 Chapter thirty-three of the Milky Way—this LibriVox recording is in the public domain—the Milky Way by F. Tennyson Jesse, Chapter thirty-three, Fia Amaris, One, the Court of Love. On the following morning I bat a fond farewell to my convent, and prepared to take to the road once more. La Chermaire called me into the deserted dining-room, and bat me chews from a pile of little white metal port-bonner that lay upon the table. I turned them over and found that, if not being England, each of these tiny medallions, which one could have bought for fifty-son teams of peace, were beautiful in design, and I hesitated amongst them. Peter, who was actually included in this gift-making, chose a gendarme, but La Chermaire finally herself settled on a Saint-Famil for me, because, as she very charmingly said, she wanted me to have as many saints as possible on my port-bonner. Whether it was because she thought me peculiarly in need of saintly protection or not, I don't know. Anyway, I clicked the metal onto my watch-chain, and kissed her smooth, thin brown cheek. Peter shook her hand, and her bird-like eyes twinkled with kindly approval, as she bat him farewell. For you, Monsieur Pierre, said she, I have relaxed my rules, and even permitted you into dinner last night. That is because I think you eminently—she paused—estimable. She concluded with a beam. I chuckled inwardly at the thought of Peter being estimable, which is a word one classes with worthy, and applies to people whom one damns by saying that they mean well. Peter blushed a brickish hue, and I trust his conscience was reminding him of what he had taught the nuns on the preceding night. He had carefully instructed them over the coffee, in the old Oriental saying about that beverage, that it should be as sweet as love, as black as sin, and as hot as hell. The only drawback was that the little nuns could not remember it aright, and invariably brought it out, as sweet as sin and as hot as love, which was rather unfortunate. It was a heaven-sent morning, and we swung joyfully along the precipitous road that descended to the coast, our luggage having gone on ahead in the fusty old black pumpkin of a diligence. We waved goodbye to the various skylines we knew and loved the best, as different points in the road revealed them. And that night, after a day spent in the blue and gold glitter of the Riviera, we took train to Marseille. The next day we went on to Agu Mart, and from there started our pilgrimage on foot, which was to lead by way of Arles and out of the way by Les Beaux, to Avignon. We dawdled in this way, painting and writing as we went, through the most lovable country in the world, growing, I think, to know a little of its soul, which its lover-mistral hymns as AMO DE LAÑO, RENATIVO, AMO JOYOSO, E FIERO E VIVO. Soul eternally renewed, soul joyous and proud and vital. Proud and vital always, joyous only here and there. But the bleakness amounting even to duriness of some of Provence is not the least of its incomparable charms. From the salt marshes of wind-bitten Agu Mart, whose brown, stark battlements rear against the sky, we went along the miles of sand and marsh, past bitter lagoons hemmed in by bars of silted earthen stones, past the swamps where the fever-wind blows and little rivulets of brackish water meander, and the film of salt crystals glitters in the sunshine, then striking more inland to the desert of the Camargue across the monotonous miles of which we rode on fierce little horses hired from a half-savage herdsman, and always the terrible mistral blue till we felt we were becoming as bent and twisted with its breath as the bushes that strained perpetually towards the sea. Thus we came to Arle, that town of shadowed ways and fragments of carving, that make one catch one's breath, and where the women, with their straight Greek faces and brows bound by a ruban de edam, seemed sculpture come to life, and from there to one of the most longed-for borns of our pilgrimage, Les Beaux, sacred to Le Bon Roi renais, and La Rangiane, to many courts of love, to princesses who posted names such as Blanco Fleur and Sibelo, who Guetto and Pausetto, and who, so sings the poet, gave love from their throne of golden rocks. Les Beaux crests a jagged head of the alpille, and before we reached the outermost of the tortuous ravines which intersected, we wandered along straight white roads across miles of bleached pasture, ardent with belts of orange-red collard willows, or sombre with rows of dark and stately cypress, whose close-set foliage was singed rust-colored on the windward side. The poplars, which only a short while ago had seemed like ghostly skeletons of flame, were breaking into a mist of pale and tender green. The cherry and almond trees had caught little glowing clouds among their branches. The broom gleamed pure gold among gray limestone, or ruddy sandstone rocks, and the sweet smell of thyme and rosemary held the air. Sometimes we climbed up great-scarped bluffs of the pale limestone, and found high-set little towns that seemed hacked from the living rock, half deserted little towns where the mistrall whistled through wonderful old-carved doorways, or we stopped at some isolated farmhouse of the plain, surrounded by budding vineyards that shimmered like a dragonfly's wing with sulfate of copper. Twice it happened that night and an overpowering degree of delicious weariness came on us, far from a roof-tree and fireside, and we defied the supposed dangers of the night air and slipped rolled up in the blanket we carried in our rucksack, tucked away in some sheltered crevice on a mattress of springy, sweet-scented box. It was good to curve down to sleep with the dark sky and powdering of stars blotted out, now here, now there, by the darker foliage of a breeze stirred olive above. I, with my hand, clasped round Peter's forefinger for company. It was good to wake to a flushed or paling sky, with the smell of crushed herbs in our nostrils, and the peace of the out-of-doors in our hearts. And now announced Peter, as we neared the chain of the out-peel, rising almost sheer from the plain, and showing ragged and gleaming against the sky. Now we approached the first shrine on our pilgrimage. Shrine? Pilgrimage? I questioned. We are, though I have not seen fit to enlighten you before, on a devout pilgrimage of Via Amaris, to the shrines of famous lovers. And Le Beau was the seat of the court of love, built by Jean de Laval, wife of Renée. They held poetic assizes, if you please. I've read a lot about the troubadours and the courts of love, I replied. And it seems they were for the propagation of gilded platonics. A poet vowed fealty and devotion to the wife of some great Lord. And she, for her part, took him for her night, placed a ring on his finger, and gave him the sole kiss he was ever to have of her. He sang and sighed for her, and she, poor thing, may have wished him in the place of her husband, who apparently invariably married her for the thiefs she brought him, and spent his time paying the same spiritual devotion to some other dame. It was an unvicious circle, and the highest pitch that gilded platonics have ever been raised to. Gilded platonics is just what it was. That's why I'm taking this place first in the pilgrimage was Peter's cryptic reply. Le Beau was the most wonderful place in the world. Not the most beautiful, or the most charming, or even the most lovable, but the most wonderful. A sheer five hundred feet it rears above the plain on one side, indistinguishable from the limestone out of which it springs, a place of ruins and silences, of sharp shadows and light sunshine, and a wind to rend the heart, and as wonderful as the town itself is the approach there, too. Up and up Peter and I toiled, up winding after winding a whitest roadway, the gorse blazing on the slopes above and below, a pungent scent of it in the air, and all among the gorse, the limestone crags, fashioned to a thousand distorted likenesses by wind and rain, crowded and reared. Defile after defile, opened around us, among the tumbled mountains, all shouldering up in bleak power through slipped mantles of gray-green turf and grayer scrub of rosemary, and we entered the region of the quarries, where the few inhabitants of Leboe work for their bread. How Peter and I ever dragged ourselves away from those quarries, even to go on up to Leboe, I can't tell. They were like ruined cities of the dead, great blocks of gleaming whiteness lay like fallen walls of houses, or stood up in solitary pillars, while here cut into the cliffside, there leading to shadowy colonnades, were tall doorways with straight sides and the limestone left in the square solid lintel. It was, above all, those doorways which gave the place its strange look of Egypt, as of the shattered city of some long-forgotten pharaoh. Dead, white, still, and yet terrifyingly massive, these seeming ruins stretched all around us, away from the shelving of the sides of the road, up the mountains, into the shadowy ravines, without a tree to soften their austerity. So at last to Leboe itself, and if the quarries, being excavated rock, are like a ruined city, Leboe, which actually is one, looks like a dead man. This is as though it had been quarried out of the living stone, and in human place, yet thronged thick with human memories, and