after leaving clementina, tommy went for a long brisk walk in order to clear his mind, and on his homeward way along the embankment, branched off to the middle of old chelsea bridge in order to admire the moonlight view; he also took off his hat in order to get cool. the treacherous may wind cooled him effectually and sent him to bed for three days with a chill.
clementina sat by his rueful bedside and rated him soundly. the idea of one just recovering from pneumonia setting his blood boiling hot and then cooling himself on a bridge at midnight in the bitter north-east wind! he was about as sane as his uncle. they were a pretty and well-matched pair. both ought to be placed under restraint. a dark house and a whip would have been their portion in the good old times.
“i’ve got ’em both now,” said tommy, grinning. “this confounded bedroom is my dark house and your tongue is the whip.”
“i hope it hurts like the devil,” said clementina.
tommy wrote from his sick bed a dignified and manly letter to his uncle, and, like brutus, paused for a reply. none came. quixtus read it, and his warped vision saw ingratitude and hypocrisy in every line. he had already spoken to griffiths about the office-stool in the star insurance company. tommy’s emphatic refusal to sit on it placed him in an awkward position with regard to griffiths. openings in a large insurance office are not as common as those for hop-pickers in august. griffiths, a sour-tempered man at times, would be annoyed. quixtus, encouraged by vandermeer, regarded himself as an ill-used uncle, and not only missed all the thrill of his deed of wickedness, but accepted tommy’s decision as a rebuff to his purely benevolent intentions. he therefore added the unfortunate tommy to the list of those whom he had tried and found wanting. he had a grievance against tommy. such is the topsyturvydom of man after a little thread has snapped in his brain.
now, it so happened that, on the selfsame day that tommy crawled again into the open air, clementina, standing before her easel and painfully painting drapery from the lay figure, suddenly felt the whole studio gyrate in a whirling maelstrom into whose vortex of unconsciousness she was swiftly sucked. she fell in a heap on the floor, and remained there until she came to with a splitting headache and a sensation of carrying masses of bruised pulp at various corners of her body instead of limbs. her maid, eliza, finding her lying white and ill on the couch to which she had dragged herself, administered water—there was no such thing as smelling-salts in clementina’s house—and, on her own responsibility, summoned the nearest doctor. the result of his examination was a diagnosis of overwork. clementina jeered. only idlers suffered from overwork. besides, she was as strong as a horse. the doctor reminded her that she was a woman, with a woman’s delicately adjusted nervous system. she also had her sex’s lack of restraint. a man, finding that he was losing sleep, appetite, control of temper and artistic grip, would abandon work and plunge utterly unashamed into hoggish idleness. a woman always feels that by fighting against weakness she is upholding the honour of her sex, and struggles on insanely till she drops.
“i’m glad you realise i’m a woman,” said clementina.
“why?”
“because you’re the first man who has done so for many years.”
the doctor, a youngish man, very earnest, of the modern neuropathic school, missed the note of irony. this was the first time he had seen clementina.
“you’re one of the most highly strung women i’ve ever come across,” said he, gravely. “i want you to appreciate the fact and not to strain the tension to breaking-point.”
“you wrap it up very nicely,” said clementina, “but, to put it brutally, your honest opinion is that i’m just a silly, unreasonable, excitable, sex-ridden fool of a female like a million others. isn’t that so?”
the young doctor bore the scrutiny of those glittering, ironical points of eyes with commendable professional stolidity.
“it is,” said he, and in saying it he had the young practitioner’s horrible conviction that he had lost an influential new patient. but clementina stretched out her hand. he took it very gladly.
“i like you,” she said, “because you’re not afraid to talk sense. now i’ll do whatever you tell me.”
“go away for a complete change—anywhere will do—and don’t think of work for a month at the very least.”
“all right,” said clementina.
when tommy, looking very much the worse for his relapse, came in the next day to report himself in robust health once more, clementina acquainted him with her own bodily infirmities. it was absurd, she declared, that she should break down, but absurdity was the guiding principle of this comic planet. holiday was ordained. she had spent a sleepless night thinking how she should make it. dawn had brought solution of the problem. why not make it in fantastic fashion, harmonising with the absurd scheme of things?
