XI. A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE
In the little hamlet of Haroc, in the Isle of St. Loup, there lived aman who--though living under the English flag--was absolutely untypicalof the French tradition. He was quite unnoticeable, but that was exactlywhere he was quite himself. He was not even extraordinarily French; butthen it is against the French tradition to be extraordinarily French.Ordinary Englishmen would only have thought him a little old-fashioned;imperialistic Englishmen would really have mistaken him for the old JohnBull of the caricatures. He was stout; he was quite undistinguished; andhe had side-whiskers, worn just a little longer than John Bull's. Hewas by name Pierre Durand; he was by trade a wine merchant; he was bypolitics a conservative republican; he had been brought up a Catholic,had always thought and acted as an agnostic, and was very mildlyreturning to the Church in his later years. He had a genius (if one caneven use so wild a word in connexion with so tame a person) a genius forsaying the conventional thing on every conceivable subject; or ratherwhat we in England would call the conventional thing. For it was notconvention with him, but solid and manly conviction. Convention impliescant or affectation, and he had not the faintest smell of either. He wassimply an ordinary citizen with ordinary views; and if you had told himso he would have taken it as an ordinary compliment. If you had askedhim about women, he would have said that one must preserve theirdomesticity and decorum; he would have used the stalest words, but hewould have in reserve the strongest arguments. If you had asked himabout government, he would have said that all citizens were free andequal, but he would have meant what he said. If you had asked him abouteducation, he would have said that the young must be trained up inhabits of industry and of respect for their parents. Still he wouldhave set them the example of industry, and he would have been one of theparents whom they could respect. A state of mind so hopelessly centralis depressing to the English instinct. But then in England a manannouncing these platitudes is generally a fool and a frightened fool,announcing them out of mere social servility. But Durand was anythingbut a fool; he had read all the eighteenth century, and could havedefended his platitudes round every angle of eighteenth-centuryargument. And certainly he was anything but a coward: swollen andsedentary as he was, he could have hit any man back who touched him withthe instant violence of an automatic machine; and dying in a uniformwould have seemed to him only the sort of thing that sometimeshappens. I am afraid it is impossible to explain this monster amid theexaggerative sects and the eccentric clubs of my country. He was merelya man.
He lived in a little villa which was furnished well with comfortablechairs and tables and highly uncomfortable classical pictures andmedallions. The art in his home contained nothing between the twoextremes of hard, meagre designs of Greek heads and Roman togas, and onthe other side a few very vulgar Catholic images in the crudest colours;these were mostly in his daughter's room. He had recently lost his wife,whom he had loved heartily and rather heavily in complete silence,and upon whose grave he was constantly in the habit of placing hideouslittle wreaths, made out of a sort of black-and-white beads. To his onlydaughter he was equally devoted, though he restricted her a good dealunder a sort of theoretic alarm about her innocence; an alarm which waspeculiarly unnecessary, first, because she was an exceptionally reticentand religious girl, and secondly, because there was hardly anybody elsein the place.
Madeleine Durand was physically a sleepy young woman, and might easilyhave been supposed to be morally a lazy one. It is, however, certainthat the work of her house was done somehow, and it is even more rapidlyascertainable that nobody else did it. The logician is, therefore,driven back upon the assumption that she did it; and that lends a sortof mysterious interest to her personality at the beginning. She had verybroad, low, and level brows, which seemed even lower because her warmyellow hair clustered down to her eyebrows; and she had a face justplump enough not to look as powerful as it was. Anything that was heavyin all this was abruptly lightened by two large, light china-blue eyes,lightened all of a sudden as if it had been lifted into the air by twobig blue butterflies. The rest of her was less than middle-sized, andwas of a casual and comfortable sort; and she had this difference fromsuch girls as the girl in the motor-car, that one did not incline totake in her figure at all, but only her broad and leonine and innocenthead.
Both the father and the daughter were of the sort that would normallyhave avoided all observation; that is, all observation in thatextraordinary modern world which calls out everything except strength.Both of them had strength below the surface; they were like quietpeasants owning enormous and unquarried mines. The father with hissquare face and grey side whiskers, the daughter with her square faceand golden fringe of hair, were both stronger than they know; strongerthan anyone knew. The father believed in civilization, in the storiedtower we have erected to affront nature; that is, the father believed inMan. The daughter believed in God; and was even stronger. They neitherof them believed in themselves; for that is a decadent weakness.
