Part 7

Then again, Joseph not only speaks seven languages, but he speaks them well--for Joseph--so much so that a stranger is never sure of his nationality.

"Are you French, Joseph?" I once asked him.

"No."

"Dutch?"

"No."

"What, then?"

"I am a Jew gentleman from Germany."

He lied, of course. He's a Levantine from Constantinople, with Greek, Armenian, Hindu, and perhaps some Turkish blood in his veins. This combination insures him good temper, capacity, and imagination--not a bad mixture for a courier. Besides, he is reasonably honest--not punctiliously so--not as to francs, perhaps, but certainly as to fifty-pound notes--that is, he was while he served me. Of course, I never had a fifty-pound note--not all at once--but if I had had I don't think he would have absorbed it--not if I had signed it on the back for identification and had kept it in a money-belt around my waist and close to my skin.

Those things, however, never trouble me. I don't want to make a savings-bank of Joseph. It is his vivid imagination that appeals to me, or perhaps the picturesqueness with which he puts things. In this he is a veritable master. His material, too, is not only uncommonly rich, but practically inexhaustible. He knows everybody; has travelled with everybody; has always kept one ear and one eye open even when asleep, and has thus picked up an immense amount of information regarding people and events--mostly his own patrons--the telling of which has served to enliven many a quiet hour while he sat beside me as I painted. Why, once I remember in Stamboul, when some Arabs had----

But I forget that I am following Joseph upstairs, and that his mission is to see that I am comfortably lodged at the Baur au Lac in Zurich.

When we reached the second floor Joseph met the porter emerging into the corridor with my large luggage. He had mounted the back stairs.

"Let me see Number 13, porter," cried Joseph. "Ah, yes--it is just as I supposed. Is it in that hole you would put my Lord--where there is noise all the time? You see that window, my Lord?" (By this time I had reached the two disputants and had entered the room.) "You remember, your Highness, that enormous omnibus in which you have arrived just? It is there that it sleeps." And Joseph craned his head out of the window and pointed in the direction of the court-yard. "When it goes out in the morning at seven o'clock for the train it is like thunder. The Count Monflot had this room. You should have seen him when he was awoke at seven. He was like a crazy man. He pulled all the strings out of the bells, and when the waiter come he had the hat-box of Monsieur the Count at his head."

Dismissing the apartment with a contemptuous wave of his hand, Joseph, with the porter's assistance, who had a pass-key, began a search of the other vacant rooms: half the hotel was vacant, I afterward learned; all this telegram and book business was merely an attempt to bolster up the declining days of a bad season.

"Number 21? No--it is a little better, but it's too near the behind stairs. It would be absurd to put his Lordship there. Number 24?"--here he looked into another room. "No, you can hear the grande baggage in the night going up and down. No, it will not do."

The manager, having disposed of the other members of the Emperor's household, now approached with a servile smile fitted to all parts of his face. Joseph attacked him at once.

"Is his Lordship a valet, Monsieur, that you should put him in such holes? Do you not know that he never wakes until ten, and has his coffee at eleven, and the omnibus, you know, sleeps there?" And he pointed outside. (Another Levantine lie: I am up at seven when the light is right.)

Here the porter unlocked another room and stood by smiling. He knew the game was up now, and had reserved this one for the last.

"Number--28! Ah, this is something like. Yes, my Lord, this will be quite right. La Contessa Moriarti had this room--yes, I remember." (Joseph never serves any woman below the rank of contessa.)

So I moved into Number 28, handed Joseph the keys, and the porter deposited my luggage and withdrew, followed by the manager. Soon the large and small trunks were disembowelled, my sponge hung on a nail in the window, and the several toilet articles distributed in their proper places, Joseph serving in the triple capacity of courier, valet, and chambermaid--the lame Englishman being out driving, and Joseph, therefore, having this hour to himself. This distribution, of course, was made in deference to my exalted rank and the ten-franc gold piece which he never fails to get despite my resolutions, and which he always seems to have earned despite my knowledge as to how the trick is performed.

