MR MURK sat on a bank, solemnly preparing for an idyll.
“But I cannot subscribe to it in one respect,” thought he; “for, if I persist in being myself, I shall look upon all this as the most idiotic fooling.”
“Little Boppard,” said he, “what will society do now you have severed yourself from it?”
“Monsieur,” said the student angrily, “I am not to be laughed at.”
“How, then, of this freedom of speech?”
“You are an interloper. You do not understand.”
“But I am eager to learn; oh, little Boppard, I am so eager to learn!”
“I will not be called so. It is infamous!”
“But it was thus M. de St Denys named you to me.”
“It is different. I am nothing to you.”
“Oh, mon pauvret! it is not so bad. You are at least a little man to me.”
One of the hobnails broke into a guffaw.
“Listen to him! this stranger is a droll! Good! It is much noise about nothing, Boppard.”
“You most happily cap me, sir,” said Ned, with great gravity. “May I have the pleasure of taking wine with you?”
“But a bucketful, Edouard!” cried the fellow boisterously. He brimmed the horns as he spoke. A vinous pigment already freckled his cheeks.
“I see here nothing but an excuse for an orgy,” thought the visitor.
The company sprawled over a bank to one side of the clearing where the great tree stood. The wine-flasks lay cool in moss. The two countrymen had thrown off their coats and bared their shaggy chests to the night. Overhead the moon was already of a power to strew the forest lanes with travelling blots of shadow, like dead leaves moving on a languid stream. A cricket chirruped here and there in spasms, as if irresistibly tickled by the recollection of some pleasantry. From time to time, across the dim perspective of a glade, a momentary indiscernible shape would steal and vanish.
Ned pondered over the enchantment—as moving less prosaic souls—of moonlit haunted woods.
“Now, I wonder,” thought he, “if I could put myself en rapport with the undefinable in less Philistine company!”
As if in reply, “What would not Nicette interpret of these fairy solitudes?” said a dreamy voice at his back.
He turned his head. Théroigne had come softly, and was seated with St Denys a little above him on the bank.
“She is not of the club, then?” said Ned.
The student laughed truculently, throwing back his head with a noise as if he were gargling.
“Little Boppard is beyond himself,” said Ned. “We shall make a man of him yet.”
The two potwallopers hooted richly at that.
“Monsieur is quick to launch insults,” said Mademoiselle Lambertine frigidly.
“Why, what have I said?”
The young man looked piously bewildered. St Denys sniggered—even, Ned could have thought, with a little note of vexation.
“Friend Edouard,” said he, “in Méricourt the portière Legrand stands pre-canonised.”
“Understand!” chuckled a bumpkin. “She is portière and a virgin—save that she bears the sins of the community.”
“Beast!” cried Théroigne. Then she went on sarcastically—“To belong to us! Oh yes! but it is likely, is it not? She who communes with the Blessed Virgin like a dear familiar.”
“It is so,” said St Denys. “That is her reputation.”
He was himself, for all his Jean-Jacques Pyrrhonism, an evident subscriber to a local superstition.
“Now,” said the perplexed Englishman, “I perceive that to be oneself is to invite resentment.”
“Not to give or take offence,” said Théroigne, with fine impartiality.
“Both of which have been done, mademoiselle. So, let us cry quits. And what would Mademoiselle Legrand make of all this?”
“How can I tell? She is the saint of dear conceits. She has the inward eye for things invisible to us. ‘Where do the threads of rain disappear to, Théroigne?’ says she. ‘Oh, mon Dieu, Nicette! Am I a Cagliostro?’ ‘I think,’ she says, ‘they are pulled into the earth by goblins working at great looms of water. Each thread draws like spun glass from the crucible of the clouds, and so underfoot is woven the network of springs and channels.’ Ciel! the quaint sweet child! Whither come her fancies? They are there in the morning like drops of dew.”
St Denys broke in with a rippling snatch of song:—
“‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,
Qui ce matin avoit desclose
Sa robe de pourpre au soleil,
A point perdu, ceste vesprée,
Les plis de sa robe pourprée,
Et son teint au vostre pareil.’”
He stopped.
