, yet with such a heartache as he had never had in his life before.