Suddenly a crash sounded through the hall as if somebody had dropped a tray of dishes. Then came another, and another. Either every waiter in the house was dropping trays, or an attack was being made on the pantry by a mob.

Joseph, with a bound, threw back the door and we rushed out.

Just opposite my room was a small salon with the door wide open. In its centre stood a man with an iron poker in his hand. He was busy smashing what was left of a large mirror, its pieces littering the floor. On the sofa lay another man twice the size of the first one, who was roaring with laughter. Down the corridor swooped a collection of guests, porters, and chambermaids in full cry, the manager at their head.

"Two hundred and fifty francs, eh--for a looking-glass worth twenty francs?" I heard the man with the poker shout. "I blister with my gas-jet one little corner, and I must pay two hundred and fifty francs. I have ruined the mirror, have I, eh? And it must be thrown out and a new one put in to-morrow--eh?" Bang! bang! Here the poker came down on some small fragment still clinging to the frame. "Yes, it _will_ come out [bang!]--_all_ of it will come out."

The manager was now trying to make himself heard. Such words as "my mirror," "outrage," "Gendarme," could be heard above the sound of the breaking glass and the shrieks of the man on the sofa, who seemed to be in a paroxysm of laughter.

I looked on for a moment. Some infuriated lodger, angry, perhaps, at the overcharge in his bill, was venting his wrath on the furniture. It was not my mirror, and it was not my bill; the manager was present with staff enough to throw both men downstairs if he pleased and without my assistance, and so I turned and reentered my room. Two things fixed themselves in my mind: the alert figure, trim as a fencer's, of the man with the poker, and the laugh of the fat man sprawling on the lounge.

Joseph followed me into my room and shut the door softly behind him.

"Ah, I knew it was he. No other man is so crazy like that. He would break the head of the propriétaire just the same. That is an old swindle. That mirror has been cracked four--five--six times. The gas-jet is fixed so that you _must_ crack it. All the mirrors like the one he burnt--it was only a little spot--go upstairs in the cheap rooms and new ones are brought in for such games. 'Most always they pay, but monsieur--it is not like him to pay. He has heard of the trick, perhaps--is it not delicious?" and Joseph's face widened into a grin.

"You know him, then?" I broke in.

"Know him?--oh, for many years. He is the great Doctor Barsac. He smashes everything he doesn't like. He smashed that old fat monsieur who made so much laugh. His name is Mariguy. He looks like a curé, does he not? But he is not a curé; he is an advocate. Barsac is from Basle, but Mariguy lives in Paris. Those two are never separated; they love each other like a man and a wife. There is a great medical convention here in Zurich, and Barsac has brought Mariguy with him to show him off. He put a new silver stomach in Mariguy last winter and is very proud of it. It is the great operation of the year, they say."

"What happened to the fat man, Joseph--was it an accident?"

"No--a duel. Barsac ran him through the belly with his sword."

"Permit me, my Lord--" And Joseph stepped to the window. "Yes, there comes the lame Englishman home from the drive. Excuse me--I will go and help him from his carriage." And Joseph bowed himself out backward.

* * * * * * *

II

Joseph's departure left my mind in an unsettled state. I hadn't the slightest interest in the great surgeon who had made the cure of the year, nor in the stout advocate with his nickel-plated digestive apparatus. Both of them might have broken every mirror in the hotel and have thrown the fragments out of the window, and the manager after them, without raising my pulse a beat. Neither did the medical convention nor the doctor's exhibit cause me a moment's thought. Such things were commonplace and of every-day occurrence. Only the dramatic in life appeals to so staid and gray an old painter as myself, and even Joseph's picturesque imagination could not imbue either one of the incidents of the morning with that desirable quality.

What really did appeal to me as I conjured up in my mind the picture of the fat man sprawled over the sofa-cushions roaring with laughter was the duel and the causes that led up to it. Why, if the man was his friend, had the doctor selected the hilarious advocate as an antagonist, and what could have induced the surgeon to pick out that particular section of his friend's surface in which to insert his sword.

