William John Locke

“ It was Joanna—lovelier than I had pictured her in my Lotus Club dreams, more gracious than Ingonde or Chlodoswinde or any of the belles dames du temps jadis whose ballade by Maître François Villon my master had but lately made me learn by heart and whose names were so many "sweet symphonies." It was Joanna, "pure and ravishing as an April dawn"; Joanna beloved of Paragot in those elusive days when I could not picture him, before he smashed his furniture with a crusader's mace and started on his wanderings under the guidance of Henri Quatre. ”

“ Through one distant patch a farmhouse struck a muffled note of grey. On the left the ribbon of road glistened white between the sentinel poplars silhouetted against the sky. The hot smell of the earth filled the air like spice. A thousand elfin sounds, the vibration of leaves, the tiny crackling of cornstalks, the fairy whirr of ground insects, melted into a companionable stillness.
Blanquette half dozed, her head against Paragot's shoulder, as she had done that far-off evening of our return from Chambéry. The smoke from his porcelain pipe curled upwards through the still air. ”

“ Let me be able to point to you as the one man in the world who does not prostitute his art for money or reputation, who sees God beneath a leper's skin and proclaims Him bravely, who reveals the magical beauty of humanity and compels the fool and the knave and the man with the muck-rake and the harlot to see it, and sends them away with hope in their hearts, and faith in the destiny of the race and charity to one another—let me see this, my son, and by heavens! ”

“ I should like to kill her," cried Blanquette.
The idea of anyone wanting to kill Joanna was so novel that I stared at her speechless. It took some time for my wits to accommodate themselves to the point of view.
"If I were a man I would not drink myself to death for the sake of a woman who treated me so," she remarked, recovering her composure.
"Is it as bad as that?" I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. Men must drink. It is their nature. But there should be limits. One ought to be reasonable, even a man. Did I not think so? In her matter of fact way she gave me details of Paragot's habits. ”

“ Nothing was said between Blanquette and myself, but she became my sworn sister from that moment. And Narcisse sat at our feet looking down on the crowd, his tongue lolling out mockingly and a satiric leer on his face. [75]
"My children," said Paragot, on our return journey in the close, ill-lighted, wooden-seated third-class compartment, "we have had a glorious day. One of those sun-kissed, snow-capped peaks that rise here and there in the monotonous range of life. It fills the soul with poetry and makes one talk in metaphor. In such moments as these we are all metaphors, my son. ”

“ He raised his lemon kids as if he would ban the place.
"My little Asticot, I have abjured absinthe and forsworn cafés. I have broken my new porcelain pipe and have cut my finger-nails. As I enter on the path of happiness, I scatter the dregs and shreds and clippings of the past behind me. I divest myself of all the crapulous years."
If he had divested himself of the superfluous trappings of respectability beneath which he was perspiring freely, I thought he would have been happier. The sight of the umbrella alone made one feel moist, to say nothing of the spats. ”

“ Like many peasant women of strong nature, she had the terrible passion of possession. In her soul she would rather have had the most degraded of Paragots in her arms, as her own unalienable property, than have seen him honourable and prosperous in the arms of another. Had she been of a nervous and emotional temperament there might have been tragedy in the Rue des Saladiers, and the newspapers of Paris might have chronicled yet another crime passionnel and the appearance of Blanquette before a weeping jury. ”

“ Could woman have spoken more sweetly?
"My dear Joanna," replied Paragot, "I do wish you all the happiness in the world. You can't fail to have it. You have a real husband as I have a real wife. Let us thank heaven we have escaped from the moon vapour of the Ideal, in which we poor humans are apt to lose our way and stray God knows whither. I am sending you a real marriage gift."
"My dear Asticot," wrote Joanna from an hotel in Florence, "what do you think your delightful but absurd master has sent me as a wedding present? ”

“ But if Paragot had not taken her measure before my eyes at Fontainebleau and made a figured drawing so to speak of her heart and soul, shewing their exiguous dimensions, I might have cast myself beneath the wheels of an omnibus like the pig Népomucène, or blacked the eyes of Ewing who was smaller than myself. As it was, I put my hands in my trousers' pockets and surveyed the abashed couple in Paragot's best manner.
"Amuse yourselves well, my children," I laughed, in French, and turned away heart-whole. ”