“what are you going to do?” asked tommy. “spend a frolicsome month in whitechapel, or put on male attire and go for a soldier?”
“i shall hire an automobile and motor about france.”
“it’s sporting enough,” said tommy, judicially, “but i should hardly call it fantastic.”
“wait till you’ve heard the rest,” said clementina. “i had originally intended to take etta concannon with me; but since you’ve come here looking like three-ha’porth of misery, i’ve decided to take you.”
“me?” cried tommy. “my dear clementina, that’s absurd.”
“i thought you would agree with me,” said clementina, “but i’m going to do it. wouldn’t you like to come?”
“i should think so!” he exclaimed, boyishly. “it would be gorgeous. but——”
“but what?”
“how can i afford to go motoring abroad?”
“you wouldn’t have to afford it. you would be my guest.”
“it’s delightful of you, clementina, to think of it—but it’s impossible.”
whereupon an argument arose such as has often arisen between man and woman.
“i’m old enough to be your grandmother, or at least you think so, which comes to the same thing,” said clementina.
tommy’s young pride would not allow him to accept largesse from feminine hands, however elderly and unromantic.
“if i had a country house and hosts of servants and several motor-cars and asked you to stay, you’d come without hesitation.”
“that would be different. don’t you see for yourself?”
clementina chose not to see for herself. here was a dolorous baby of a boy disinherited by a lunatic uncle, emaciated by illness and unable to work, refusing a helping hand just because it was a woman’s. it was preposterous. clementina grew angry. tommy held firm.
“it’s merely selfish of you. don’t you see i want a companion?”
tommy pointed out the companionable qualities of etta concannon. but she would not hear of etta. the sight of tommy’s wan face had decided her, and she was a woman who was accustomed to carry out her decisions. she was somewhat dictatorial, somewhat hectoring. she had taken it into her head to play fairy godmother to tommy burgrave, and she resented his repudiation of her godmotherdom. besides, there were purely selfish reasons for choosing tommy rather than etta, which she acknowledged with inward candour. tommy was a man who would fetch and carry and keep the chauffeur up to the mark, and inspire gendarmes and custom-house officials and maitres-d’hotel with respect, and, although clementina feared neither man nor devil, she was aware of the value of a suit of clothes filled with a male entity as a travelling adjunct to a lone woman. with etta the case would be different. etta would fetch her motor-veil and carry her gloves with the most adoringly submissive grace in the world; but all the real fetching and carrying for the two of them would have to be done by clementina herself. therein lay the difference between clementina and the type generally known as the emancipated woman. she had no exaggerated notions of the equality of the sexes, which in feminine logic generally means the high superiority of women. circumstance had emancipated her from dependence upon the other sex, but on the circumstance and the emancipation she cast not too favourable an eye. she had a crystal clear idea of the substantial usefulness of men in this rough and not always ready cosmic scheme. therefore, for purposes of utility, she wanted tommy. in her usual blunt manner she told him so.
“you run in here at all hours of the day and night, and it’s clementina this and clementina that until i can’t call my soul my own—and now, the first time i ask you to do me a service you fall back on your silly little prejudices and vanity and pride, and say you can’t do it.”
“i’m very sorry,” said tommy, humbly.
“i tell you what it is,” said clementina, with a curiously vicious feminine stroke, “you’d come if i was a smart-looking woman with fine clothes who could be a credit to you—but you won’t face going about with an animated rag-and-bone shop like me.”
tommy flushed as pink as only a fair youth can flush; he sprang forward and seized her wrists and, unwittingly, hurt her in his strong and indignant grip.
“what you’re saying is abominable and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. if i thought anything like that i’d be the most infernal cur that ever trod the earth. i’d like to shake you for daring to say such things about me.”
he flung away her hands and stalked off to the other end of the studio, leaving her with tingling wrists and unfindable retort.