That same night, in the smoking-room of the hotel, Joseph caught sight of me as he passed the open door and moved forward to my table. He had changed his dress of the morning, discarding the inflammatory waistcoat, and was now upholstered in a full suit of black. He explained that there were some friends of his living in the village who were going to have some music. The Englishman was in bed and asleep, and now that he was sure that I was comfortable, he could give himself some little freedom, with his mind at rest.

I motioned him to a seat.

He laid his silk hat and one glove on an adjoining table, spread his coat-tails, and deposited himself on the extreme edge of a chair--a position which would enable him to regain his feet at a moment's notice should any of my friends chance to join me. It is just such delicate recognition of my rank and lordly belongings that makes Joseph's companionship ofttimes a pleasure.

"You tell me, Joseph, that that crazy doctor stabbed the fat man in a duel."

"Not _stabbed_, my Lord! That is not the nice word. It was done so--_so_--so." And Joseph's wrist, holding an imaginary sword, performed the grand thrust in the air. "He is a master with the rapier. When he was at the Sorbonne he had five duels and never once a scratch. His honor was most paramount. He would fight with anybody, and for the smallest thing--if one man had a longer cane, or wore a higher hat, or took cognac in his coffee. Not for the grisette or for the cards in the face; not so big a thing as that; quite a small thing that nobody would remember a moment. And with his friends always--never with the man he did not before know."

"And was the fat man his friend?"

"His friend! Mon Dieu! they were like the brothers. One--two--five year, I think--all the whole time of the instruction. I was not there, of course, but a friend of mine tell me--a most truthful man, my friend."

"What was the row about? Cognac in his coffee?"

"I do not know--perhaps somethings. Yes, I do remember now. It was the cutting of the hair. Barsac like it short and Mariguy like it long. Barsac tried to cut the hair from Mariguy's head when he was asleep, and then it began. It was in that little wood at the bridge at Surèsne that they went to fight. You know you turn to the right and there is a little place--all small trees--there it was.

"When they all got ready, there quickly arrive a carriage all dust, and the horse in a sweat, and out jumps an old lady--it was Mariguy's mother. Somebody had told her--not Mariguy, of course, but some student. 'Stop!' she cried; 'you do not my son kill. You, Barsac, you do nothing but fight!' Then they all talk, and Mariguy say to Barsac, 'It cannot be; my mother, as you see, is old. There is no one but me. If I am wounded, she will be in the bed with fright. If I am killed, she will be dead. It is my mother, you see, that you fight, not me.'

"Barsac take off his hat and bow to madame." (Joseph had now reached for his own and was illustrating the incident with an appropriate gesture.) "'Madame Mariguy,' said Barsac, 'I make ten thousand pardons. I respect the devotion of the mother,' and he went back to Paris, and Mariguy got into the carriage and go away with the mother."

"But, Joseph, of course that was not the last of it?"

"Yes, my Lord, until one year ago."

"Why, did they have another quarrel, Joseph?"

"No, not another--never but that one. They were for a long time what you call friends of the bosom. Every day after that they see each other, and every night they dine at the Louis d'Or below the Luxembourg. Then pretty soon the doctor, he have to take his degree and come back to Basle to live, and Monsieur Mariguy also have take his degree and become a great advocate in Paris. Every week come a letter from Barsac to Mariguy, and one from Mariguy to Barsac."

Joseph stopped in his narrative at this point, noticing perhaps some shade of incredulity across my countenance, and said parenthetically: "I am quite surprised, my Lord, that you have not this heard before. It was quite the talk of Paris at the time. No? Well, then, I will tell you everything as it did happen, for I do assure you that it is most exciting.

"All this time--it was quite ten years, perhaps fifteen--not one word does Monsieur Barsac say to Monsieur Mariguy about the insult of the long hair. All the time, too, they are together. For the summer they go to a little village in the Swiss mountains, and for the winter they go to Nice, and 'most every night they play a little at the tables. It was there I met them.

