The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol. Locke William John
None of your cabbage-soup and eels and andouilles, but a good omelette, some fresh fish, and a bit of very tender meat. Will that suit you?” he asked, turning to me.
“Excellently,” said I, smiling. “And since you’ve ordered me so charming a déjeuner, perhaps you’ll do me the honour of helping me to eat it?”
“With the very greatest pleasure,” said he, without a second’s hesitation.
We entered the small, stuffy dining-room, where a dingy waiter, with a dingier smile, showed us to a small table by the window. At the long table in the middle of the room sat the half-dozen frequenters of the house, their napkins tucked under their chins, eating in gloomy silence a dreary meal of the kind my new friend had deprecated.
“What shall we drink?” I asked, regarding with some disfavour the thin red and white wines in the decanters.
“Anything,” said he, “but this piquette du pays. It tastes like a mixture of sea-water and vinegar. It produces the look of patient suffering that you see on those gentlemen’s faces. You, who are not used to it, had better not venture. It would excoriate your throat. It would dislocate your pancreas. It would play the very devil with you. Adolphe” – he beckoned the waiter – “there’s a little white wine of the Côtes du Rhone – ” He glanced at me.
“I’m in your hands,” said I.
As far as eating and drinking went I could not have been in better. Nor could anyone desire a more entertaining chance companion of travel. That he had thrust himself upon me in the most brazen manner and taken complete possession of me there could be no doubt. But it had all been done in the most irresistibly charming manner in the world. One entirely forgot the impudence of the fellow. I have since discovered that he did not lay himself out to be agreeable. The flow of talk and anecdote, the bright laughter that lit up a little joke, making it appear a very brilliant joke indeed, were all spontaneous. He was a man, too, of some cultivation. He knew France thoroughly, England pretty well; he had a discriminating taste in architecture, and waxed poetical over the beauties of Nature.
“It strikes me as odd,” said I at last, somewhat ironically, “that so vital a person as yourself should find scope for your energies in this dead-and-alive place.”
He threw up his hands. “I live here? I crumble and decay in Aigues-Mortes? For whom do you take me?”
I replied that, not having the pleasure of knowing his name and quality, I could only take him for an enigma.
He selected a card from his letter-case and handed it to me across the table. It bore the legend: —
“That address will always find me,” he said.
Civility bade me give him my card, which he put carefully in his letter-case.
“I owe my success in life,” said he, “to the fact that I have never lost an opportunity or a visiting-card.”
“Where did you learn your perfect English?” I asked.
“First,” said he, “among English tourists at Marseilles. Then in England. I was Professor of French at an academy for young ladies.”
“I hope you were a success?” said I.
He regarded me drolly.
“Yes – and no,” said he.
The meal over, we left the hotel.
“Now,” said he, “you would like to visit the towers on the ramparts. I would dearly love to accompany you, but I have business in the town. I will take you, however, to the gardien and put you in his charge.”
He raced me to the gate by which I had entered. The gardien des remparts issued from his lodge at Aristide Pujol’s summons and listened respectfully to his exhortation in Provençal. Then he went for his keys.
“I’ll not say good-bye,” Aristide Pujol declared, amiably. “I’ll get through my business long before you’ve done your sight-seeing, and you’ll find me waiting for you near the hotel. Au revoir, cher ami.”
He smiled, lifted his hat, waved his hand in a friendly way, and darted off across the square. The old gardien came out with the keys and took me off to the Tour de Constance, where Protestants were imprisoned pell-mell after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; thence to the Tour des Bourguignons, where I forget how many hundred Burgundians were massacred and pickled in salt; and, after these cheery exhibitions, invited me to walk round the ramparts and inspect the remaining eighteen towers of the enceinte. As the mistral, however, had sprung up and was shuddering across the high walls, I declined, and, having paid him his fee, descended to the comparative shelter of the earth.
There I found Aristide Pujol awaiting me at the corner of the narrow street in which the hotel was situated. He was wearing – like most of the young bloods of Provence in winter-time – a short, shaggy, yet natty goat-skin coat, ornamented with enormous bone buttons, and a little cane valise stood near by on the kerb of the square.
He was not alone. Walking arm in arm with him was a stout, elderly woman of swarthy complexion and forbidding aspect. She was attired in a peasant’s or small shopkeeper’s rusty Sunday black and an old-fashioned black bonnet prodigiously adorned with black plumes and black roses. Beneath this bonnet her hair was tightly drawn up from her forehead; heavy eyebrows overhung a pair of small, crafty eyes, and a tuft of hair grew on the corner of a prognathous jaw. She might have been about seven-and-forty.
Aristide Pujol, unlinking himself from this unattractive female, advanced and saluted me with considerable deference.
“Monseigneur – ” said he.
As I am neither a duke nor an archbishop, but a humble member of the lower automobiling classes, the high-flown title startled me.
“Monseigneur, will you permit me,” said he, in French, “to present to you Mme. Gougasse? Madame is the patronne of the Café de l’Univers, at Carcassonne, which doubtless you have frequented, and she is going to do me the honour of marrying me to-morrow.”
The unexpectedness of the announcement took my breath away.
“Good heavens!” said I, in a whisper.
Anyone less congruous as the bride-elect of the debonair Aristide Pujol it was impossible to imagine. However, it was none of my business. I raised my hat politely to the lady.
“Madame, I offer you my sincere felicitations. As an entertaining husband I am sure you will find M. Aristide Pujol without a rival.”
“Je vous remercie, monseigneur,” she replied, in what was obviously her best company manner. “And if ever you will deign to come again to the Café de l’Univers at Carcassonne we will esteem it a great honour.”
“And so you’re going to get married to-morrow?” I remarked, by way of saying something. To congratulate Aristide Pujol on his choice lay beyond my power of hypocrisy.
“To-morrow,” said he, “my dear Amélie will make me the happiest of men.”
“We start for Carcassonne by the three-thirty train,” said Mme. Gougasse, pulling a great silver watch from some fold of her person.
“Then there is time,” said I, pointing to a little weather-beaten café in the square, “to drink a glass to your happiness.”
“Bien volontiers,” said the lady.
“Pardon, chère amie,” Aristide interposed, quickly. “Unless monseigneur and I start at once for Montpellier, I shall not have time to transact my little affairs before your train arrives there.”
Parenthetically, I must remark that all trains going from Aigues-Mortes to Carcassonne must stop at Montpellier.
“That’s true,” she agreed, in a hesitating manner. “But – ”
“But, idol of my heart, though I am overcome with grief at the idea of leaving you for two little hours, it is a question of four