LITMIR.BIZ

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My head is in a dreadful whirl and muddle about it though....

      "Every year she goes to the tiny Breton village of Poldac for one week. I suppose she feels that she must have one week's rest and communion with her own soul if she is to live. On the first day of every July she goes, and her train stops at Pennebecque for five minutes. As you have guessed, I go to Pennebecque every year for that five minutes. It is the longest stop that the train makes.... And the setting of the scene is so wonderful, it is worthy to frame such a picture. I would not see her in the dust and noise and bustle of the Gare de l'Ouest, or at any ugly little wayside station. Yes, I go to Pennebecque to see her for five minutes every year. The only other train that passes through that tiny place does so at night. So I arrive over-night and sit on a seat and wait, almost too happy and exalted to breathe....

      "I have sat on that seat, for the last night of June, for seven years. And I have striven not to pray that the Marquis might die. And yet would not he be better dead—the poor, lolling-tongued, squint-eyed, half-witted Marquis? Think of that marvel of beauty, grace, goodness, and wit, the Marquise de Montheureux, making herself the nurse, the attendant, the keeper, of a lunatic!

      "Yes, but for that one week in the year she is never out of his sight, night or day. If she but turns her back he weeps and sobs aloud. She tends that great, slobbering, dribbling lout, that mindless, soulless clod—no more sentient nor responsive than a hippopotamus—as the most devoted of young mothers tends and nurses her firstborn....

      "For one week in the year she lives her own life, and for five minutes in the year I see her. For six months I do nothing but look forward to that five minutes, and for six months again I do nothing but look back upon it.

      "The first time, she did not see me, or did not recognize me as the man whom she had seen at the neighbouring château of the de Grandcourts—where I was tutor to the young Comte.

      "The second time I ventured to bow, having debated the matter for a year, and she bowed and smiled, with the remark that only the other day the Comtesse de Grandcourt was speaking of me and my good influence over the headstrong and rather wild boy who had been in my charge.

      "The next year she spoke to me and commented on the curious coincidence of my being there again. She is of the real and true noblesse, you see, and has the kind, gentle, and unassuming manner of the genuine aristocrat. Noblesse oblige. She was as sweetly, graciously kind to the village curé, to her own servants, or to me, as she was to de Grandcourt himself. She was a noble, and her nobility was made patent by her nobleness. It is your bourgeois 'noble' whose nobility has to be advertised by gilt and plush and display and rudeness to 'inferiors.'

      "The fourth year she did not remark on the 'coincidence' of my presence at the station. She understood. And she accepted the bunch of roses I took. Oh, the sleepless nights I passed in the agony of that struggle to decide whether to take the roses!

      "The year she did not come was rather terrible. I did not know what an eternity could be covered by two years. The bellowing calf of a Marquis was 'ill,' forsooth, and she never left his bedside.... Curse him! Had he not even the sense and understanding to see what he was making of her life, and to die like a man?

      "Bon Dieu! Surely to die is easy—it is living that is so hard. But no—Monsieur le Marquis de Montheureux could not die. He must go on living, even though he could not wash his own face nor feed himself....

      "The sixth year she gave me so beautiful and kind and understanding a smile! She knew that I lived but for that five minutes. How I sang through the next twelve months! She knew. She understood. She smiled at me. Why should I not love her? It did neither her nor anyone else any harm, and it made my life—well—glorious, and gave it all the fineness and fulness that it possessed.

      "For I simply did everything as though she were watching me, and as though account were to be rendered to her instead of to God. Was this an offence against Le Bon Dieu? ...

      "Sin? I dare to think for myself in religious matters. And I say that what is absolutely good must be of God—and if it isn't, I can't help it. And I lived as though she were watching me.

      "The seventh year she gave me her hand. Had my heart been other than strong I should have died.... For twelve months I pondered the possibility of daring to put my lips to it, should she give me her hand again. Whenever she encountered de Grandcourt, he used to bow in the ancient grand manner, sweeping the ground with his hat, as though it were a great mousquetaire head-dress, and as she swept him a mock curtsey in return he could kiss her hand. Why should not I? No de Grandcourt could honour her more nor love her as much....

      "That eighth year, I, poor fool, had determined that, if she again gave me her hand, I would kiss it. What Emperor then could have the pride and glory of the man who had kissed the hand of the Marquise de Montheureux? Would I, Cæsar Maximilien Raoul de Baillieul, then change with any king on earth?

      "The day came, and I sat in the usual place, awaiting her, and picturing her. She would wear, this year, a silken dust-cloak of a lavender tint, and her glorious hair would be uncovered. One hand would be bare, the other gloved in a shade of lavender. I felt certain of these details.

      "The train came at last, and yet all too soon. When she had come and gone there would be twelve months to live through, before I might see her again.

      "I went to the window of the nearest first-class carriage.

      "There she sat alone, and, as I approached, the beautiful slow smile, to me the loveliest thing on earth, warmed her glorious face.

      "She was arrayed in lavender-coloured silk, her head was bare and so was her hand. She extended it towards me. With heart beating as though I had just run a race, I stepped to the window—and she was not. The carriage was empty, and as I clung to the handle, a little faint, her maid, dressed in deep mourning, came to a neighbouring window and looked out....

      "Madame la Marquise had died of typhoid which had broken out in Montheureux village. She would stay and work among her stricken people. The Marquis had died within twenty-four hours. No, not of the disease. Of grief. He had grasped that she was dead, and that he would never see her again. The maid was on her way to Poldec to arrange about Madame's cottage and property there.

      "It appears that I fell there as one dead and lay ill for weeks.

      "But no, I must not commit suicide or I might not enter the Heaven where she is ... the Heaven that our Wise Men decided does not exist, when they turned God out of France.... But I must crucify myself in some way or go mad. Physical pain and strife and stress alone can save me.

      "I shall enlist in the Foreign Legion. Perhaps I shall earn an honourable death against the enemies of France.

      "Oh, Rose of the World. Rosemonde, Rosemonde, Rosemonde——"

      "Finished?" quoth Sergeant Baudré, approaching. "Dump him in that rice-mud. He'll be more useful dead than he ever was alive."

VIII. "Here Are Ladies"

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      A sluggish, oily river with mangrove-swamp banks; a terrible September day with an atmosphere of superheated, poisonous steam; and the two French gunboats, Corail and Opale, carrying a detachment of the French Foreign Legion, part of an expeditionary force entrusted with the task of teaching manners, and an enhanced respect for Madame la République, to Behanzin, King of Dahomey.

      The Legionaries standing, squatting, and lying on the painfully hot iron decks, were drenched in perspiration. The light flannel active-service kits, served out to them at Porto Novo, clung wetly to their bodies. From under the big ugly pith helmets of dirty white, dirty white faces showed cadaverous and wan. For a month they had forced their way through the West African jungle, sometimes achieving as much as a mile an hour through the sucking mud of a swamp; sometimes thrusting their stifling, choking way through elephant grass eight to ten feet in height; and again fighting through dense tangled bush with chopper, coupe-coupe,

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