Chapter 9

The next morning the Mayor entered his office with a very grave face.

"Do you know what has happened? My house was broken into last night. The safe in my study was forced open, and three thousand francs and some valuable jewelry were stolen. _Quel malheur!_" he cried, throwing himself into a chair, and wiping his forehead. "It is not I who can afford to lose three thousand francs at once. If they had robbed _maman_ it would have been a different matter."

Aristide expressed his sympathy.

"Whom do you suspect?" he asked.

"A robber, _parbleu!_" said the Mayor. "The police are even now making their investigations."

The door opened and a plain clothes detective entered the office.

"Monsieur le Maire," said he, with an air of triumph, "I know a burglar."

Both men leapt to their feet.

"Ah!" said Aristide.

"_A la bonne heure!_" cried the Mayor.

"Arrest him at once," said Aristide.

"Alas, Monsieur," said the detective, "that I cannot do. I have called on him this morning and his wife tells me that he left for the North yesterday afternoon. But it is Jose Puegas that did it. I know his ways."

"_Tiens!_" said the Mayor, reflectively. "I know him also, an evil fellow."

"But why are you not looking for him?" exclaimed Aristide.

"Arrangements have been made," replied the detective coldly.

Aristide suddenly bethought him of the furtive masquer of the night before.

"I can put you on his track," said he, and related what he knew.

The Mayor looked dubious. "It wasn't he," he remarked.

"Jose Puegas, Monsieur, would not commit a burglary in a pig's head," said the policeman, with the cutting contempt of the expert.

"It was a vow, I suppose," said Aristide, stung to irony. "I've always heard he was a religious man."

The detective did not condescend to reply.

"Monsieur le Maire," said he, "I should like to examine the premises, and beg that you will have the kindness to accompany me."

"With the permission of Monsieur le Maire," said Aristide. "I too will come."

"Certainly," said the Mayor. "The more intelligences concentrated on the affair the better."

"I am not of that opinion," said the detective.

"It is the opinion of Monsieur le Maire," said Aristide rebukingly, "and that is enough."

When they reached the house--distances are short in Perpignan--they found policemen busily engaged with tape measures around the premises. Old Madame Coquereau in a clean white linen dressing jacket, bare-headed, defying the keen air, stood grim and eager in the midst of them.

"Good morning, Monsieur Pujol, what do you think of this?"

"A veritable catastrophe," said Aristide.

She shrugged her iron shoulders. "I tell him it serves him right," she said, cuttingly. "A sensible person keeps his money under his mattress and not in a tin machine by a window which anyone can get at. I wonder we've not been murdered in our beds before."

"_Ah, Maman!_" expostulated the Mayor of Perpignan.

But she turned her back on him and worried the policemen. They, having probed, and measured, and consulted with the detective, came to an exact conclusion. The thief had climbed over the back wall--there were his footsteps. He had entered by the kitchen door--there were the marks of infraction. He had broken open the safe--there was the helpless condition of the lock. No one in Perpignan, but Jose Puegas, with his bad, socialistic, Barcelona blood, could have done it. These brilliant results were arrived at after much clamour and argument and imposing _proces verbal_. Aristide felt strangely depressed. He had narrated his story of the pig-headed masquer to unresponsive ears. Here was a melodramatic scene in which he not only was not playing a leading part, but did not even carry a banner. To be less than a super in life's pageant was abhorrent to the nature of Aristide Pujol.

Moodily he wandered away from the little crowd. He hated the police and their airs of gods for whom exists no mystery. He did not believe in the kitchen-door theory. Why should not the thief have simply entered by the window of the study, which like the kitchen, was on the ground floor? He went round the house and examined the window by himself. No; there were no traces of burglary. The fastenings of the outside shutters and the high window were intact. The police were right.

Suddenly his quick eye lit on something in the gravel path and his heart gave a great leap. It was a little round pink disc of confetti.

Aristide picked it up and began to dance and shake his fist at the invisible police.

"Aha!" he cried, "now we shall see who is right and who is wrong!"