rich with carved relics of the races who have held it, from the Roman, Caes Marius, to the great seniors who felt and wrought all things passionately, love, religion, and poesy, and to the royal house of Anjou, of whom was Renée, who helped to make it famous. It was left to a prince of the church, and centuries later, to an earthquake, to shatter the carbon houses and splendid towers of Leboe, into the ruins that they are. A boy leapt forward at us as we passed in through the shadow of the ancient gateway. A boy as wonderful as the town. He was a brown, voluble, clear-eyed creature, with thick white teeth, his sun-burnt skin powdered ever so finely with limestone dust, even to the rounded, pinky-brown toe that poked through his broken boot. All his clothes, his felt hat, which might have adorned a Hermes, his corduroy jacket and trousers, and those tattered boots were of the same pale, harmonious brown as his face, and equally powdered with the fine white deposit. In the course of his confidences, he informed us that, though only twelve, he already worked in the quarries, and that he was the best guide in Leboe. That I can well believe, for his language poured from him in a torrent of description, facts and ideas of his own, all fiercely intelligent and mostly true. He whirled us into ruthless rooms where stately chimneys still arched, rich with carving from wide hearths where the nettles flickered in the sun. He ran us into inhabited houses where broad-faced blue-eyed women picked their babies from beneath our feet and pointed us out frescoes in corners too dark to see them. He led us scrambling over crag and broken wall, declaiming from the windiest and most precipitous spots he could find on the beauty of the view or the antiquity of the Roman remains. He showed us mere caverns in the rock where peasants were actually living. Finally he pulled a vise green hand-bill from his pocket and thrust it under our noses. It proved to be an advertisement for a musical performance to be held in some slightly more accessible township a few miles off, and it held forth particularly on the charms of a strong man who lifted a grand piano with his teeth or his toes, or some such unlikely portion of his person. Hermes held no brief for this affair. He did not even expect us to attend it, and he was not attending it himself. But years ago, when he was a small boy, he had seen this very man, grand piano and all, and he assured us it was a most marvellous sight. Never in all his life had he seen anything to equal it, and therefore, as visitors in search of the marvellous, it had evidently occurred to him we must be thrilled to hear of this epic-making event. It was pure altruism on his part, but he did not rise to the height of presenting us with the vise hand-bill. He continued to bear it along with him, unable every now and then to resist pulling it out of his pocket and following a brown forefinger along its line of enthralling print. We contrived at length to get rid of him by promising to turn up for a glass of wine at the inn, and then Peter and I crossed a turfy eminence that shouldered itself up among the rocks and ruins, meaning to gaze upon the view from the edge of it. Up till then we had imagined we knew what wind was. We thought we had been almost one with it as we traversed the Camargue. Now we knew we had never really felt it before. We clung for our lives to a broken wall, our hats firmly clasped to our chests, and just managed between our struggles to catch a glimpse of the provance that lay hundreds of feet below and stretched away to the rim of the world. To our right we could see faint and afar the towers of Egumart and a glimmer of sea, southward the forking of the Rhône, eastward range upon range of mountains and the gleam caught by the broad waters of the Durans, and all these wonders and the miles of plain that here and there were purled by lagoons and canals, or patched with orchards and vineyards. All these were drenched in sun beneath an arching sky of deep blue that quivered to pallor at the horizon, with only here and there a cloud to vary by gracious shadow, the patterning of the light-colored world below. I began to see, gasped Peter, the truth as well as the poetic beauty of what it means in Colin Dahl, when it says that the lords of Lebeau had the wind of the Rhône blowing in their veins. The only marvel is that they weren't blown away, veins and all. Sketching is out of the question anyway, said I, as we beat our way back towards the narrow, steep little street that led to the inn. I shall have to be immoral and chic from postcards. Hermes was waiting us by one of the little round iron tables painted a faded green, that were set about outside the inn. He sprang forward at our approach. I have ordered your wine, declared this youth, surely born to carry all before him, and everything has happened of the most fortunate. For here is my uncle, M. Poulitan. Think of that. We thought of it as we returned in blank bewilderment, the bow of a portly gentleman seated at one of the little tables. But thinking told us nothing. M. Poulitan himself came to our aid. You must excuse my so youthful nephew, said he, for having the idea that the whole world knows the name of Telemak Charlemagne Poulitan. His own expression and manner rather suggested that he could not help agreeing with his nephew. The fact is, to those good people of Les Beaux, a little success and, shall we say, celebrity goes a long way. I am thee, Poulitan, the filmmaker, M. M. and at your service. We had neither of us ever heard of him, but we summoned up intelligent smiles. At least I did. Peter, I saw to my horror, had taken a dislike to M. Poulitan, for being there at all. Peter, when he took a dislike to any one or any thing, was about as easy to manage as a ship with a broken rudder in a gale. And nervously I expressed the hope that M. Poulitan would do us the honor of sharing our bottle of wine. M. Telemak, et cetera, was a round, highly glossy looking little man, with downy black hair, cut alabros, and the inevitable velvet collar to his brown greatcoat. The ends of his black mustache were fiercely waxed, and when he grew excited, which he frequently did, they twitched like eager little wings. Of all men the mildest at heart he was the most easily roused, and calmed again, that I have ever met. He had no idea of keeping anything to himself, and we soon knew that he was traveling for Roche Frère, the big firm of filmmakers, in search of fresh inspiration, and had called in at Le Baud to see his old parents. And you, my children, he finished with a paternal beam. We are, so to speak, said Peter, on a sacred pilgrimage. Ah, Tien, a honeymoon, said he, with a still wider beam. Our relations are strictly those of business, I replied severely. Monsieur here has been commissioned to write a book on Provence, and I am illustrating it. At the present moment we are treading in the footsteps, at least we shall when we leave here, of Ocasan and Nicolette. Dom, and who may they be, friends of yours, asked Monsieur Poulotin. Peter, aghast at such a state of ignorance, collected his French together, and fixing the unfortunate telomoc, by now conscious of having said something wrong. With a relentless gaze he proceeded to pour the following remarks out, gathering in volume as he went. Yes, they are friends of ours, and they should be friends of yours, too. It is your own fault, if they are not. They are friends, because everything that is eternally young and lovely is friendly, and they are the immortal lovers of the world. You will say that they have never lived except in a manuscript. Monsieur Poulotin had said nothing at all, and was gazing at Peter with his moist red lips apart, and an expression like a hypnotized rabbit. But I reply that that is the fullest and most enviable form of life, the fullest because it has never known death, the most enviable because it has never been alive. Sopristi said Monsieur telomoc Charlemagne Poulotin. You meet them first in that wonderful old manuscript of the thirteenth century, pursued Peter, which sings of them in the long d'oeil. Not in the long doc, you observe, though that was the language of Provence. And that is why we imagine the singer to be of the North, although he laid his scene in Bocair. He says that Ocasan was the only son of the Count of Bocair, which was a great castle by the sea. But Bocair is not by the sea, objected telomoc. Grasping at something which he felt he knew. In the first place said Peter, Bocair is by the sea, because it is vital for the story that it should be so, and what is vital is. In the second place it was by the sea, in the beginning of time, because all about it you can find sea fossils and shells, which is proof, even to a materialist. It is true that Ocasan and Nicolette were of the Divine Middle Ages, and not of the stone or iron age. But if Bocair, being actually and physically by the sea, wants upon a time, and morally and mentally and poetically by the sea in the thirteenth century, does not make it quite enough by the sea for the purposes of the story, then what does? Mondieu murmured telomoc, wiping his brow, and gazing with deep respect at Peter. Perhaps he added hastily, you have it with you and could lend it to me, this so interesting history. He evidently thought