"One morning at Basle the doctor was at his table eating the breakfast when the newspaper is put on the side. He read a little and sip his coffee, and then he read a little more--all this, my Lord, was in the papers at the time--I am quite astonished that you have not seen it--and then the doctor make a loud cry, and throw the paper down, run upstairs, pack his bag, jump into a fiacre and go like mad to the station. The next morning he is in Paris, and at the house of his friend Mariguy. In three days they are at Surèsne again--not in the little wood, but in the garden of Monsieur Rochefort, who was his second. It was against the law to go into the little wood to fight, so they took the nearest place to their old meeting--a small sentiment, you see, my Lord, which Monsieur the Doctor always enjoys.

"They toss up for the sun, and Monsieur Barsac he gets the shade. At the first pass, no one is hurt. At the second, Monsieur Barsac has a little scratch on his wrist, but no blood. The seconds make inspection most careful. They regret that the encounter must go on, but the honor is not yet satisfied. At the third, Monsieur Mariguy made a misstep, and Monsieur Barsac's sword go into Monsieur Mariguy's shirt and come out at Monsieur Mariguy's back.

"You can imagine what then take place. Doctor Barsac cry in a loud voice that his honor is satisfied, and the next moment he is on his knees beside his friend. Monsieur Mariguy is at once put in the bed, and for one--two--three months he is dead one day and breathe a little the next. Barsac never leave the house of his friend Monsieur Rochefort one moment--not one day does he go back to Basle. Every night he is by the bed of Monsieur Mariguy. Then comes the critical moment. Monsieur Mariguy must have a new stomach; the old one is like a stocking with a hole in the toe. Then comes the great triumph of Monsieur le Docteur. All Paris come out to see. To make a stomach of silver is to make one the fool, they say. The old doctors shake their heads, but Barsac he only laugh. In one more month Monsieur Mariguy is on his feet, and every day walks a little in the Bois near the house of Monsieur Rochefort. In one more month he run, and eat himself full like a boy.

"He is now no longer the great advocate. He is the _example_ of Monsieur Barsac. That is why he is here at the medical convention. They arrived only yesterday and leave to-night. If you turn a little, my Lord, you can see into the other room. There they sit smoking.--Ah! do you hear? That is Monsieur Mariguy's laugh. Oh, they enjoy themselves! They have drank two bottles of Johannisberger already--twenty-five francs each, if you please, my Lord. The head waiter showed me the bottles. But what does Barsac care? He cut everything out of the insides of the Prince Morin one day last month, and had for a fee fifty thousand francs and the order of St. John."

I bent my head in the direction of Joseph's index finger and easily recognized the two men at the table. The smaller man, Barsac, was even more trim and alert-looking than when I caught a glimpse of him in the bedroom. As he sat and talked to Mariguy he looked more like an officer in the French army than a doctor. His hair was short, his mustache pointed, and his beard closely trimmed. He had two square shoulders and a slim waist, and talked with his hands as if they were part of his mental equipment. The other man, Mariguy, the "example," was just a fat, jolly, good-natured Frenchman, who to all appearance loved a bottle of wine better than he did a brief.

Joseph was about to begin again when I stopped him with this inquiry:

"There is one thing in your story, Joseph, that I don't quite get: you say they were students together?"

"Yes, my Lord."

"That the first duel--the one that the mother stopped--was fifteen years ago?"

"Quite true, my Lord."

"And that this last duel was fought a year ago, and that all that time they were together whenever they could be, and devoted friends?"

"Every word true, my Lord."

"Well, then, why didn't they fight before?"

Joseph looked at me with a curious expression on his face--one rather of disappointment, as if I had utterly failed to grasp his meaning.

"Fight before! It would have been impossible, my Lord. Barsac's honor was at the stake."

"And he must wait fifteen years," I asked with some impatience, "to vindicate it?"

"Certainly, my Lord--or twice that time if it was necessary. It was only when he read in the paper at the table of his breakfast that morning in Basle that he knew."

"What difference did that make?"

"Every difference, my Lord; Madame Mariguy, the mother, was only the day before dead."