“ That hat has been to me Luke's iron crown. That coat has been the peine forte et dure crushing my infinite soul into my liver." He tore off his black tie and hurled it away from him. "This has been strangling every noble inspiration. I have been swathed in mummy bands of convention. I have been dead. I have come to life. My lungs are full. My soul regains its limitless horizons. My swollen tongue is cool, and nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu, I can talk again!"
He walked up and down the little salon vociferating his freedom, and kicking the remains of the frock-coat before him. ”

“ Needless to say, Bucéphale had been rechristened in his extreme old age.
"He is a living proof," cried Paragot, "of the solidity rerum agrestium. Look at him! Shew me a horse of his age in Paris. The Paris horses, like Youth in the poem, grow pale and spectre thin and die of premature decay. Here, mon petit," said he giving a sou to a blue bloused urchin who was restraining the impetuous Bucéphale from a wild gallop over the Eure et Loire, "when you have spent that come to La Haye and I will give you another." ”

“ Sometimes it was Blanquette who slept, Narcisse huddled up against her, while Paragot and I read our tattered books, or sketched, or discussed the theme which I had written overnight as my evening task. It was an odd school; but though I could not have passed any examination held by the sons of men, I verily believe I had a wider culture, in the truest sense of the word, than most youths of my age. I craved it, it is true, and I drank from an inexhaustible source; but few men have the power of directing that source so as to supply the soul's need of a boy of sixteen. ”

“ Oh what three beautiful fools we are! Blanquette to think of supporting two hulking men, I to be angry, and Asticot to plead tragically as if I were a tyrant about to cut off her head. My little Blanquette, you have touched my heart, and who touches the heart of Paragot can eat Paragot's legs and liver if he is hungry and drink his blood if he is thirsty. ”

“ Had it not been for the hard grip of the day before I should have jealously resented her admission into our vagabond fraternity. As it was, from the height of my sixteen-year-old masculinity I somewhat looked down upon her: not as poor Blanquette, the zither-playing vagrant; but as a girl. Could we, creation's lords, do with a creature of an inferior sex in our wanderings? Could she perform our feats of endurance? I questioned her anxiously.
"Moi?" she laughed, "I am as strong as any man. ”

“ The young man at the piano whom I had expected to see a fiend in human shape was a harmless consumptive fellow who played with the sweet patience of a musical box. He shook hands with me and called me "cher collègue," and before nightfall told me of a disastrous love-story in consequence of which, were it not for his mother, he would drown himself in the lake. He effaced himself before Paragot much as the bellows-blower does before the organist. His politeness to Blanquette would have put to the blush any young man at the Bon Marché or the Louvre. His name was Laripet. ”

“ Asticot too. Haven't you been enchanted all day to be of service to Mademoiselle? Do you want to be paid for wearing a red shirt with a tasselled collar and pommade in your hair? Aren't we going about the world like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza rescuing damsels in distress? Isn't that the lodestar of our wanderings?"
"Yes, master," said I.
Blanquette looked open-mouthed from him to me, from me to him, scarce able to grasp such magnanimity. To the peasant, money is a commodity to be struggled for, fought for, grasped, prized; to be doled out like the drops of a priceless Elixir Vitæ. ”

“ The corners of her kind lips quivered.
"The world is turned upside down," she said piteously. "There is no love, honour or loyalty in it. I felt this evening as if I could forgive him; but now—" She rose and wrung her hands and exclaimed sharply, "Oh, it's hateful, it's hateful for men to be so base!"
That it was a base action to sell Joanna for any sum of money, however bewildering in largeness, I could not deny. But that Paragot should have been guilty of it I would not have believed had the accusation come from Joanna's own lips. ”

“ At the station gates Paragot stood and watched the brisk life that swarmed up and down the Rue Saint-Lazare and the Rue du Havre. Paris awakens a couple of hours earlier than London. Clerks hurried by with flat leather portfolios under their arms. Servants trotted to market, or homewards, with the end of a long golden loaf protruding from their baskets. Work-girls sped by in all directions. Omnibuses lumbered along as at midday. Before the great cafés opposite, the tables were already set out on the terrace and the awnings lowered, and white-aproned waiters stood expectant. ”

