after his first twenty-four hours in the hills the professor was ready to swear that this final refuge was all he had hoped for. the situation (though he had hardly looked out on it) seemed high yet sheltered; he had a vague impression of sunshine in his room; and when he went down on the first morning, after a deep and curative sleep, he at once found himself in a congenial atmosphere. no effusive compatriots; no bowing and scraping french; only four or five english people, as much in dread of being spoken to as he was of their speaking to him. he consumed the necessary number of square inches of proteins and carbohydrates and withdrew to his room, as stubbornly ignored as if the other guests had all thought he was trying to catch their eyes. an hour later he was lost in his work.
if only life could ever remain on an even keel! but something had made him suspect it from the first: there was a baby in the house. of course everybody denied it: the cook said the bowl of pap left by accident on the stairs was for the cat; the landlady said she had been a widow twenty years, and did he suppose —? and the bonne denied that there was a smell of paregoric on the landing, and said that was the way the scent of mimosa sometimes affected people.
that night, after a constitutional in the garden (ear-pads on), the professor went up to his room to resume his writing. for two hours he wrote uninterruptedly; then he was disturbed by a faint wail. he clapped on the pads, and continued; but the wail, low as it was, pierced them like a corkscrew. finally he laid down his pen and listened, furiously. every five minutes the sound came again. “i suppose they’ll say it’s a kitten!” he growled. no such pretence could deceive him for a moment; he remembered now that at the moment of entering the house he had noticed a smell of nursery. if only he had turned straight around and gone elsewhere! but where?
the idea of a fresh plunge into the unknown made him feel as weak as in the first stages of convalescence. and then his book had already sunk such talons into him; he could feel it sucking at his brain like some hungry animal. and all those people downstairs had been as cold and stony at dinner as they had at lunch. after two such encounters he was sure they would never bother him. a paradise indeed, but for that serpent!
the wail continued, and he turned in his chair and looked slowly and desperately about him. the room was small and bare, and had only one door, the one leading into the passage. he vaguely recalled that, two nights before, at monte carlo, he had been disturbed in much the same way, and had found means to end the disturbance. what had he done? if only he could remember!
his eye went back to the door. there was a light under it now; no doubt someone was up with the child. slowly his mind dropped from the empyrean to the level of the crack under the door.
“a couple of towels . . . ah, but, there are no towels!” almost as the words formed themselves, his glance lit on a well-garnished rack. what had made him think there were no towels? why, he had been reliving the night at monte carlo, where in fact, he now remembered, he could find none, and to protect himself from the noise next door had had to . . .
“oh, my god!” shouted the professor. his pen clattered to the floor. he jumped up, and his chair crashed after it. the baby, terror-struck, ceased to cry. there was an awful silence.
“oh, my god!” shouted the professor.
slowly the vision of that other room came back: he saw himself jumping up just as wildly, dashing for towels and finding none, and then seizing a pile of papers and cramming them into the crack under the door. papers, indeed! “oh, my god . . . ”
it was money that he had seized that other night: hundreds of hundred franc bills; or hundreds of thousands, were they? how furiously he had crushed and crumpled them in his haste to cram enough stuffing into the crack! money — an unbelievable amount of it. but how in the world had it got there, to whom on earth did it belong?
the professor sat down on the edge of the bed and took his bursting head between his hands.
daylight found him still labouring to reconstitute the succession of incredible episodes leading up to his mad act. of all the piles of notes he had stuffed under the door not one franc had belonged to him. of that he was now sure. he recalled also, but less clearly, that some one had given him a banknote — a hundred francs, he thought; was it on the steamer at marseilles, or in the train? — given it with some mysterious injunction about gambling . . . that was as far as he could go at present . . . his mind had come down from the empyrean with a crash, and was still dazed from its abrupt contact with reality. at any rate, not a penny of the money was his, and he had left it all under the door in his hotel bedroom at monte carlo. and that was two days ago . . .
the baby was again crying, but the rest of the house still slept when, unkempt, unshorn, and with as many loose ends to his raiment as hamlet, professor hibbart dashed out past an affrighted bonne, who cried after him that he might still catch the autobus if he took the short cut to the village.
to the professor any abrupt emergence from his work was like coming to after a severe operation. he floated in a world as empty of ideas as of facts, and hemmed with slippery perpendicular walls. all the way to monte carlo those walls were made of the faces in the motorbus, blank inscrutable faces, smooth secret surfaces up which his mind struggled to clamber back to the actual. only one definite emotion survived: hatred of the being — a woman, was it? — who had given him that fatal hundred franc note. he clung to that feeling as to a life-belt, waiting doggedly till it should lift him back to reality. if only he could have recalled his enemy’s name!
arrived at monte carlo he hailed a taxi and pronounced the one name he did recall: arcadie! but what chance was there that the first chauffeur he met would know the title, or remember the site, of that undistinguished family hotel?