SIMPLE FOLK

A long reach of coast country, white and smooth, broken by undulating fences smothered in snowdrifts, only their stakes and bush-tops showing; farther away, horizontal markings of black pines; still farther away, a line of ragged dunes bearded with yellow grass bordering a beach flecked with scurries of foam--mouthings of a surf twisting as if in pain; beyond this a wide sea, greenish gray, gray and gray-blue, slashed here and there with white-caps pricked by wind rapiers; beyond this again, out into space, a leaden sky flat as paint and as monotonous.

Nearer by, so close that I could see their movements from the car window, spatterings of crows, and higher up circling specks of gulls glinting or darkening as their breasts or backs caught the light. These crows and gulls were the only things alive in the wintry waste.

No, one thing more--two, in fact: as I came nearer the depot, a horse tethered to the section of the undulating fence, a rough-coated, wind-blown, shackly beast; the kind the great Schreyer always painted shivering with cold outside a stable door (and in the snow, too), and a man: Please remember, A MAN! And please continue to remember it to the end of this story.

Thirty-one years in the service he--this keeper of the Naukashon Life-Saving Station--twenty-five at this same post. Six feet and an inch, tough as a sapling and as straight; long-armed, long-legged, broad-shouldered and big-boned; face brown and tanned as skirt leather; eye like a hawk's; mouth but a healed scar, so firm is it; low-voiced, simple-minded and genuine.

If you ask him what he has done in all these thirty-one years of service he will tell you:

"Oh, I kind o' forget; the Superintendent gets reports. You see, some months we're not busy, and then ag'in we ain't had no wrecks for considerable time."

If you should happen to look in his locker, away back out of sight, you would perhaps find a small paper box, and in it a gold medal--the highest his government can give him--inscribed with his name and a record of some particular act of heroism. When he is confronted with the tell-tale evidence, he will say:

"Oh, yes--they _did_ give me that! I'm keepin' it for my grandson."

If you, failing to corkscrew any of the details out of him, should examine the Department's reports, you will find out all he "forgets"--among them the fact that in his thirty-one years of service he and the crew under him have saved the lives of one hundred and thirty-one men and women out of a possible one hundred and thirty-two. He explains the loss of this unlucky man by saying apologetically that "the fellow got dizzy somehow and locked himself in the cabin, and we didn't know he was there until she broke up and he got washed ashore."

This was the man who, when I arrived at the railroad station, held out a hand in hearty welcome, his own closing over mine with the grip of a cant-hook.

"Well, by Jiminy! Superintendent said you was comin', but I kind o' thought you wouldn't 'til the weather cleared. Gimme yer bag--Yes, the boys are all well and will be glad to see ye. Colder than blue blazes, ain't it? Snow ain't over yet. Well, well, kind o' natural to see ye!"

The bag was passed up; the Captain caught the reins in his crab-like fingers, and the bunch of wind-blown fur, gathering its stiffened legs together, wheeled sharply to the left and started in to make pencil-markings in double lines over the white snow seaward toward the Naukashon Life-Saving Station.

The perspective shortened: first the smooth, unbroken stretch; then the belt of pines; then a flat marsh diked by dunes; then a cluster of black dots, big and little--the big one being the Station house, and the smaller ones its outbuildings and fishermen's shanties; and then the hard, straight line of the pitiless sea.

I knew the "boys." I had known some of them for years: ever since I picked up one of their stations--its site endangered by the scour of the tide--ran it on skids a mile over the sand to the land side of the inlet without moving the crew or their comforts (even their wet socks were left drying on a string by the kitchen stove); shoved it aboard two scows timbered together, started out to sea under the guidance of a light-draught tug in search of its new location three miles away, and then, with the assistance of a suddenly developed north-east gale, backed up by my own colossal engineering skill, dropped the whole concern--skids, house, kitchen stove, socks and all--into the sea. When the surf dogs were through with its carcass the beach was strewn with its bones picked clean by their teeth. Only the weathercock, which had decorated its cupola, was left. This had floated off and was found perched on top of a sand-dune, whizzing away on its ornamental cap as merry as a jig-dancer. It was still whirling away, this time on the top of the cupola at Naukashon. I could see it plainly as I drove up, its arrow due east, looking for trouble as usual.