to forestall future tirades. I explained that our copy was in the ancient Long Doi, but as Monsieur Poudain merely replied, let me see. Peter fished Ocasan and Nicolette out of his knapsack and handed it across the little table. Telomoc opened it cheerily, looked puzzled, turned a few pages back and forth, and finally, with a sacré tonnerre, handed it back. For the opening sentences, qui vouloir vont vers y d'être du port de deux kétis, de deux biases en forme pétis, are as about as intelligible as anything you are likely to come across later on. Peter was by now so proficient in this little dead language that he wrote me a postcard when I was at the convent, which I don't doubt all the other borders read without being in the least aware of what any of it meant, let alone the beginning thereof. Maisonette Eau Claire V. Which is being interpreted, maiden of the shining face. It's a simple tale, Monsieur said I, hastily, seeing a cloud gathering on Telomoc's ingenuous brow, and the value doesn't lie so much in the actual story, as in the characterization and setting. Thereby resembling all good literature broke in Peter, mounting one of his pet hobby-horses, and, I continued quickly, we are going to see the actual scenes of the romance so as to reconstruct it for ourselves. That is our idea. A sudden gleam came into the little pursed-up eyes of Monsieur Poudre Tann. We will go together, he declared, and you shall tell it to me as we go. I was conscious of a pang of dismay, for it had not been just when we had said we were on a sacred pilgrimage. What of our pursuit of old-time lovers, who would surely fade away like morning mists before the uncompromising sun of Monsieur Telomoc, Charlemagne, Houlitan? But if there is one thing more than another over which Peter and I are rank cowards, hurting anyone's feelings is that thing. And somehow we found ourselves hustled into the to-know of a shattered old pea-green motor, while the proud owner thereof, having caught his aged parents, the patron and patron of the inn, to his manly bosom, himself squeezed behind the wheel. Hermes stood, all smiles, grasping our two-frank piece in one hand and his felt hat in the other. The parents thrust a bunch of apple-blossom into my lap. The horn blared toot toot, and with Telomoc bent like a vast brown toad over the wheel, his broad red-neck bulging level with cap and coat-collar, we started off at a rush down the mountain road. I have a ghastly idea that this profane fellow may wish to film Ocusan and Nicolette, shrieked Peter in my ear as we fled along in the wind. I began to laugh helplessly. The prospect struck me as not being without its humour. If you wanted a beautiful poetical via Amaris, I yelled back at him. Uninterrupted by the banal and the ridiculous, you should have set out on it with someone else. This sort of thing always happens to me. It's because of you I'm so sick, explained Peter, as we slid round a more sheltered curve. To tell you the truth, I had meant to teach you such a lot on this pilgrimage. You'd have gone up another of those steps of yours in your feelings for me, I mean, at every point. And I'm damned if you can go up steps of that kind, while Telemoc, Charlemagne, Houlitan sets the scene. And I gaily agreed with him, which only showed how little either of us knew what in what in Congress forms the gods are sometimes pleased to assume. End of Chapter 33 Chapter 34 This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Milky Way by F. Tennyson Jesse. Chapter 34 Via Amaris. Two. Oka-san and Nicolette. We rushed across the level country at about fifty miles an hour, past cliff-high rows of black cypress and gentler bending poplars, scattering at one place a regiment of beautiful pale blue cavalry on maneuvers. There was no windscreen to the car, which perhaps was wise as it would probably have come to grief. And by the time Monsieur Telemoc rushed us across that great suspension bridge from Tarascon to Bocair, on which Tartaran so feared to set foot, my hair was in a warm web right over my face. Through it I caught sight on either hand of the brown rhone, refracting blue here and there, like a starling's back. Of its golden shoals and of the battlements of Bocair, rising clear and bright into the late afternoon sunshine, on the further side, we abandoned the car in a little alley and wandered about the town for a while. Through those narrow ways across which the tall old houses with their barred and mullioned windows lean as though to stare into each other's eyes, under deep eaves of sculptured wood, where carven hands came out from under the roofs as though for their support. Then we turned into the castle grounds and went up the steep slope of them, through the checkered shade thrown by the pine trees, upon the long, lush growing grass. The castle is mostly in ruins, save for a tower or so. The splendid sweep of the encircling walls and the great gateway, and the places allowed to run mercifully wild, not tortured into gravel paths, carpet beds, and lawns, which one may not press with an inquiring foot. A seat is placed unobtrusively here and there, and in great archways that are hollowed out of the walls and must, I suppose, have once been alcoves in the castle rooms, chairs are placed, and here come the old women of Bocair to sit with their knitting in the sun, sheltered from the piercing breath of the Mistral. The buff gray of the sunlit stonework behind them, with just the blue crescent of shadow curved over them by the cutting in of the arch, makes a brilliant decoration of the old black-clad, white-capped figures, crouched, chattering together. And I felt my fingers itching for a brush. We stood looking out a while over the faded, brown, fluted roofs of Bocair. A whole sea of them stretching and sloping away into a bright mistiness. Then wandered to the other side of the battlements, and looked over the long curves of the throne and its pale sand-banks, away beyond Tarascon to the bleached plains and hillocks of the open country. Then Telemach said, to business, which I could see struck Peter as a goth-like way of putting it. We all sat down in the grass under a friendly pine, and I began the story of Oka-san and Nicolette. I told it as plainly and boldly as possible, because it is profanation to try and tell in your own way what has been told perfectly once and for all. And whether Telemach ever caught anything of the undying romance of Oka-san's pursuit of Nicolette, I don't know. When I had finished with the lovers having such joy as never yet, he said something to the effect that he knew what it was to get an idea into his head so that it wouldn't come out, that one. Thus referring to Oka-san, who was so shapely of body and so full of all gracious qualities. Oka-san, the king of lovers, with his high and comely nose, his eyes gray and dancing, his hair curled in little gold rings about his clear face. But even Mr. Poul-tan gathered, I think, something of the mysterious quality of Nicolette that Walter Peter felt when he called her a beautiful, weird foreign girl. He sat rubbing his downy black head for a moment till it was more alabros than ever, and then delivered himself to the following astonishing effect. It is the finger of Providence. Romance, costume, incident, all are there. It can be done, and I, Telemach, Charlemagne, Poul-tan, am the man to do it. Do what, chorused Peter and I, together? Film it was the brief and terrible response of Telemach, the response we had so dreaded. Well, there it was, and we soon discovered it was no use fighting it. Mr. Poul-tan merely replied to all our cries of sacrilege with, if you help me you will get well paid and you will be able to see the thing is done after your ideas. If you don't, then I shall do it without you, and you will see then that the sacrilege will be far worse. And haunted by terrible visions of Nicolette dressed in a Louis Cator's lace collar, or ochre-san with a moustache, we yielded. We all went back over the bridge to Tarascon and engaged rooms at the inn. And then I went to the Post-Restante, where I found two letters awaiting me, one bearing English stamps, and I opened that first oligog or news of little John in the changeling. It proved to be nothing of an exciting nature as regarded them. But for herself Gladice wrote that she was walking out with a gentleman from the bush, by which she did not mean the wilds of Australia, but that district of London known as Shepherd's Bush. I breathed a sigh of relief at the thought of settling Gladice in life, and opened the other letter. This was a rather plaintive epistle from Chloe, from which one gathered that life was singularly black for her. But that Joe's wedding, which she had attended some weeks previously as best girl, had been peerless. Chas and Joe were now wrapped in oblivion somewhere, but Chloe was back in Paris alone, stodgily finishing her time at Colorosses. Hence these tears. I should have been worried only I knew that probably by now Chloe was neck deep in some new affair, which she would gleefully describe to the whole world as really platonic this time, only to dissolve a few weeks hence in floods of tears with the whale. How was I to know he was feeling things the whole time? I thought it was just friendship, and now it's all spoiled. And the curious part of it