The daughter was called a devotee. She left upon ordinary people theimpression--the somewhat irritating impression--produced by such aperson; it can only be described as the sense of strong water beingperpetually poured into some abyss. She did her housework easily; sheachieved her social relations sweetly; she was never neglectful andnever unkind. This accounted for all that was soft in her, but not forall that was hard. She trod firmly as if going somewhere; she flung herface back as if defying something; she hardly spoke a cross word, yetthere was often battle in her eyes. The modern man asked doubtfullywhere all this silent energy went to. He would have stared still moredoubtfully if he had been told that it all went into her prayers.
The conventions of the Isle of St. Loup were necessarily a compromiseor confusion between those of France and England; and it was vaguelypossible for a respectable young lady to have half-attached lovers, in away that would be impossible to the _bourgeoisie_ of France. One man inparticular had made himself an unmistakable figure in the track of thisgirl as she went to church. He was a short, prosperous-looking man,whose long, bushy black beard and clumsy black umbrella made him seemboth shorter and older than he really was; but whose big, bold eyes, andstep that spurned the ground, gave him an instant character of youth.
His name was Camille Bert, and he was a commercial traveller who hadonly been in the island an idle week before he began to hover in thetracks of Madeleine Durand. Since everyone knows everyone in so smalla place, Madeleine certainly knew him to speak to; but it is not veryevident that she ever spoke. He haunted her, however; especially atchurch, which was, indeed, one of the few certain places for findingher. In her home she had a habit of being invisible, sometimes throughinsatiable domesticity, sometimes through an equally insatiablesolitude. M. Bert did not give the impression of a pious man, though hedid give, especially with his eyes, the impression of an honest one. Buthe went to Mass with a simple exactitude that could not be mistaken fora pose, or even for a vulgar fascination. It was perhaps this religiousregularity which eventually drew Madeleine into recognition of him. Atleast it is certain that she twice spoke to him with her square and opensmile in the porch of the church; and there was human nature enough inthe hamlet to turn even that into gossip.
But the real interest arose suddenly as a squall arises with theextraordinary affair that occurred about five days after. There wasabout a third of a mile beyond the village of Haroc a large but lonelyhotel upon the London or Paris model, but commonly almost entirelyempty. Among the accidental group of guests who had come to it at thisseason was a man whose nationality no one could fix and who bore thenon-committal name of Count Gregory. He treated everybody with completecivility and almost in complete silence. On the few occasions when hespoke, he spoke either French, English, or once (to the priest) Latin;and the general opinion was that he spoke them all wrong. He was alarge, lean man, with the stoop of an aged eagle, and even the eagle'snose to complete it; he had old-fashioned military whiskers andmoustache dyed with a garish and highly incredible
yellow. He had thedress of a showy gentleman and the manners of a decayed gentleman; heseemed (as with a sort of simplicity) to be trying to be a dandy when hewas too old even to know that he was old. Ye he was decidedly a handsomefigure with his curled yellow hair and lean fastidious face; and he worea peculiar frock-coat of bright turquoise blue, with an unknown orderpinned to it, and he carried a huge and heavy cane. Despite his silenceand his dandified dress and whiskers, the island might never have heardof him but for the extraordinary event of which I have spoken, whichfell about in the following way:
In such casual atmospheres only the enthusiastic go to Benediction; andas the warm blue twilight closed over the little candle-lit church andvillage, the line of worshippers who went home from the former to thelatter thinned out until it broke. On one such evening at least no onewas in church except the quiet, unconquerable Madeleine, four old women,one fisherman, and, of course, the irrepressible M. Camille Bert. Theothers seemed to melt away afterwards into the peacock colours of thedim green grass and the dark blue sky. Even Durand was invisible insteadof being merely reverentially remote; and Madeleine set forth throughthe patch of black forest alone. She was not in the least afraid ofloneliness, because she was not afraid of devils. I think they wereafraid of her.
In a clearing of the wood, however, which was lit up with a last patchof the perishing sunlight, there advanced upon her suddenly one who wasmore startling than a devil. The incomprehensible Count Gregory, withhis yellow hair like flame and his face like the white ashes of theflame, was advancing bareheaded towards her, flinging out his arms andhis long fingers with a frantic gesture.
"We are alone here," he cried, "and you would be at my mercy, only thatI am at yours."
Then his frantic hands fell by his sides and he looked up under hisbrows with an expression that went well with his hard breathing.Madeleine Durand had come to a halt at first in childish wonder, andnow, with more than masculine self-control, "I fancy I know your face,sir," she said, as if to gain time.