“if you really think i can be of service to you,” he said, in a dignified way, having completed the return journey, “i shall be most happy to come.”
“i don’t want you to make a martyr of yourself,” she snapped.
tommy considered within himself for a moment or two, then broke into his boyish laugh.
“i’m an ungrateful pig, and i’ll follow you all over the world. dear old clementina,” he added, more seriously, putting his hand on her shoulder, “forgive me.”
clementina gently removed his hand. she preferred the grip on the wrists that hurt. but, mollified, she forgave him.
so in a few days they started on their travels.
the thirty-five horse-power car whirled them, a happy pair, through the heart of summer. above the blue sky blazed, and beneath the white road gleamed a shivering streak. the exhilarating wind of their motion filled their lungs and set their tired pulses throbbing. now and then, for miles, the great plane trees on each side of the way formed the never-ending nave of an infinite cathedral, the roof a miracle of green tracery. through quiet, sun-baked villages they passed, at a snail’s pace, hooting children and dogs from before their path—and because they proceeded slowly and tommy was goodly to look upon, the women smiled from their doorways, or from the running laundry stream where they knelt and beat the wet clothes, or from the fountain in the cool, flagged little square jutting out like a tiny transept from the aisle of the street. babies stared stolidly. here and there a bunch of little girls, their hair tied in demure pigtails, the blue sarrau over their loud check frocks; would laugh and whisper, and one more daring than the rest would wave an audacious hand, and when tommy blew her a kiss from his fingers there came the little slut’s gracious response, amid mirth and delight unspeakable. men would look up from their dusty, bare, uneven bowling-alley beneath the trees and watch them as they went by. an automobile, in spite of its frequency, is always an event in a french village. if it races mercilessly through; there is reasonable opportunity to curse which always gladdens the heart of man. if it proceeds slowly and shows deference to the inhabitants, it is an event rare enough to command their admiration. instead of shutting their eyes against a sort of hell-chariot in a whirlwind; they can observe the gracefully built car and its stranger though human occupants, which is something deserving a note in the record of an eventless day. if they stopped and quitted the car so as to glance at leisure at old church or quaint fountain—and in many an out-of-the-way village in france the water of the community gushes forth from a beautiful work of art—all the idlers of the sunny place clustered round the car, while the british chauffeur stood by the radiator, impeccably vestured and unembarrassed as a fate. at noon came the break for déjeuner; preferably in some little world-forgotten townlet, where, after the hors-d’?uvre, omelette, cutlet, chicken, and fruit—and where is the sad, plague-stricken hamlet of france that cannot, in the twinkling of an eye, provide such a meal for the hungry wayfarer?—they loved to take their coffee beneath the awning of a café on the shady side of the great, sleepy square, and absorb the sleepy, sunny, prosperous spirit of the place; the unpainted bandstand in the centre, the low-lying houses with sleepy little shops and cafés—heavens! how many cafés!—around it, the modern, model-built h?tel de ville, the fine avenue of plane trees without which no grande place in france could exist, and, above the roofs of the houses, the weather-beaten, crumbling gothic tower of the church surmounted by its extinguisher-shaped leaden belfry alive with vivid yellows and olives. and then the road again past the rapidly becoming familiar objects; the slow ox-carts; the herd of wayside goats in charge of a dirty, tow-headed child; the squad of canvas-suited soldiers; the great lumbering waggons drawn by a string of three gaudily and elaborately yoked horses, the driver fast asleep on the top of his mountainous load; the mongrel dogs that sought, and happily found not, euthanasia beneath the wheels of the modern car of juggernaut; the sober-vested peasant women bending beneath their burdens with the calm unexpressive faces of caryatides grown old and withered. towards the late afternoon was reached the larger town where they would halt for the night: first came the eternal, but grateful, outer boulevard cool with foliage, running between newly built, perky houses and shops and then leading into the heart of the older city, grey, narrow-streeted, picturesque. as the automobile clattered through the great gateway of the hotel into the paved courtyard, out came the decent landlord