would be that she would undoubtedly believe that she believed herself. Late that night, after I was a bed, but while Peter and Mr. Poulitan were still arguing in the common room below me, I had an idea. Jumping out of bed I hid on the floor with the heel of my slipper, and then stuck my head out of the window. I have always hoped I did not look as absurd from below as Peter and Telemoc did from above when they thrust their heads forth and turned themselves upside down to ask what I wanted. I've had an idea, I shrilled. You were saying, Mr. Poulitan, you did not know any one of a suitable type to play Nicolette, but I do. Chloe, Peter, Chloe! Of course, absolutely it, cried Peter. Have you a photo you could chuck down for Mr. Poulitan to see? I had a few snapshots of Chloe in a light frock being blown about by the wind, and they gave some little idea of her slim grace, the glitter of her hair, and the angelic look of her whole person. These I showered down on the upturned faces, and then retired to bed and to sleep. The next morning we wired to Chloe, and the day after that she arrived, and not she alone, but Joe and Chaz with her. Explain this, cried I, falling into Joe's arms at the station. I thought you and Chaz were the world forgetting, though not by the world forgot. So we have been for the last month, but I suppose it's no good expecting you or Peter to take count of the flight of time. It is one of my theories, said Peter, that time is all of one continuous peace, so to speak, and that we make a mistake even portioning it off in past, present, and future. How much more of a mistake, then, to cut it into absurd squares like a child's puzzle, and label them January or February, or Monday or Tuesday? A little while ago I added we had to write to our publisher. We were at some farm in the middle of a plain, and we didn't know the date, but we knew the month, and the farm people knew the day of the week. And they produced one of those little calendars which have the date that each day of the week falls on, all printed in a column below the initial of the day. Well, we all came to the conclusion that it was Wednesday, but whether the 7th, 14th, the 21st, or the 28th, no one could tell, and there was no way of finding out. So we put them all at the head of our letter, and let Mr. Brennan take his chance. And then finished, Peter, the beastly calendar turned out to be of the wrong year, so none of the dates was right after all. Joe was looking her best in a leaf-brown satin coat and skirt that just matched her eyes and hair, and Chaz was at his man of the worldliest, which made us very proud. Telemach Charlemann was visibly impressed. It is needless to say that he had no sooner set eyes on Chloe than he fell into raptures, as great, though not as poetical, as were Oka Hans over his lady of the shining face. Joe, he declared, he could fit in as a court lady, though he added, and it was a perpetual joke against the long-suffering Joe. If you would only consent to wear the suitable costume, madame, what a man at arms you would make. Telemach suggested that as his wife refused. Chaz should fulfill that role. But Chaz, who is nothing if not a looker on at life, declined firmly. Of course by now the all-conquering Telemach had discovered that Peter and I had each been a pro in our day, and no amount of honest avowal as to the fifth greatness of the company in which we had played. Suffice to check his enthusiasm. Peter, he vowed, must be his Oka-san. Since he was young, slim, and fair, I could not help thinking Peter's face had too puck like a twist to it, to be quite suitable. But here again Telemach proved right. The addition of a wig of golden hair, which fell in a shining curve to his shoulders, transformed my whimsical long-faced companion to a young medieval knight. As for me, I was a little foot-page, an eminently fitting choice, since my face is nothing in particular, and my legs really superior. Monsieur Poulitan was one of those producers who, instead of keeping a stock company always in readiness, worked with a nucleus of half a dozen character artisans, and augmented them by special leads as required, and also by the supers necessary for crowd- work. This nucleus company now arrived from Paris. The supers sprang up apparently out of the earth at a wave of Telemach's wand. Medieval dresses arrived by the crateful from a Parisian expert in such matters, and the rehearsals began. The chief difficulty turned out to be the setting of the scenes, for Bocair Castle is undeniably in a ruined condition, and no sea laps its foot. The latter defect worried Monsieur Poulitan not at all. The river will do as well, said he placidly. Why should not the ships sail up from the sea? As to the sheltered state of the castle and of the walls of the town, here too Monsieur Poulitan had his remedies, and incredible enough the last one was. To begin with, as he pointed out, very little space was necessary for a cinema scene. The focus of the lens was not wide, and for the figures to be of a reasonably interesting size on the screen, the space they moved in had to be confined. With one tower and a corner of the ramparts we could do wonders. So vowed Telemach, and there was a complete gateway which could be besieged. As to the interior, that truly was a more complicated matter, and even were the castle still roofed and ruined, it would not have helped us as much light was necessary. Here, where most people would have been daunted, Monsieur Poulitan had another idea. There was a cinema studio at Lyon, and to Lyon we would all take train accordingly. To film the indoor scenes, as soon as ever, Monsieur Poulitan had completed his arrangements for hiring the studio. There only remained to get on the right side of the authorities at Bocair, and we all doubted if this were possible, even to the winning tongue of Telemach Charlemagne. Our hopes, for by now this organized and systematic desecration, had reduced Peter almost to a state of coma. We're dashed to the earth, however. Telemach, his rosy face creased in smiles, burst into the common room of the inn, where we were all having lunch, and over a glass of absinthe, detailed to us his success. Figured to yourself, cried he, that the mare ended by falling on my neck and calling me brother. We expressed to perhaps not wholly complimentary surprise, and asked how this miracle had been accomplished. Imagine, my children, said Telemach, that the mare is none other than Henri Dupont, who used to be a boy at school with me. Later on we both entered the service of an hotel at Avignon as waiters. I left it for the cinema business. He prospered till he came to Bocaire, and set up an hotel for himself. He did well, chiefly out of the Americans, and now he is mare. Then you were great friends in the old days, I asked. Canon, canon, mamzelle, au contraire par bleu, when we last parted we had to be rent asunder, not because we were embracing, but because we wished each to tear out the hair and eyes of the other. But then why? At Donde, the whole trouble was we both loved the same woman. Jean, a femme d'Achambre, at the Avignon Hotel. And I won her. But then how? I do not wish to speak unkindly of the dead, and I trust she rests in peace, said Telemoc, piously. It was more than she ever let me do in life. It was notorious the way she treated men. Everyone heard of it. Her tongue and her fingernails, gnome to gnome. Never was husband so abused as I. Ah, well, a beautiful bronchitis removed her a year ago. So now you see how it was that Henri was so pleased to see me. I began by saying there was something I wished to ask him, and he seized me by the hand, crying, Ask what you will of me. I owe you eternal gratitude. From what did you not save me? Oh, yes, I sighed, and at what a cost to myself. After that all was easy. And I have gained incredible concessions. I have left to reconstruct temporarily part of the castle to place towers and windows where I will. All in pasteboard, a castle of the theatre you understand. It will be magnificent, and banners shall wave from the roof. This is hell, groaned Peter, and departed out of doors forthwith. A half nibbled radish still in his hand. Tien, he has the stomach ache that one, observed Monsieur Poulotin. Well, my children, is it not news of the most magnificent I bring you? He beamed at us in such joy that we had not the heart to disappoint him, and we faithlessly applauded, glad in our cowardly way that Peter was not there to hear us. And to confess the truth, I was as sad as Peter. Sadder, for mine was not a noble and aesthetic misery. Quite the reverse. I had been happy enough as we all walked from the station to the inn together. I was still happy. Though with vague prickings of some other feelings at the rather uproarious little dinner which followed, but that night, when I had gone to bed, the fell thing came over me, wave upon wave. I wished we had never met Telemoc, who had turned our devout pilgrimage into opera-bouf. But that I could forgive myself for wishing. What filled me with shame was that I found I was regretting the advent of Joe, of Charles, and of Chloe, for there was no denying that it had broken up the solitude adieu to which I had been accustomed for so many weeks. The whole atmosphere had suffered sudden and violent disruption, and I felt