"I know I shall not forget yours," said the other, and extended oncemore his ungainly arms in an unnatural gesture. Then of a sudden therecame out of him a spout of wild and yet pompous phrases. "It is as wellthat you should know the worst and the best. I am a man who knows nolimit; I am the most callous of criminals, the most unrepentant ofsinners. There is no man in my dominions so vile as I. But my dominionsstretch from the olives of Italy to the fir-woods of Denmark, and thereis no nook of all of them in which I have not done a sin. But when Ibear you away I shall be doing my first sacrilege, and also my first actof virtue." He seized her suddenly by the elbow; and she did not screambut only pulled and tugged. Yet though she had not screamed, someoneastray in the woods seemed to have heard the struggle. A short butnimble figure came along the woodland path like a humming bullet andhad caught Count Gregory a crack across the face before his own couldbe recognized. When it was recognized it was that of Camille, with theblack elderly beard and the young ardent eyes.
Up to the moment when Camille had hit the Count, Madeleine hadentertained no doubt that the Count was merely a madman. Now she wasstartled with a new sanity; for the tall man in the yellow whiskers andyellow moustache first returned the blow of Bert, as if it were a sortof duty, and then stepped back with a slight bow and an easy smile.
"This need go no further here, M. Bert," he said. "I need not remind youhow far it should go elsewhere."
"Certainly, you need remind me of nothing," answered Camille, stolidly."I am glad that you are just not too much of a scoundrel for a gentlemanto fight."
"We are detaining the lady," said Count Gregory, with politeness; and,making a gesture suggesting that he would have taken off his hat ifhe had had one, he strode away up the avenue of trees and eventuallydisappeared. He was so complete an aristocrat that he could offer hisback to them all the way up that avenue; and his back never once lookeduncomfortable.
"You must allow me to see you home," said Bert to the girl, in a gruffand almost stifled voice; "I think we have only a little way to go."
"Only a little way," she said, and smiled once more that night, inspite of fatigue and fear and the world and the flesh and the devil. Theglowing and transparent blue of twilight had long been covered by theopaque and slatelike blue of night, when he handed her into the lamp-litinterior of her home. He went out himself into the darkness, walkingsturdily, but tearing at his black beard.
All the French or semi-French gentry of the district considered this acase in which a duel was natural and inevitable, and neither party hadany difficulty in finding seconds, strangers as they were in the place.Two small landowners, who were careful, practising Catholics, willinglyundertook to represent that strict church-goer Camille Burt; while theprofligate but apparently powerful Count Gregory found friends inan energetic local doctor who was ready for social promotion andan accidental Californian tourist who was ready for anything. As noparticular purpose could be served by delay, it was arranged that theaffair should fall out three days afterwards. And when this was settledthe whole community, as it were, turned over again in bed and thoughtno more about the matter. At least there was only one member of it whoseemed to be restless, and that was she who was commonly most restful.On the next night Madeleine Durand went to church as usual; and as usualthe stricken Camille was there also. What was not so usual was that whenthey were a bow-shot from the church Madeleine turned round and walkedback to him. "Sir," she began, "it is not wrong of me to speak to you,"and the very words gave him a jar of unexpected truth; for in all thenovels he had ever read she would have begun: "It is wrong of me tospeak to you." She went on with wide and serious eyes like an animal's:"It is not wrong of me to speak to you, because your soul, or anybody'ssoul, matters so much more than what the world says about anybody. Iwant to talk to you about what you are going to do."
Bert saw in front of him the inevitable heroine of the novels trying toprevent bloodshed; and his pale firm face became implacable.
"I would do anything but that for you," he said; "but no man can becalled less than a man."
She looked at him for a moment with a face openly puzzled, and thenbroke into an odd and beautiful half-smile.
"Oh, I don't mean that," she said; "I don't talk about what I don'tunderstand. No one has ever hit me; and if they had I should not feelas a man may. I am sure it is not the best thing to fight. It would bebetter to forgive--if one could really forgive. But when people dinewith my father and say that fighting a duel is mere murder--of courseI can see that is not just. It's all so different--having a reason--andletting the other man know--and using the same guns and things--anddoing it in front of your friends. I'm awfully stupid, but I know thatmen like you aren't murderers. But it wasn't that that I meant."
"What did you mean?" asked the other, looking broodingly at the earth.
"Don't you know," she said, "there is only one more celebration? Ithought that as you always go to church--I thought you would communicatethis morning."
Bert stepped backward with a sort of action she had never seen in himbefore. It seemed to alter his whole body.
"You may be right or wrong to risk dying," said the girl, simply; "thepoor women in our village risk it whenever they have a baby. You men arethe other half of the world. I know nothing about when you ought to die.But surely if you are daring to try and find God beyond the grave andappeal to Him--you ought to let Him find you when He comes and standsthere every morning in our little church."
And placid as she was, she made a little gesture of argument, of whichthe pathos wrung the heart.
