The Wonderful Year. William John Locke

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СКАЧАТЬ on this basis that I am about to deliver the judgment for which I have duly received my fee of ten francs.”

      He moistened his lips with the pink syrup. For the picture you can imagine a grey old lion eating ice-cream.

      “You, Corinna,” he continued, “belong to the new race of women whose claims on life far exceed their justification. You have as assets youth, a modicum of beauty, a bright intelligence and a stiff little character. But, as you rightly say, you are capable of nothing in the steep range of human effort from painting a picture to washing a baby. Were you not temperamentally puritanical and intellectually obsessed by the modern notion of woman’s right to an independent existence, you would find a means of realising the above-mentioned assets, as your sex has done through the centuries. But in spite of amazonian trifling with romantic-visaged and granite-headed medical students, you cling to the irresponsibilities of a celibate career.”

      “If he asked me, I’d marry a Turk to-morrow,” said Corinna.

      “Don’t interrupt,” said Fortinbras. “You disturb the flow of my ideas. I have no doubt that, in your desperate situation, you would promise to marry a Turk; but your essential pusillanimity would make you wriggle out of it at the last moment. You’re like ‘the poor cat in the adage.’ ”

      “What cat?” asked Corinna.

      “The one in Macbeth, Act i, Scene 3, a play by Shakespeare. ‘Letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would,” like the poor cat i’ the adage.’ You require development, my dear Corinna, out of the cat stage. You have had your head choked with ideas about things in this soul-suffocating Paris, and the ideas are tormenting you; but you’ve never been at grips with things themselves. As for our excellent Martin, he has not even arrived at the stage of the desirous cat.”

      The smile that lit up his coarse, lined features, and the musical suavity of his voice divested the words of offence. Martin, with a laugh, assented to the proposition.

      “He, too, needs development,” Fortinbras went on. “Or rather, not so much development as a collection of soul-material from which development may proceed. Your one accomplishment, I understand, is riding a bicycle. Let us take that as the germ from which the tree of happiness may spring. Do you bicycle, Corinna?”

      “I can, of course. But I hate it.”

      “You don’t,” replied Fortinbras quickly. “You hate your own idea of it. You’ll begin your course of happiness by sweeping away all your ideas concerning bicycling and coming to bicycling itself.”

      “I never heard anything so idiotic,” declared Corinna.

      “Doubtless,” smiled Fortinbras. “You haven’t heard everything. Go on your knees and thank God for it. I repeat—or amplify my prescription. Go forth both of you on bicycles into the wide world. They will not be Wheels of Chance, but Wheels of Destiny. Go through the broad land of France filling your souls with sunshine and freedom and your throats with salutary and thirst-provoking dust. Have no care for the morrow and look at the future through the golden haze of eventide.”

      “There’s nothing I should like better,” said Martin, with a glance at Corinna, “but I can’t afford it. I must get back to London to look out for an engagement.”

      Fortinbras mopped his brow with an over-fatigued pocket-handkerchief.

      “What did you pay me five francs for? For the pleasure of hearing me talk, or for the value of my counsel?”

      “I must look at things practically,” said Martin.

      “But, good God!” cried Fortinbras, with soft uplifted hands, “what is there more practical, more commonplace, less romantic in the world than riding a bicycle? You want to emerge from your Slough of Despond, don’t you?”

      “Of course,” said Martin.

      “Then I say—get on a bicycle and ride out of it. Practical to the point of pathos.”

      Martin objected: “No one will pay me for careering through France on a bicycle. I’ve got to live, and for the matter of fact, so has Corinna.”

      “But, my dear young friend, she has twenty pounds. You, on your own showing have forty. Sixty pounds between you. A fortune! You both are tormented by the idea of what will happen when the Pactolus runs dry. Banish that pestilential miasma from your minds. Go on the adventure.”

      In poetic terms he set forth the delights of that admirable vagabondage. His eloquence sent a thrill through Martin’s veins, causing his blood to tingle. Before him new horizons broadened. He felt the necessity of the immediate securing of an engagement grow less insistent. If he got home with twenty pounds in his pocket, even fifteen, at a pinch ten, he could manage to subsist until he found work. And perhaps this blandly authoritative, though seedy angel really saw into the future. The temptation fascinated him. He glanced again at Corinna, who sat demure and silent, her chin propped on her fists, and his heart sank. The proposition was absurd. How could he ride abroad, for an indefinite number of days and nights with a young unmarried woman? Of himself he had no fear. Undesirous cat though he was, sent forth on the journey into the world to learn desire, he could not but remain a gentleman. In his charge she would enjoy a sister’s sanctity. But she would never consent. She could not. No matter how profound her belief in his chivalry, her maiden modesty would revolt. Her reputation would be gone. One whisper in Wendlebury of such gipsying and scandal with bared scissor-points would arrest her on the station platform. And while these thoughts agitated his mind, and Corinna kept her eyes always demure and somewhat ironical on Fortinbras, the latter continued to talk.

      “I’m not advising you,” said he, “to pedal away like little Pilgrims into the Unknown. I propose for you an objective. In the little town of Brantôme in the Dordogne, made illustrious by one of the quaintest of French writers——”

      “The Abbé Brantôme of ‘La Vie des Dames Galantes’?” asked Corinna.

      Martin gasped. “You don’t know that book?”

      “By heart,” she replied mischievously, in order to shock Martin. As a matter of fact she had but turned over the pages of the immortal work and laid it down, disconcerted both by the archaic French and the full flavour of such an anecdote or two as she could understand.

      “In the little town of Brantôme,” Fortinbras continued after a pause, “you will find an hotel called the Hôtel des Grottes, kept by an excellent and massive man by the name of Bigourdin, a poet and a philosopher and a mighty maker of pâté de foie gras. A line from me would put you on his lowest tariff, for he has a descending scale of charges, one for motorists, another for commercial travellers and a third for human beings.”

      “It would be utterly delightful,” Martin interrupted, “if it were possible.”

      “Why shouldn’t it be possible?” asked Corinna with a calm glance.

      “You and I—alone—the proprieties——” he stammered.

      Again Corinna burst out laughing. “Is that what’s worrying you? My poor Martin, you’re too comic. What are you afraid of? I promise you I’ll respect maiden modesty. My word of honour.”

      “It is entirely on your account. But if you don’t mind—” said Martin politely.

      “I assure you I don’t СКАЧАТЬ