forlorn and lonely amid the ruins. Lonely because Peter was, sustainedly, in one of his gloomiest moods, when he not only gave no help to anyone, but when he himself was very difficult to help. And instead of trying, I sulked inwardly and was irritable outwardly. We made several excursions by train to places we had to see, but the joy had somehow gone out of it all, and the curious thing was that, as Peter at last began to grow more cheerful, I became crosser. Chloe, frankly, soon lost patience with me. Joe bore it angelically, but at last even she raised her brows and exchanged glances with Chloe, and I rushed out and stared into the callous ron and felt that I hated the whole world and that nobody loved me. I was indeed a worse-than-hog, but ashamed as I felt then it was as nothing to my shame when I discovered what was at the root of my misery. The dress rehearsal had just taken place. Incredible as it may sound, the ancient castle of Bocair had been duly profaned with pasteboard and looked like the Earl's Court exhibition. We had performed in circumscribed areas, marked off just outside the angle of the lens vision, with pegged-down tape to keep us in focus. The whole thing, on looking back, seems like a comic nightmare. All was over, and I, who had not been in on the last scenes, was once more in everyday attire. I had loitered back over the suspension bridge from Tarascon, changing at the inn, because I hoped not to see any more of the performance. And as I reached the castle, I met the Supers jostling down through the gateway, making brilliant splashes of vermilion and emerald, blue and purple in the sunshine. I went on up into the grounds, and there I saw Peter and Chloe, still hand in hand, coming down the slope. He had discarded his wig and was grinning broadly, but still playing at being a medieval lord to his stately dame. I stood by a juniper bush, and at last I knew what was the matter with me. Jealousy, plain jealousy, hot waves of it. Oh, why, why hadn't I golden hair and chiseled features and a presence? If I had, then I could have played the Nicolette to Peter's ocha-san. I, who was his Nicolette in real life, hear a worse pang than any shot through my mind. Was I his Nicolette? I, with my mouse-colored hair, my pale little face, my lack of all the pretty ways in which Chloe was so versed. After all, it had taken me a long time to realize that my affection for Peter was as strong as it was. Had it taken too long and tired him out, Chloe, of course, had been flirting with him, because she flirted as she breathed. But I knew she meant nothing, and indeed was genuinely unaware that she did it at all. But would Peter take it as lightly? He might think she really was in earnest, and I could not imagine the man able to resist Chloe if she set her heart on him. Indeed, I don't think I should have much opinion of a man who could. That terrible moment achieved some good, at least. For the revelation of it killed my bad temper there and then. There was no place for irritation in the feeling that stormed over me till I was almost drowning in it. And Peter's happiness, that stood out as the first thing of importance. I stepped towards them with a firm, if somewhat forced, smile upon my countenance. The others, hot and exhausted looking, now appeared. And we streamed down through the checkered shade of the pines, and so out to Tarascon, followed by an excited populace, Mr. Telemoc Charlemagne Houlitan, who, like myself, was in ordinary garb, fell in by my side. He was bubbling with relief and glorification, and I, reflecting that it was not his fault. He being but a tool of fate, let him prattle and gave him due praise. It only remained that he should add to my discomfort. And he did so between the two banks of the Rhône. It appeared that I, though, as he candidly remarked, not beautiful, had a Petit-Minois chiffonné, which charmed all who had the felicity of beholding it, that my prowess in the French language made me an intelligent companion, and that never had he met one of my sex with so many good ideas. Did I not think it would be an excellent thing if I combined these advantages with those which he, Telemoc, as a man, and perhaps something of a genius, possessed? At first I did not understand and stared blankly at him. Then, as he elaborated further, I felt that it was indeed the crowning touch to the whole opera bouffe. This suggestion that the fat, rosy, downy-headed producer of picture plays should produce me as Madame Poulotin. I enlarged on my total lack of dough, assured him he had overrated my capabilities, and by the time we had reached the inn, had succeeded in making him understand the impossibility of exceeding to his request. Poor, dear, fat Telemoc. I have no doubt he soon consoled himself with fresh triumphs, and I hope a new Madame Poulotin. But there were actual tears in his kindly little pig's eyes as I left him to fly up to the solitude of my own room. It had been the last nightmare that walked over the hot suspension bridge, and this was what our Via Amaris had come to. Via Amaris, indeed. End of Chapter 34 Chapter 35 of The Milky Way The sleeper-vox recording is in the public domain. The Milky Way by F. Tennyson Jesse. Chapter 35 Via Amaris, three, Petrarch and Laura. That night I couldn't sleep, and at six o'clock I was downstairs and sitting outside under the plain trees, which looked exquisitely cool and green to my tired eyes. The kindly patron brought me some coffee, and as I was sipping it Peter came strolling out and sat down at my table. I said hello and propelled the coffee-pot towards him. I am an early bird, he remarked, in a best bromide company voice. And I see you are the same. No, I'm the worm. I didn't sleep. It's got so hot suddenly. I am going to get away from here. Ah, well said Peter. It's a long worm that has no turning, as the proverb says. I too think it is time we left. That's why I scraped myself out of bed so early, to make arrangements. If you hadn't been down I was going to awake you by playing the humoresque under your window. At the mention of the humoresque and the memories it conjured up, I bent my head swiftly, so that a fat and idiotic tear should fall unperceived into my coffee. Biv said, Peter, when you have breakfasted I have ordered you an egg, by the way. Go upstairs, put on your bonnet. Yes, it is not masculine ignorance. I mean your motor bonnet. Cast your belongings together to be sent on by the petite vitesse. And be ready here in half an hour. I sat with my mouth open, and the tears suspended in my eyes. Ready for what, I asked. When I was a little girl, replied Peter severely, I was taught the following rhyme. Speak when you're spoken to, do as your bid, shut the door after you, and you'll never be chid. That's all I have to say on the subject at present. This correspondence must now cease. May I say anything to the others, I asked meekly. If you like, you may leave a note on your pin-cushion in Orthodox style. But I must have something to say in it, I objected. Say that we have gone on. Gone on, said I densely. But why? Petrarch and his Laura, stupid. Viv. Here his hand came over the table and caught mine. Have you forgotten that we're on via Amaris? That you've still got something to learn, and that I, with the help of Petrarch and Laura, am going to teach it to you? No, I hadn't forgotten. But, oh Peter, I thought you had. I did not leave a note on my pin-cushion. But when all my preparations were complete, crept into Chloe's room. She was still asleep, but I heartlessly awoke her, and managed to instill into her drowsy brain that Peter and I were going on. She put her arms round my neck and murmured that she hoped I would be happy. And would I please tell Madame not to send up her breakfast till she rang for it? Good-bye, you lazy thing, I said, with all the unbearable virtue of the early riser. Good-bye, and Chloe, I want to say. And I want you to say it to Joe for me, that I'm sorry I've been such a cross-pig lately. You haven't, not a bit, declared Chloe generously, but with a sad lack of truth, and we exchanged an embrace that, on my side, was not entirely innocent of egg. The pea-green car, with a chauffeur called from the neighbouring garage, was waiting outside, and as he tucked me in, Peter informed me that Monsieur Poulitan had lent it to take us wherever we wanted to go. And where do we want to go, I asked. Not to Avignon again, surely. No, to both clues, of course. I think it's awfully nice of Telemach, said I. Not a bad old chap, agreed Peter. A very good chap, I declared, and added, very. We talked hardly at all as the car tore along the fresh morning roads. But I felt the mistrust and soreness of the past week or so being blown away from me, and I saw by the backward tilt of Peter's head, and the light in his narrowed eyes, that he, too, was being swept clean of the depression which had lain upon him. At the village of Oakleuse we dismissed the pea-green car with a message of thanks and farewell to Telemach. And then set off on foot up the valley. Oakleuse Valley is one of those places which, from the intensity and beauty of the passion associated with it and breathed into its air, seems a more poetic mood, a state of mind, a lovely emanation and memorial of the passionate spirit which sang and loved there. Then an actual