He began to search and soon found another bit of confetti. A little further along he discovered a third and a fourth. By using his walking stick he discovered that they formed a trail to a point in the wall. He examined the wall. There, if his eyes did not deceive him, were evidences of mortar dislodged by nefarious toes. And there, _mirabile visu!_ at the very bottom of the wall lay a little woollen pompon or tassel, just the kind of pompon that gives a finish to a pierrot's shoes. Evidently the scoundrel had scraped it off against the bricks while clambering over.

The pig-headed masquer stood confessed.

A less imaginative man than Aristide would have immediately acquainted the police with his discovery. But Aristide had been insulted. A dull, mechanical bureaucrat who tried to discover crime with a tape-measure had dared to talk contemptuously of his intelligence! On his wooden head should be poured the vials of his contempt.

"_Tron de l'air!_" cried Aristide--a Provencal oath which he only used on sublime occasions--"It is I who will discover the thief and make the whole lot of you the laughing-stock of Perpignan."

So did my versatile friend, joyously confident in his powers, start on his glorious career as a private detective.

"Madame Coquereau," said he, that evening, while she was dealing a hand at piquet, "what would you say if I solved this mystery and brought the scoundrel to justice?"

"To say that you would have more sense than the police, would be a poor compliment," said the old lady.

Stephanie raised cloistral eyes from her embroidery frame. She sat in a distant corner of the formal room discreetly lit by a shaded lamp.

"You have a clue, Monsieur?" she asked with adorable timidity.

Aristide tapped his forehead with his forefinger. "All is there, Mademoiselle."

They exchanged a glance--the first they had exchanged--while Madame Coquereau was frowning at her cards; and Aristide interpreted the glance as the promise of supreme reward for great deeds accomplished.

The mayor returned early from the cafe, a dejected man. The loss of his hundred and twenty pounds weighed heavily on his mind. He kissed his mother sorrowfully on the cheek, his niece on the brow, held out a drooping hand to Aristide, and, subsiding into a stiff imitation Louis XVI chair, rested his elbows on its unconsoling arms and hid his face in his hands.

"My poor uncle! You suffer so much?" breathed Stephanie, in divine compassion.

"Little Saint!" murmured Aristide devoutly, as he declared four aces and three queens.

The Mayor moved his head sympathetically. He was suffering from the sharpest pain in his pocket he had felt for many a day. Madame Coquereau's attention wandered from the cards.

"_Dis donc_, Fernand," she said sharply. "Why are you not wearing your ring?"

The Mayor looked up.

"_Maman_," said he, "it is stolen."

"Your beautiful ring?" cried Aristide.

The Mayor's ring, which he usually wore, was a remarkable personal adornment. It consisted in a couple of snakes in old gold clenching an enormous topaz between their heads. Only a Mayor could have worn it with decency.

"You did not tell me, Fernand," rasped the old lady. "You did not mention it to me as being one of the stolen objects."

The Mayor rose wearily. "It was to avoid giving you pain, _maman_. I know what a value you set upon the ring of my good Aunt Philomene."

"And now it is lost," said Madame Coquereau, throwing down her cards. "A ring that belonged to a saint. Yes, Monsieur Pujol, a saint, though she was my sister. A ring that had been blessed by His Holiness the Pope----"

"But, _maman_," expostulated the Mayor, "that was an imagination of Aunt Philomene. Just because she went to Rome and had an audience like anyone else----"

"Silence, impious atheist that you are!" cried the old lady. "I tell you it was blessed by His Holiness--and when I tell you a thing it is true. That is the son of to-day. He will call his mother a liar as soon as look at her. It was a ring beyond price. A ring such as there are few in the world. And instead of taking care of this precious heirloom, he goes and locks it away in a safe. Ah! you fill me with shame. Monsieur Pujol, I am sorry I can play no more, I must retire. Stephanie, will you accompany me?"

And gathering up Stephanie like a bunch of snowdrops, the yellow, galvanized iron old lady swept out of the room.

The Mayor looked at Aristide and moved his arms dejectedly.

"Such are women," said he.

"My own mother nearly broke her heart because I would not become a priest," said Aristide.

"I wish I were a Turk," said the Mayor.

"I, too," said Aristide.

He took pouch and papers and rolled a cigarette.

"If there is a man living who can say he has not felt like that at least once in his life he ought to be exhibited at a fair."

"How well you understand me, my good Pujol," said Monsieur Coquereau.