and smiling landlady, welcomed their guests, summoned unshaven men in green-baize aprons—who, at dinner, were to appear in the decorous garb of waiters, and in the morning, by a subtle modification of costume (dingy white aprons instead of green-baize) were to do uncomplaining work as housemaids—to take down the luggage, and showed the travellers to their clean, bare rooms. after the summary removal of the journey’s dust came the delicious saunter through the strange old town; the stimulus of the sudden burst into view of the west front of a cathedral, with its deeply recessed and sculptured doorways, and its great, flamboyant window struck by the westering sun; the quick, indrawn breath of delight when, in a narrow, evil-smelling, cobble-paved street, they came unexpectedly upon some marvel of an early renaissance fa?ade, with its refined riot of ornament, its unerring proportions, its laughing dignity—laughing all the more and with all the more dignity, as became its mocking, aristocratic soul, because the ground floor was given up to a dingy tinsmith and its upper storeys to the same class of easy-going, slatternly folk who sat at the windows of the other unconsidered houses in the sallow and homely street; the gay relief of emerging from such unsavoury and foot-massacring by-ways into the quarter of the town on which the syndicat d’initiative prides itself—the wide, well-kept thoroughfare or place with its inevitable greenery, its flourishing cafés thick with decorous folk beneath the awnings, its proud and prosperous shops, its municipal theatre, bourse, h?tel de ville, its generously spouting fountain, its statue of the great son—poet, artist, soldier—of the locality; its crowd of well-fed saunterers—fat and greasy citizens, the supercilious aristocrat and the wolf-eyed anarchist might perhaps join together in calling them—but still god’s very worthy creatures; its general expression, not of the joy of life, for a provincial town is, as a whole, governed by conditions which affect only a part of a great capital, but of the undeniable usefulness and pleasurableness of human existence. then, after dinner, out again to the cool terrace of a café—in provincial france no one lounges over coffee and tobacco in an hotel—and lastly to bed, with wind and sun in their eyes and in their hearts the peace of a beautiful land.
they had planned the first part of their route—boulogne, abbeville, beauvais, sens, tonnerre, dijon, through the c?té d’or and down the valley of the rhone to avignon. after that the roads of france were open to them to go whithersoever they willed. the ground, the experience, the freedom, all were new to them. to clementina france had practically been synonymous with paris—not paris of the grands boulevards, montmartre, and expensive restaurants, but paris of the left bank, of the studios, of struggle and toil—a place not of gaiety but grimness. to tommy it meant paris, too—paris of the young artist-tourist, a museum of great pictures—the louvre, the luxembourg, the pantheon immortalised by puvis de chavannes; also dieppe, dinard, and such-like dependencies of britain. but of the true france such as they beheld it now they knew nothing, and they beheld it with the wide-open eyes of children.
after a few days the weariness fell from clementina’s shoulders; new life sped through her veins. her hard lips caught the long-forgotten trick of a smile. she almost lost the art of acid speech. she grew young again.
tommy held the money-bag.
“i’m not going to look like a maiden aunt treating a small boy to buns at a confectioner’s,” she had declared. “i’m going to be a real lady for once and see what it’s like.”
so clementina did nothing in the most ladylike manner, while tommy played courier and carried through all arrangements with the impressive air of importance that only a young briton in somebody else’s motor-car can assume. he had forgotten the little sacrifice of his pride, he had forgotten, or at least he disregarded, with the precious irresponsibility of three-and-twenty, the fact that his income was reduced to the negligible quantity of a pound a week; he gave himself up to the enjoyment of the passing hour, and if ever he did cast a forward glance at the clouded future, behold! the clouds were rosy with the reflections of the present sunshine.
he was proud of his newly discovered talent as a courier, and boasted in his boyish way.
“aren’t you glad you’ve got me to take care of you?”
“it’s a new sensation for me to be taken care of.”
“but you don’t dislike it?”
he was arranging at the bottom of the car a pile of rugs and wraps as a footstool for clementina, at the exact height and angle for her luxurious comfort.
clementina sighed. she was beginning to like it very much indeed.