place. It is impossible to look at that towering semi-circle of cliff which makes a great amphitheater of the valley's end, without imagining how Petrarch's eyes must have gazed upon it, up to the cloud-wrapped, gleaming snow-picks above. And it is impossible to look downwards again to the river that rises in the hollow of the cliffs without a picture of Laura, as he saw her bathing her white feet in its waters. Read it to me, said Petr, lying in the grass at my feet. You know the one about the river. I opened my tattered little volume of the most divine love-songs ever written and read him the one beginning, chiare fresce e dolci acue, the exquisite cadences of which fall with as inevitable a grace as the water that it praises. Oh, oh! said Peter, rubbing his forehead in the grass, to have written it. Well, it's divine, even to read it. Aire sacros sereno. Isn't that just what one feels here? It's not so much the passion of Petrarch as the cold, clear, unruffled serenity of Laura that lives on here. Did she ever love him, I wonder? I mused. It seems impossible that any woman could have things like that written to her and remain unmoved. Why, it must have been like being wooed by a god. That she remained unwon, we all know. Think of his pallor and his pain. As to being unmoved, I can't think it. Although the whole impression of Laura always is of someone aloof and spiritual, it's no wonder that people accuse him of imposing on the world for poetic purposes a Laura who had no real existence, instead of which there is a biographer who wishes us to believe she was the wife of a man who scolded her till she cried and who made her bear ten children. Petr sat up and ran his fingers through his hair. I don't believe that. What does it rest on? A note which may or may not be genuine on the margin of a manuscript in the library at Milan. The only thing is, if one gives up belief in that, one has to give up that description of her as a lady in a green mantle sprinkled with violets over which fell the golden plaques of her hair. I cling rather to that mantle, I must say. But no, she was a simple, wonderfully strong, sold girl who lived in this valley. And he probably saw her first when she was bathing her white self in the Dolci Aque, which, after all, is worth all the mantles in the world, as you and I know Viv. And his priestly orders were quite enough bar to her way of thinking. One needn't stick in a surly husband and ten squalling brass. I am, as was very often apparent, no such idealist as Petr. Though I should rather have liked giving Hugh de Saade and his progeny into limbo, I felt myself unable to do so. If Laura were a simple peasant girl, then how came it that Charles of Luxembourg kissed her at a banquet? A chaste salute which caused Petrarch pangs of envy. I intimated as much to Peter, who would have none of it. The poems in every line of them, he said, breathed of her as an untouched girl, a volley closer, like her own voclus. All very lovely said I, if Laura had died young. But you remember Petrarch loved her for one in twenty years before, as he says, she took his heart with her to heaven. Laura must have been between forty and fifty when she died. And I think whether Hugh de Saade scolded her or no, it's better to picture her when she died a plague, as being a beautiful stately woman who'd borne ten children, even to a man she didn't love, than as a woman who'd done nothing but keep Petrarch at any in some farm beside the Sorgh. Perhaps you're right, said Peter suddenly. It spoils the youthful picture, but it beautifies the middle-aged one. And Petrarch had a mistress and two children in Avignon, though that never spoils the story a bit, even if it ought to. In a way, that and Laura's wifehood, if she were a wife, mind I don't quite give in on the subject. Both go to make the ittle more perfect, because it becomes so purely of the spirit. Viv, I wonder why everyone always talks of love as though it were a definite quantity. It comes differently and means something different to each person on this earth. Yes, it does. But in theory I think it's much the same to all of us, before we know anything about it in practice. When one is very young, eighteen or nineteen, the future's all wrapped in a beautiful golden mist, and it's ever so far ahead. One feels quite confident that one day this mist will lift, or rather become a beautiful golden light instead of a beautiful golden mist. That was what one meant by falling in love. But it was very remote, as well as very splendid. And meanwhile one was so happy, and life was such fun that one didn't want to hurry. And then, asked Peter, adding, and now? Well, then one got nearer to the golden mist, and it was less misty and less golden, and nothing happened at all, and the future had become the present, and one still went on from day to day. And speaking personally, this one had to go out and earn its own living. Well, that's only then. What about now? asked Peter. Oh, but I haven't finished with then yet. The demigod whom I fondly pictured as awaiting me in that golden mist was, would you like to hear what he was like? He was about forty, had a square, clean, shaven jaw, hair going iron grey on the temples, and velvety grey eyes that, as far as I remember, were to be able to flash like steel of occasion warranted. I suppose men don't look ahead in that way, do they, Peter? Not in that way, not to marriage as the ultimate and most gorgeous firework. Among boys there is an enormous amount of curiosity about women, often not of a very nice description. And if, like me, you didn't care for that kind of speculation and talk, well, then you didn't dwell much on it at all, except that you had an idea it must be rather jolly to be in love. And so it is, too. It's the finest thing in the world. All love is because love is life, love of one's parents, friends, brothers, of one's dog, of the sun and wind and stars, and the little things that move on leaves and among the grass, love of life altogether, and that queer, rare, wonderful thing that holds them all, like the atmosphere holds the world, love of God. It's all of a peace. I have a theory, and here Peter began to wave his hands, as he always did, when he began on that pet sentence of his. I have a theory that love is all in one huge, shining, quivering sheet, like the Sea of Crystal in the Revelation. And the love that each of us has is derived from it, as the rain is originally drawn up from the sea. There's a power of water in the world, Viv, what with the sea and rivers and lakes and things. But it's really all one piece, you know, perpetually being condensed and drawn up and dissolved and forming again in a vast circle. That's like love. Then one needn't mind if one's love seems all different from what one expected, because it still belongs to the big love, even if what one has is only a raindrop or so. The funny thing is, Peter, I always imagined my iron-jawed gray-vel that I'd person would love me most enormously. And now if I marry, I'd rather do the loving myself. Marriage is different to what one thinks too, opined Peter. For instance, well, you must know by now that I want to marry you, Viv. I want to have you there, almost always. And no one but you. I shouldn't want to go away to other women. But I shall want to go away to other things. Work most of all. You're such fun to play with. I think I should always want you for that. But to work one must always go alone. You're the pluckiest, dearest, sweetest thing that ever happened, and I can't do without you. And I've got to have you, because you're as much a necessity of life as air or food, and just as much of a daily miracle as sunrise. But I've the wanderlust and the lone lust, and you mustn't forget it, dear. I sat silent, stroking the rough, fair head in my lap. But continued Peter after a minute. There is, to a male creature, something of a feeling of putting his head in a noose when he marries. Less with you than with anyone, which is funny, because one always pictures you as so much more with one than most wives. As a rule women are creatures to go back to. You're a companion on the way. And there's another funny thing. You used to look forward to marriage as a sort of inevitable splendor, and I never looked forward to it at all. So you want to be married more than I do, and yet I want to marry you a sight more fiercely than you want to marry me. I don't want marriage, qua marriage. And don't you believe any man who tells you he does? But I do want to marry you. Most particular. Well, you shall, said I. I fell in love with you at once, you know, Viv. You've only walked in, step by step. By the way, and here he knelt up beside me and took my hands. Viv, how much do you? I don't know, Peter, dear, I replied truthfully. I know that I couldn't marry anyone but you, and I can see now that even if it had gone as far as fitting on my wedding dress, I could never have married Harry or William or anyone but you. I don't think you're a prodigy of genius and tansomeness and goodness. Though I do like your funny face, and I adore your mind, and I think you're the goodest person I happen to know. But it's the ewness of you I like best about you. Off the point, get back to how much you love me. Oh, I said, and held out my arms. He laid his head against my shoulder, and