“Sing on, my heart,” whispered Théroigne.
“Monsieur the Englishman does not approve my music.”
“Monsieur!” began the girl, in great scorn; but, to stay her, St Denys lifted up his voice a second time:—
“When Clœlia proved obdurate
To Phædon’s fond advances,
Repaid with scorn his woful state,
With flout his utterances,
‘Forego,’ he cried, ‘this acrid strain,
From such sweet lips a schism,
And dumbly quit me of my pain
By posy symbolism!
‘For hope, a white rose; for despair,
A red, pluck to thy bosom!’—
He turned; then looked—the wilful fair
Had donned a crimson blossom.
But, so it chanced, within the cup
A cupid, honey-tipsy,
In rage at being woken up,
Thrust out and stung the gipsy.
Then, all compunction for his deed,
For cap to the disaster,
Rubbed Phædon’s lips with honey-mead,
To serve the wound for plaster.”
“Is it pretty or not, monsieur?” asked Théroigne mockingly, advancing her foot and giving Ned a little peck in the back with it.
“It suits the occasion, mademoiselle, and, no doubt, the company.”
St Denys laughed out.
“Hear the grudging ascetic!” he cried. “It is martial music that shall fire this temperate blood! Ho, Boppard, mon petit chiffon! give him a taste of thy quality.”
“He will laugh at me, Basile.”
Nevertheless, the sizar got upon his legs. It brought him three feet nearer the stars. His voice was a protesting little organ; but the spirit that inspired it was many degrees above proof.
He sang:—
“Decorous ways,
Though Mammon praise
With self-protective art—
We’ve learnt through ruth,
The damnèd truth,
Why he affects the part.
Courage, then! Courage, my children!
Virtue is all gammon,
Imposed on us by Mammon,
Not to spoil the fashion.
Giving him monopoly—hatefully, improperly—
Of the sweets of passion.
—Monsieur, I will not be laughed at.”
“A thousand pardons,” said Ned. “I thought from your expression you were going to be sick. But, never mind. Go on!”
“I will go on or not as I please. I protest, at least, I can crow as well as monsieur.”
“Like a bantam cock on a dunghill, little Boppard. You hail the awaking of the proletariat. And are the verses your own?”
“I will not tell you. I will not tell you anything. I have never been so insulted.”
He seemed to sob, plumped down, and drank off a horn of wine in resounding gulps. The two rustics rolled to their feet and began to fling an uncouth dance together. They had canvassed the bottle freely, and were grown very true to themselves. They spun, they hooted, their moonlit shadows writhed on the ground like wounded snakes. Wilder and more abandoned waxed their congyrations, till at length one flung the other upon the bank at the very feet of Théroigne.
Now this fellow, potulent and pot-valiant, and taking his cue from sobriety, scrambled to his knees, threw himself upon the girl, and crying, “No hurt to my neighbour!” endeavoured to salute her after an example set him.
His reception was something more than damning. Théroigne, with a cry of rage, met the impact tooth and nail, and following on the rebound, became in her turn the furious aggressor. A devil possessed her fierce mouth and vigorous young arms. Her victim, wailing with terror, tried to protect his face, from which the blood ran in rivulets. For a moment or two she had everything to herself. The others stood paralysed about her where they had got to their feet. Then St Denys seized and struggled to draw her away. Even at that she resisted, worrying her prey and gabbling like a thing demented.
“Leave the brute his life!” cried M. le Président. “It is not he, after all, that is most to blame. Do you hear, Théroigne? I will twist your arm out of its socket, but you shall come!”
She uttered a shriek of physical pain, and, releasing her hold, stood panting. On the grass the wretched creature nursed his wounds, and sobbed and wriggled. His comrade, sobered beyond belief, dumbly glowered in the background.
Ned took off his hat in a shameless manner of politeness.
“These fraternal orgies,” said he, “are a little difficult of digestion to a stomach prescriptive. On the whole, I think, I prefer the despotism of savoir-vivre. With monsieur’s permission I will e’en back to Méricourt.”
“We must bear in mind that he is an Englishman,” said the sizar. “His traditions are not of the licence of good-fellowship.”