“ How good it is to be in Paris again!"
The door of a marchand de vin swung open just by our noses to give exit to a reveller, and the hot poisoned air streamed forth.
"And how good it is, the smell of alcohols. I could kiss the honest sot who has just reeled out and is skating across the road. A bas les bourgeois!"
He did not carry out his unpleasing desire, but when we reached the salon in the Rue des Saladiers, and we had lit the lamp, he kissed Blanquette on both cheeks, still crying out how good it was to be back. Narcisse, mad with delight, capered about him and barked his rapture. ”

“ Blanquette acquiesced humbly.
"When one hears Monsieur, one has the devil in one's body."
"Listen to this," said the delighted Paragot jumping on to his feet and tucking the fiddle beneath his chin.
And there in the pure dawn with nothing but God's sky and green fields around us, he played Gounod's "Ave Maria," putting into his execution all his imaginative fervour, and accentuating the tremolo passages in a vibrating ecstasy which to Blanquette's uncultured soul was the very passion of music. [67] I have since learned that the greatest violinists do not overemphasise the tremolo. ”

“ You are like Asticot and Narcisse. You belong to me. But Asticot is going to learn how to become an artist, and Narcisse when he is bored can hunt for fleas. You are a young woman; things must arrange themselves differently. But how? Voilà tout!"
"It is very simple," said Blanquette.
"How, simple?"
"Dame! I can work for you and Asticot."
"The devil!" cried Paragot.
"But yes," she went on earnestly. "I know that men are men, and sometimes they do not like to work. It happens very often. Tiens! mon maître, I am alone, all that is most alone. ”

“ Bravo, petit Asticot de mon cœur! The nightmare is over, and we can enjoy the sunshine again. We will drag Blanquette from the Rue des Saladiers which does not lay itself out for jollity, and we will dine at a reckless restaurant. Blanquette shall eat the snails which she adores and I shall eat pig's feet and you an underdone beefsteak to nourish your little body. ”

“ We entered the crêmerie, sat down and ordered our coffee and crisp horse-shoe loaves. I think the petit déjeuner at a crêmerie is one of the most daintily served meals in France. The morning dew glistens so freshly on the butter, the fringed napkin is so spotless, the wide-mouthed cups offer themselves so delicately generous. If everyone breakfasted there crime would cease. No man could hatch a day's iniquity amid such influences.
When we were half-way through, Paragot unbuttoned his frock coat and took from his pocket a black-edged letter which he flourished before my eyes. ”

“ When she bade us good night, Paragot drew her down and kissed her cheek, which was an unprecedented mark of domesticity. Blanquette turned brick-red, and I suppose her foolish heart beat wildly. I have known my own heart to beat wildly for far less, and I am not a woman; but I have been in love.
"It is because you belong to me, my little Blanquette, and I am among mine own people. We understand one another, don't we? Et tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner." ”

“ When the ladies had left us that evening after dinner, Paragot poured out a glass of port and pushed the decanter across to me.
"My son," said he, "as a philosopher and a citizen of the world you will find Melford repay patient study as much as Chambéry or Buda-Pesth or the Latin Quarter. It is a garden of Lilliput. Here you will see Life in its most cultivated littleness. A great passion bursting out across the way would convulse the town like an earthquake. Observe at the same time how constant a factor is human nature. ”

“ How many men of speckless reputation, though feeling the pinch of poverty, would not have married Joanna for the great wealth her husband left behind? Answer me that.
I know that Joanna wept bitterly over her lost romance. But she has owned to me that the words written on a scrap of paper by Paragot and posted from London were tragically true:
"My dear. It is only the shadows of our past selves that love. You and I are strangers to each other. To continue this sweet pretence of love is a mockery of the Holiest. God bless you. Gaston." ”

“ You don't even know Blanquette. Beneath an unprepossessing exterior she has a heart of gold. She has every large-souled quality that a woman can stuff into her nature. She would live on cheese-rind and egg shells, if she thought it would benefit either of us. I not care for Blanquette? You shall see."
So the following afternoon when we met Blanquette's train at the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paragot had taken her into his arms and planted a kiss on each of her broad cheeks before she realised who the magnificent, clean-shaven welcomer in the silk hat really was. ”

“ Hotchkiss has etched in burning words a story of Yankee bravery and true love that thrills from beginning to end with the spirit of the Revolution. The heart beats quickly, and we feel ourselves taking a part in the exciting scenes described. You lay the book aside with the feeling that you have seen a gloriously true picture of the Revolution. His whole story is so absorbing that you will sit up far into the night to finish it. As a love romance it is charming. ”