M. Camille Bert was by no means placid. Before that incomplete gestureand frankly pleading face he retreated as if from the jaws of a dragon.His dark black hair and beard looked utterly unnatural against thestartling pallor of his face. When at last he said something it was:"O God! I can't stand this!" He did not say it in French. Nor did he,strictly speaking, say it in English. The truth (interesting only toanthropologists) is that he said it in Scotch.
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p; "There will be another mass in a matter of eight hours," said Madeleine,with a sort of business eagerness and energy, "and you can do it thenbefore the fighting. You must forgive me, but I was so frightened thatyou would not do it at all."
Bert seemed to crush his teeth together until they broke, and managed tosay between them: "And why should you suppose that I shouldn't do as yousay--I mean not to do it at all?"
"You always go to Mass," answered the girl, opening her wide blue eyes,"and the Mass is very long and tiresome unless one loves God."
Then it was that Bert exploded with a brutality which might have comefrom Count Gregory, his criminal opponent. He advanced upon Madeleinewith flaming eyes, and almost took her by the two shoulders. "I do notlove God," he cried, speaking French with the broadest Scotch accent; "Ido not want to find Him; I do not think He is there to be found. I mustburst up the show; I must and will say everything. You are the happiestand honestest thing I ever saw in this godless universe. And I am thedirtiest and most dishonest."
Madeleine looked at him doubtfully for an instant, and then said with asudden simplicity and cheerfulness: "Oh, but if you are really sorry itis all right. If you are horribly sorry it is all the better. You haveonly to go and tell the priest so and he will give you God out of hisown hands."
"I hate your priest and I deny your God!" cried the man, "and I tell youGod is a lie and a fable and a mask. And for the first time in my life Ido not feel superior to God."
"What can it all mean?" said Madeleine, in massive wonder.
"Because I am a fable also and a mask," said the man. He had beenplucking fiercely at his black beard and hair all the time; now hesuddenly plucked them off and flung them like moulted feathers in themire. This extraordinary spoliation left in the sunlight the same face,but a much younger head--a head with close chestnut curls and a shortchestnut beard.
"Now you know the truth," he answered, with hard eyes. "I am a cad whohas played a crooked trick on a quiet village and a decent woman for aprivate reason of his own. I might have played it successfully on anyother woman; I have hit the one woman on whom it cannot be played. It'sjust like my damned luck. The plain truth is," and here when he came tothe plain truth he boggled and blundered as Evan had done in telling itto the girl in the motor-car.
"The plain truth is," he said at last, "that I am James Turnbull theatheist. The police are after me; not for atheism but for being ready tofight for it."
"I saw something about you in a newspaper," said the girl, with asimplicity which even surprise could never throw off its balance.
"Evan MacIan said there was a God," went on the other, stubbornly, "andI say there isn't. And I have come to fight for the fact that thereis no God; it is for that that I have seen this cursed island and yourblessed face."
"You want me really to believe," said Madeleine, with parted lips, "thatyou think----"
"I want you to hate me!" cried Turnbull, in agony. "I want you to besick when you think of my name. I am sure there is no God."
"But there is," said Madeleine, quite quietly, and rather with the airof one telling children about an elephant. "Why, I touched His body onlythis morning."
"You touched a bit of bread," said Turnbull, biting his knuckles. "Oh, Iwill say anything that can madden you!"
"You think it is only a bit of bread," said the girl, and her lipstightened ever so little.
"I know it is only a bit of bread," said Turnbull, with violence.
She flung back her open face and smiled. "Then why did you refuse to eatit?" she said.
James Turnbull made a little step backward, and for the first time inhis life there seemed to break out and blaze in his head thoughts thatwere not his own.
"Why, how silly of them," cried out Madeleine, with quite a schoolgirlgaiety, "why, how silly of them to call _you_ a blasphemer! Why,you have wrecked your whole business because you would not commitblasphemy."
The man stood, a somewhat comic figure in his tragic bewilderment,with the honest red head of James Turnbull sticking out of the rich andfictitious garments of Camille Bert. But the startled pain of his facewas strong enough to obliterate the oddity.
"You come down here," continued the lady, with that female emphasiswhich is so pulverizing in conversation and so feeble at a publicmeeting, "you and your MacIan come down here and put on false beardsor noses in order to fight. You pretend to be a Catholic commercialtraveller from France. Poor Mr. MacIan has to pretend to be a dissolutenobleman from nowhere. Your scheme succeeds; you pick a quite convincingquarrel; you arrange a quite respectable duel; the duel you have plannedso long will come off tomorrow with absolute certainty and safety. Andthen you throw off your wig and throw up your scheme and throw overyour colleague, because I ask you to go into a building and eat a bit ofbread. And _then_ you dare to tell me that you are sure there is nothingwatching us. Then you say you know there is nothing on the very altaryou run away from. You know----"
"I only know," said Turnbull, "that I must run away from you. This hasgot beyond any talking." And he plunged along into the village, leavinghis black wig and beard lying behind him on the road.