“arcadie? but, of course! it’s the place they’re all asking for!” cried the chauffeur, turning without a moment’s hesitation in what seemed to his fare to be the right direction. yet how could that obscure pension be the place “they” were all asking for, and who in the name of madness were “they”?
“are you sure —?” the professor faltered.
“of finding the way? allons donc; we have only to follow the crowd!”
this was a slight exaggeration, for at that early hour the residential quarter of monte carlo was hardly more populous than when the professor had last seen it; but if he had doubted being on the right road his doubt was presently dispelled by the sight of a well-set-up young man in tennis flannels, with a bright conversational eye, who came swinging along from the opposite direction.
“taber tring!” cried a voice from the depths of the professor’s sub-consciousness; and the professor nearly flung himself over the side of the taxi in the effort to attract his friend’s notice.
apparently he had been mistaken; for the young man, arrested by his signals, gave back a blank stare from eyes grown suddenly speechless, and then, turning on his heels, disappeared double-quick down a side-street. the professor, thrown back into his habitual uncertainty, wavered over the question of pursuit; but the taxi was still moving forward, and before he could decide what to do it had worked its way through a throng of gaping people and drawn up before a gate surmounted by the well-remembered arcadie.
“there you are!” the chauffeur gestured, with the air of a parent humouring a spoilt child.
there he was! the professor started to jump out, and pushing through the crowd was confronted with a smoking ruin. the garden gate, under its lying inscription, led straight into chaos; and behind where arcadie had stood, other houses, blank unknown houses, were also shouldering up to gape at the disaster.
“but this is not the place!” remonstrated the professor. “this is a house that has burnt down!”
“parbleu,” replied the chauffeur, still humouring him.
the professor’s temples were bursting.
“but was it — was it — was this the hotel arcadie?”
the chauffeur shrugged again and pointed to the name.
“when — did it burn?”
“early yesterday.”
“and the landlady — the person who kept it?”
“ah, ?a . . . ”
“but how, in the name of pity, can i find out?”
the chauffeur seemed moved by his distress. “let monsieur reassure himself. there was no loss of life. if monsieur had friends or relations . . . ”
the professor waved away the suggestion.
“we could, of course, address ourselves to the police,” the chauffeur continued.
the police! the mere sound of the word filled his hearer with dismay. explain to the police about that money? how could he — and in his french? he turned cold at the idea, and in his dread of seeing himself transported to the commissariat by the too-sympathetic driver, he hurriedly paid the latter off, and remained alone gazing through the gate at the drenched and smoking monument of his folly.
the money — try to get back the money? it had seemed almost hopeless before; now the attempt could only expose him to all the mysterious perils of an alien law. he saw himself interrogated, investigated, his passport seized, his manuscript confiscated, and every hope of rational repose and work annihilated for months to come. he felt himself curiously eyed by the policeman who was guarding the ruins, and turned from the scene of the disaster almost as hurriedly as the young man whom he had taken — no doubt erroneously — for taber tring.
having reached another quarter of the town, he sat down on a bench to take stock of his situation.
it was exactly what he had done two days before when, on arriving at monte carlo, he had found that he had missed the motorbus; and the associations of ideas once more came to his rescue.
gradually there arose in his mind a faint wavering vision of a young woman, pearled and furred and scented, precipitately descending from his compartment, and, as she did so, cramming a banknote into his hand.
“the princess . . . the princess . . . they call me betsy at the dressmaker’s . . . ” that was as far as the clue went; but presently the professor remembered that his companion had got out of the train at cannes, and it became certain to him that his only hope of clearing his overburdened conscience would be to take the train to that place, and there prosecute his almost hopeless search.