I pressed it there and kissed it. I don't know, I said again. I only know I want to hold you tight, tight, and that I want to keep away anything that might hurt you, and give you all you want. I'd fight God for you. I'd stand between him and you if he wanted to hurt you. I wish I were God to protect you. We stayed quietly, and only the faint, thin voice of trickling waters made the serene air alive. When did you first know? That you felt all that I mean, asked Peter at length. Not quite entirely till now. And up to Tarascon I took it and you as a matter of course. It was Ocasan and Nicolette, and Chloe I feel horrid about it and ashamed. Peter burst out laughing. Good old Telemoc, he said, and I vowed he would be death to romance. Do you remember? I said you couldn't go up any more steps while Telemoc was round spoiling things. And to think it was that. Darling, what a relief to find you so human. And you said I. When did you begin to know? I always knew I wanted you. If you mean when did I know I must have you? Well, Viv, could I see your dearness and not want you? Could I feel your nearness and not know I must have you? He lent towards me, and I suddenly felt I didn't quite want him to kiss me then. I slipped through his arms and stood up. Let's wander a bit, I said. We wandered till those thin faint voices began to be overpowered by one more insistent. We turned up a shadowy, narrow twist of gorge, where a sharp frost, such as that land of contrasts, knows even in April, glittered in the crevices, and the voice grew stronger. Another curve, and we came on something that made us stop, and stand gazing up. The cliff curved away from the pass in a dark semi-circle that towered far above it. And over the edge of this curve came a slather of water, blue as a kingfisher where the sun shone on it before it fell over into the shadow. It gave a curious effect that constantly descending slather of water and the sunlit gleam of color that always stayed in the same place so that it almost seemed as though the water ran under it. In mid-air the thin stream changed to a smoking column of spray, only turning again as by some alchemy to water when it splashed on to the boulders at the cliff's foot. To the right of the fall, a wild cherry tree, thick with pearly blossom, reared up and out from the side of the rock wall, out into the sunlight. The spray was being blown by the breeze on to the cherry tree, and as it drifted it froze. How long we stood looking at it, I don't know. But I know the tears were in my eyes for the sheer, aching beauty of it. Peter spoke first. Oh, he said. Dare I make a poem about it? It's so exquisitely virginal and yet bridal too. Look at her coming out into the sunlight and that perpetually blowing veil of spray, drifting over her and freezing on her filigree of white blossom. Isn't she slender and chill and yet golden white in the sun? I only said, It's Laura herself. It was all I could think. If ever a thing expressed personality, this vision-tree expressed that of Petroc's Laura. The loved and lovely and aloof, still exquisite and fragrant, guarding her valley of voclos as when Petroc saw her there. Laura, with her sudden shining smile, like angels mirth. And I've been theorizing about love, said Peter. Love, forgive me. And it was then that Peter and I kissed. CHAPTER XXXVI At last we wandered down the valley again to the little inn, and there ordered a meal to be brought to us in the garden that sloped down to the river. It was then well towards evening, and as we clicked our wine-glasses together a familiar sound broke in upon us, the unmistakable blaring toot-toot of Telemoc's pea-green car. We looked up and there, coming towards us, were Joe, Chaz, and Chloe, the latter waving a petty blue in her hand. It is a rather curious thing that I felt only pleasure at sight of them. None of the sense of a disrupted atmosphere which had so fretted me at vocare. And I suppose this was because Peter and I were now in such a definite sphere all our own, that material interruption left it calm. I ran towards Chloe, crying, What's the news? From glad eyes gasped Chloe, thrusting the petty blue into my hand. We knew you'd want to know at once, and we asked the chauffeur where he'd driven you, and we followed. The telegram bore the simple not to say laconic statement. Married Mr. Murdoch, registry this morning, sailing Canada at once, will not deprive you of Lucy. Have left food with her and Emily at studio. Gladys Murdoch. For a moment I was bereft of speech, almost of thought. Then all I could say, very stupidly, was. But glad eyes wrote and said she was walking out with someone in Shepard's bush. Perhaps, observed Peter, she thought a husband in the hand was worth two in the bush. Heavens above us, glad eyes and Edgar, what a mixture! They won't either of them speak a grain of truth from the beginning of the day till the end. Such a marriage should have been forbidden by the eugenics society. I don't care a straw about that, cried I, awaking to the full import of the news. But don't you realize that they've been and gone and left little John and the changeling, the two poor helpless innocents, alone at the studio? To say she's left food with them. Tinned sardines and depressed tongue, I suppose. Oh, what may and be happening to them, even now? I must go back at once. There was nothing else to be done. Everyone saw that. If Joe or Chloe had been in London, so that I could have wired the State of Affairs to them, it would have been different. As it was, we all agreed to fly back together. Luckily Peter and I now had all the material needful for our book. Joe and Chaz wished to see about their flat in town. And Chloe's one idea was to get back in time for varnishing day at the Academy, for she had that morning received her ticket for it, which told her that the miniature she had sent was in. I snatched my thoughts from little John to congratulate her. And oh, she then shrieked. I'd quite forgotten there's one for you, too. You never told us you'd sent, Viv. What was it? I caught at my envelope with a beating heart and pulled out the coveted orange ticket. Yes, I, too, was in, if I didn't find, when varnishing day arrived, that I had been crowded out. A watercolor I answered, at least as much that as anything. It had pen and ink, charcoal, pencil, watercolor, and body color in it, and was painted chiefly with a rag and a toothbrush. It was doubtless very handsome, and represented Peter as a herdsman, piping beneath an olive tree, his sheep browsing around, with their legs all artfully concealed by vegetation. Legs are so difficult. All this time Chaz had been burrowing in the recesses of a bradshaw, and he announced that we could motor to Avignon, dine there, catch the night expressed to Paris, where we should arrive early next morning and be able to take the first boat train to Calais. Where's Telemach, asked I, as we piled breathlessly into the car, where the luggage of the whole party seemed already taking up all the room there was. Gone to Avignon by train. We promised whatever we eventually did to leave the car there for him to-night. Right you are, Chaz, press on. Chaz pulled the lever and away we went. Joe and Chloe among the band boxes behind, I in the front seat beside Chaz, and Peter on the floor at my feet, with half his person disposed upon the step. It is not many miles to Avignon from the port of Ville-de-L'Hôte-Marche, and soon we sighted its towers and battlements reflected in the liquid gold of the evening river, and standing up a soft purple-blue into what seemed the no less liquid gold of the sunset sky. The day that had been so magical for Peter and myself was over, and yet it seemed a fitting end that we should enter the town sacred to Petroc and his Laura. Who had helped to show us on our way so clearly. Also after the wonder that the day had held for us, it was good to be once more in the midst of friendship and much talk. And dinner that night was a delightful meal. Telemach was there at the very hotel where he had wooed and won the late Unlamented. Induced to go there by a curious mixture of sentimentality and relief, he would not hear of our merely leaving the car and withdrawing. No, he insisted we should all do him the honour of dining with him, and so we did. I can't remember that Peter or I made any definite announcement of the understanding we had come to. I don't suppose we did, but everyone seemed to realize it all the same. Perhaps we looked different from our usual selves. Anyway, Chloe kissed us both, and I have to admit that Telemach did the same. Peter's face as Telemach's fierce little black moustachios were pressed into his cheek was a sight for the gods. Joe caught my hand under the table and whispered, Darling, I'm so glad. Of course, we always knew, but I'm so glad it's come. It's the wisest thing in the world, Biv. Only look at Chaz and me. Telemach sank into sudden gloom after dinner, and when he saw us off at the station late that night he pulled out his handkerchief and wept freely into its folds. Chaz watched, with a grin of inhuman glee as Telemach held, first Peter and then myself, in his scrubby embrace once more. The others too, Mr. Poulitan, I murmured in his ear. Do not let their feelings be hurt when they have such an affection for you. The gallant Telemach