As the market-place opened before him he saw Count Gregory, thatdistinguished foreigner, standing and smoking in elegant meditationat the corner of the local cafe. He immediately made his way rapidlytowards him, considering that a consultation was urgent. But he hadhardly crossed half of that stony quadrangle when a window burst openabove him and a head was thrust out, shouting. The man was in hiswoollen undershirt, but Turnbull knew the energetic, apologetic head ofthe sergeant of police. He pointed furiously at Turnbull and shoutedhis name. A policeman ran excitedly from under an archway and tried tocollar him. Two men selling vegetables dropped their baskets and joinedin the chase. Turnbull dodged the constable, upset one of the men intohis own basket, and bounding towards the distinguished foreign Count,called to him clamorously: "Come on, MacIan, the hunt is up again."
The prompt reply of Count Gregory was to pull off his large yellowwhiskers and scatter them on the breeze with an air of considerablerelief. Then he joined the flight of Turnbull, and even as he did so,with one wrench of his powerful hands rent and split the strange, thickstick that he carried. Inside it was a naked old-fashioned rapier. Thetwo got a good start up the road before the whole town was awakenedbehind them; and half-way up it a similar transformation was seen totake place in Mr. Turnbull's singular umbrella.
The two had a long race for the harbour; but the English police wereheavy and the French inhabitants were indifferent. In any case, they gotused to the notion of the road being clear; and just as they had cometo the cliffs MacIan banged into another gentleman with unmistakablesurprise. How he knew he was another gentleman merely by banging intohim, must remain a mystery. MacIan was a very poor and very soberScotch gentleman. The other was a very drunk and very wealthy Englishgentleman. But there was something in the staggered and openlyembarrassed apologies that made them understand each other as readilyand as quickly and as much as two men talking French in the middle ofChina. The nearest expression of the type is that it either hits orapologizes; and in this case both apologized.
"You seem to be in a hurry," said the unknown Englishman, falling backa step or two in order to laugh with an unnatural heartiness. "What'sit all about, eh?" Then before MacIan could get past his sprawling andstaggering figure he ran forward again and said with a sort of shoutingand ear-shattering whisper: "I say, my name is Wilkinson. _You_know--Wilkinson's Entire was my grandfather. Can't drink beer myself.Liver." And he shook his head with extraordinary sagacity.
"We really are in a hurry, as you say," said MacIan, summoning asufficiently pleasant smile, "so if you will let us pass----"
"I'll tell you what, you fellows," said the sprawling gentleman,confidentially, while Evan's agonized ears heard behind him the firstpaces of the pursuit, "if you really are, as you say, in a hurry, I knowwhat it is to be in a hurry--Lord, what a hurry I was in when we allcame out of Cartwright's rooms--if you really
are in a hurry"--and heseemed to steady his voice into a sort of solemnity--"if you are in ahurry, there's nothing like a good yacht for a man in a hurry."
"No doubt you're right," said MacIan, and dashed past him in despair.The head of the pursuing host was just showing over the top of thehill behind him. Turnbull had already ducked under the intoxicatedgentleman's elbow and fled far in front.
"No, but look here," said Mr. Wilkinson, enthusiastically running afterMacIan and catching him by the sleeve of his coat. "If you want to hurryyou should take a yacht, and if"--he said, with a burst of rationality,like one leaping to a further point in logic--"if you want a yacht--youcan have mine."
Evan pulled up abruptly and looked back at him. "We are really in thedevil of a hurry," he said, "and if you really have a yacht, the truthis that we would give our ears for it."
"You'll find it in harbour," said Wilkinson, struggling with his speech."Left side of harbour--called _Gibson Girl_--can't think why, oldfellow, I never lent it you before."
With these words the benevolent Mr. Wilkinson fell flat on his face inthe road, but continued to laugh softly, and turned towards his flyingcompanion a face of peculiar peace and benignity. Evan's mind wentthrough a crisis of instantaneous casuistry, in which it may be that hedecided wrongly; but about how he decided his biographer can professno doubt. Two minutes afterwards he had overtaken Turnbull and told thetale; ten minutes afterwards he and Turnbull had somehow tumbled intothe yacht called the _Gibson Girl_ and had somehow pushed off from theIsle of St. Loup.