The Wonderful Year. William John Locke

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СКАЧАТЬ across the label ran the inscription, “Mlle. Hastings.”

      “Mademoiselle Hastings!” cried Martin. “Why, that is the lady I am expecting.”

      The waiter smiled copiously. Monsieur was a friend of Miss Hastings? Then it was a different matter. Mademoiselle said she would be back to-night and that was why her bottle of Evian had been preserved for her. She was the only one left of the enormous clientèle of the restaurant. It was a restaurant of students. In the students’ season, not a table for the chance comer. All engaged. The students paid so much per week or per month for nourishment. It really was a pension, enfin, for board without lodging. When the students were away from Paris the restaurant was kept open at a loss; not a very great loss, for in Paris one knew how to accommodate oneself to circumstance. Good provincials and English tourists sometimes wandered in. One always then indicated the decorations, real masterpieces some of them. … Only a day or two ago an American traveller had taken photographs. If Monsieur would deign to look round …

      Martin deigned. Drawings in charcoal and crayon on the distempered walls, caricatures, bold nudes, bars of music, bits of satiric verse, flowing signatures, bore evidence of the passage of many generations of students.

      “It amuses them,” said the waiter, “and gives the place a character.”

      He was pointing out the masterpieces when a young voice by the door sang out:

      “Hallo, Martin!”

      Martin turned and met the welcoming eyes of Corinna Hastings, fair-haired, slender, neatly dressed in blue serge coat and skirt and a cheap little hat to which a long pheasant’s feather gave a touch of bravado.

      “You’re a real Godsend,” she declared. “I was thinking of throwing myself into the river, only there would have been no one on the deserted bridge to fish me out again. I am the last creature left in Paris.”

      “I am more than lucky then to find you, Corinna,” said Martin. “For you’re the only person in Paris that I know.”

      “How did you find my address?”

      “I went down to Wendlebury——”

      “Then you saw them all?” said Corinna, as they took their seats at the window-table. “Father and mother and Bessie and Joan and Ada, etcetera, etcetera down to the new baby. The new baby makes ten of us alive—really he’s the fourteenth. I wonder how many more there are going to be?”

      “I shouldn’t think there would be any more,” replied Martin gravely.

      Corinna burst out laughing.

      “What on earth can you know about it?”

      The satirical challenge brought a flush to Martin’s sallow cheek. What did he know in fact of the very intimate concerns of the Reverend Thomas Hastings and his wife?

      “I’m afraid they find it hard to make both ends meet, as it is,” he explained.

      “Yet I suppose they all flourish as usual—playing tennis and golf and selling at bazaars and quarrelling over curates?”

      “They all seem pretty happy,” said Martin, not overpleased at his companion’s airy treatment of her family. He, himself, the loneliest of men, had found grateful warmth among the noisy, good-hearted crew of girls. It hurt him to hear them contemptuously spoken of.

      “It was the first time you went down since——!” she paused.

      “Since my mother died? Yes. She died early in May, you know.”

      “It must be a terrible loss to you,” said Corinna in a softened voice.

      He nodded and looked out of window at the houses opposite. That was why he was in Paris. For the last ten years, ever since his father’s death had hurried him away from Cambridge, after a term or two, into the wide world of struggle for a living, he had spent all his days of freedom in the little Kentish town. And these days were few. There were no long luxurious vacations at Margett’s Universal College, such as there are at ordinary colleges and schools. The grind went on all the year round, and the staff had but scanty holidays. Such as they were he passed them at his mother’s tiny villa. His father had given up the chaplaincy in Switzerland, where he had married and where Martin had been born, to become Vicar of Wendlebury, and Mr. Hastings was his successor. Mrs. Overshaw, with her phlegmatic temperament, had taken root in Wendlebury and there Martin had visited her and there he had been received into the intimacy of the Hastings family and there she had died; and now that the little villa was empty and Martin had no place outside London to lay his leisured head, he had satisfied the dream of his life and come to Paris. But even in this satisfaction there was pain. What was Paris compared with the kind touch of that vanished hand? He sighed. He was a simple soul in spite of his thirty years.

      The waiter roused him from his sad reflections by bringing the soup and a bottle of thin red wine. Conscious of food and drink and a female companion of prepossessing exterior, Martin’s face brightened.

      “It’s so jolly of them in Paris to throw in wine like this,” said he.

      “I only hope you can drink the stuff,” remarked Corinna. “We call it tord-boyau.”

      “It’s a rare treat,” said Martin. “I can’t afford wine in England, and the soup is delicious. Somehow no English landlady ever thinks of making it.”

      “England is a beast of a place,” said Corinna.

      “Yet in your letter you called Paris a God-forsaken city.”

      “So it is in August. The schools are closed. Not a studio is open. Every single student has cleared out and there’s nothing in the world to do.”

      “I’ve found heaps to do,” said Martin.

      “The Pantheon and Notre Dame and the Folies Bergère,” said Corinna. “There’s also the Eiffel Tower. Imagine a three years’ art-student finding fun on the Eiffel Tower!”

      “Then why haven’t you gone home this August as usual?” asked Martin.

      Corinna knitted her brows. “That’s another story,” she replied shortly.

      “I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to be impertinent,” said Martin.

      She laughed. “Don’t be silly—you think wallowing in the family trough is the height of bliss. It isn’t. I would sooner starve than go back. At any rate I should be myself, a separate entity, an individual. Oh, that being merely a bit of clotted family! How I should hate it!”

      “But you would return to Paris in the autumn,” said Martin.

      Again she frowned and broke her bread impatiently. All that was another story. “But never mind about me. Tell me about yourself, Martin. Perhaps we may fix up something merry to do together. Père la Chaise or the Tomb of Napoleon. How long are you staying in Paris?”

      “I can only afford a week—I’ve already had three days. I must look out for another billet as soon as possible.”

      “Another billet?”

      Her question reminded him СКАЧАТЬ