failed not to act on my suggestion. He bowed towards Chloe and with a permette mamzelle imprinted a chaste salute on her cheek and then repeated the performance on Joe, who was laughing helplessly. I saw the look of fear spread on Chaz's countenance. I saw him leap up the step of the train, and I pulled him firmly down by the coattails. I was resolved he should pay for that heartless grin. Ah, my brother, cried Telemach, clasping the ramrod like Chaz to his breast. I weep at saying farewell. I have misunderstood you. I see it now. I thought you cold, reserved, English. Now I feel sure your heart is warm, warm. I do not say adieu to you, my children, but au revoir. We were cast into the train by a strong-minded porter, and the stout figure of Telemach stood, looking rather forlorn, upon the dimly lit platform. Then as the train started he puffed beside us for a second or so. The film he panted, our great film, Free Passes, I will give orders for you all to have Free Passes, my children. Au revoir, au revoir. I leant out of the train and blew a last kiss to him, and then sinking back I began to laugh. What's amusing you, demanded Peter. Only that once one begins on the downward path it is astonishing the rate at which one progresses. A few short months ago I was horrified and miserable because you kissed me, and now I have not only been embraced by a little French cinema agent, but I have embraced him in my turn. If this is the result of a mere engagement, whatever will be that of matrimony. Kissing, replied Peter, is an excellent thing, and by the way, Viv, you kiss very badly. You don't kiss, you peck. But that can be remedied. Only you will please understand that your improvement in that respect must be limited to me. I beg your pardon, said Chaz, but you cannot possibly be married unless I am best man, and we all know the privileges that go with that. At this moment it struck me that Chloe might be feeling a little forlorn. She was curled up silently in one corner of the carriage, staring out at the darkness. We had not been able to engage a sleeper, since they had all been appropriated earlier in the day at Marseilles. But Chaz had insisted on taking a salon-leaf for Joe, Chloe and myself. Chloe now stifled a yawn, rose, and suggested that we should repair to our couches, and leave to Peter and Chaz the two seats of the compartment we were in. I slipped my hand through her arm in the corridor, and we followed the attendant to our lair. There three narrow couches, furnished with pillows, but not with sheets, let down from the wall of the carriage as though by enchantment. And soon we were all stretched out on them in a row. It was a long time since we three had slept together, and I confess that for a while we indulged in the kind of talk that we ourselves, even though we practised it, labelled gallish. In the faraway days when the future was in that golden mist of which I had spoken to Peter, we had been used to discuss what we called falling in love, what we each thought it was, how differently we imagined we would succumb to it, and what our respective johns were to be like. We called them johns because some palmist, having once assured Chloe that she would be married several times, she had remarked with admirable forethought. Then I shall have a generic name for them, just as one always calls one's housemate Mary. Imagine if the first were Henry and the second Algernon. How annoyed Algernon would be when I called him Henry from sheer force of habit. And when I had attained William and called him by either of the names of the first two, how enraging that would be for him. I shall call them all John. One isn't likely to confuse a nice simple name like John. The only passion Joe had ever felt besides her devotion for Chaz, was for a bandmaster with curly hair who was to be seen daily on Folkestone Pier, at which place Joe aged twelve years was residing at the time. I had never been able to care for anyone in what we always referred to as that sort of way, as though it were a special brand like a patent medicine. Chloe had been deeply in love with a succession of hopeless ineligible ever since we had known her. Owing to the merciful, if somewhat confusing fact, that these attacks were each always cured by the next, their results had never been permanently or irretrievably disastrous. Each time Chloe was sure she had never known what love was before, and if there chanced, which was seldom, to be a gap between two attacks. Then she vowed that she had never loved at all. There was a gap at present, and just now Chloe was contented that it should be so. Soon she would begin to feel a curious sense of idleness. Then she would be seized with a conviction that nobody loved her. And then, woe betide the luckless youth who next approached her. He would soon be deeply in the toils, only to have his dream of bliss shattered by Chloe finding she had mistaken her feelings towards him. Well, said Chloe, switching out the light and snuggling down beneath an elegant blue rug that she had especially bought to match her eyes. Well, Viv? Well, what? Well, how does it feel, now you and Peter? Different? No, that's the funny part of it. The same, only more so. Joe, you know all about it, because you're married, continued Chloe. Does it go on being thrilling, or does it get boring? Oh, it gets thrillinger and thrillinger, declared Joe. We all stretched a little, holed up our rugs and lay in silence, while the train thundered and swayed on through the night. Then, well, I'm glad it's not me anyway, said Chloe. I considered this a reflection on Peter, and though I knew, but I was very glad to know that he wouldn't have suited Chloe in the least. I yet felt not quite pleased. My dear Chloe, I replied, no one ever can understand any one marrying the people they do. It's a great providential law. It's when that law's upset that people get into the divorce court. Oh, I didn't mean because of that, said Chloe elliptically. But because it's still ahead of me. Joe's is over. The first part of yours is over. Mine's still ahead. Don't you be too sure, young woman? advised Joe sleepily. It may be a case of there ain't going to be no core with you. Now let's go to sleep. But Chloe's words had banished sleep from me. Quite suddenly I felt plunged in an abyss of depression that would have done credit to Peter. I realized that, though I'd gained something, I'd lost something too. Something that would never come back. And we had both lost our pay to Tondra. We were out on the better regulated, more plainly marked road of another country, and somehow there was not quite the same manner about it. That there were finer, dearer things to be found there, I knew, even in that depression. But I knew, too, that never again should we have such a half-shy, half-intimate, elusive, exquisite time as we had had this winter in Provence. For in the pay to Tondra, the whole bubble of the world itself swings by a gold hair. Silence and speech alike are full of new and entrancing discoveries. Every moment is a step further into the unknown region. And both inhabitants, for there are never more than two in that country, drift along on a tide of golden days, knowing that there are definite actions, sorrows, and perhaps keener joys ahead, but wrapped in a present that for them flows imperceptibly along. In the pay to Tondra the lovers are as children. Afterwards they have to take their place among the grown-ups of the world. I buried my face in my pillow, and if I had not suddenly fallen asleep, I am quite sure I should have cried. But next day, when we were all aboard the steamer, something happened which showed me what it was that made the change well worth it after all. Something that made me go up another step. It was one of those clear April days when the showers fall through the sunlight. And Peter and I were standing by the rail above the voxel, looking down on to the hold, whose tarpaulin cover gleamed with the spray that perpetually broke over it. And with every wave a fountain seemed to play in the air above the grimy donkey engine. Isn't it good, said Peter, sniffing the salt air and holding my hands strongly against the rail, as the ship reared and plunged again. Isn't it good? There's nothing like the sea and the things appertaining thereto. If ever we have a sun, I mean to teach him to swim and sail a boat before he does any other blessed thing. He said it quite casually. But some quality in the words caught at both of us. We stood looking at each other, and at that moment I felt something come to life in my heart that not even little John had ever awakened before. I knew that I must have a son of Peter's, and I wanted it above everything in the world. Oh, look! cried Peter, suddenly. I followed his pointing finger, and there, in the cloud of spray that was having its brief moment of life below us, hung a rainbow. We watched breathless as the spray fell. Then, as the next wave in its turn sent that mimic fountain up, the rainbow sprang into the sight again. With every scatter and rebound of spray it came, curving down like a Jacob's ladder, and glorifying with passionate color the unromantic-looking foxhole. Spellbound we watched it gleam out with every burst of spray, coming and going, coming and going. I have never been so near the crock of gold before.