The next few days passed busily for Aristide. He devoted every spare hour to his new task. He scrutinized every inch of ground between the study window and the wall; he drew radiating lines from the point of the wall whence the miscreant had started homeward and succeeded in finding more confetti. He cross-examined every purveyor of pierrot shoes and pig's heads in Perpignan. His researches soon came to the ears of the police, still tracing the mysterious Jose Puegas. A certain good-humoured brigadier whose Catalan French Aristide found difficult to understand, but with whom he had formed a derisory kind of friendship, urged him to desist from the hopeless task.

"_Jamais de la vie!_" he cried--"The honour of Aristide Pujol is at stake."

The thing became an obsession. Not only his honour but his future was at stake. If he discovered the thief, he would be the most talked of person in Perpignan. He would know how to improve his position. He would rise to dizzy heights. Perpignan-Ville de Plaisir would acclaim him as its saviour. The Government would decorate him. And finally, both the Mayor and Madame Coquereau would place the blushing and adorable Mademoiselle Stephanie in his arms and her two hundred and fifty thousand francs dowry in his pocket. Never before had so dazzling a prize shimmered before him in the near distance.

On the last Saturday night of the Carnival, there was a special _corso_ for the populace in the Avenue des Plantanes, the long splendid Avenue of plane trees just outside the Porte Notre Dame, which is the special glory of Perpignan. The masquers danced to three or four bands. They threw confetti and _serpentins_. They rode hobby-horses and beat each other with bladders. They joined in bands of youths and maidens and whirled down the Avenue in Bacchic madness. It was a _corso blanc_, and everyone wore white--chiefly modifications of Pierrot costume--and everyone was masked. Chinese lanterns hung from the trees and in festoons around the bandstands and darted about in the hands of the revellers. Above, great standard electric lamps shed their white glare upon the eddying throng casting a myriad of grotesque shadows. Shouts and laughter and music filled the air.

Aristide in a hideous red mask and with a bag of confetti under his arm, plunged with enthusiasm into the revelry. To enjoy yourself you only had to throw your arm round a girl's waist and swing her off wildly to the beat of the music. If you wanted to let her go you did so; if not, you talked in the squeaky voice that is the recognized etiquette of the carnival. On the other hand any girl could catch you in her grip and sweep you along with her. Your mad career generally ended in a crowd and a free fight of confetti. There was one fair masquer, however, to whom Aristide became peculiarly attracted. Her movements were free, her figure dainty and her repartee, below her mask, more than usually piquant.

"This hurly-burly," said he, drawing her into a quiet eddy of the stream, "is no place for the communion of two twin souls."

"_Beau masque_," said she, "I perceive that you are a man of much sensibility."

"Shall we find a spot where we can mingle the overflow of our exquisite natures?"

"As you like."

"_Allons! Hop!_" cried he, and seizing her round the waist danced through the masquers to the very far end of the Avenue.

"There is a sequestered spot round here," he said.

They turned. The sequestered spot, a seat beneath a plane tree, with a lonesome arc-lamp shining full upon it, was occupied.

"It's a pity!" said the fair unknown.

But Aristide said nothing. He stared. On the seat reposed an amorous couple. The lady wore a white domino and a black mask. The cavalier, whose arm was around the lady's waist, wore a pig's head, and a clown or Pierrot's dress.

Aristide's eyes fell upon the shoes. On one of them the pompon was missing.

The lady's left hand tenderly patted the cardboard snout of her lover. The fierce light of the arc lamp caught the hand and revealed, on the fourth finger, a topaz ring, the topaz held in its place by two snakes' heads.

Aristide stared for two seconds; it seemed to him two centuries. Then he turned simply, caught his partner again, and with a "_Allons, Hop!_" raced back to the middle of the throng. There, in the crush, he unceremoniously lost her, and sped like a maniac to the entrance gates. His friend the brigadier happened to be on duty. He unmasked himself, dragged the police agent aside, and breathless, half-hysterical, acquainted him with the astounding discovery.

"I was right, _mon vieux!_ There at the end of the Avenue you will find them. The pig-headed prowler I saw, with _my_ pompon missing from his shoe, and his _bonne amie_ wearing the stolen ring. Ah! you police people with your tape-measures and your Jose Puegas! It is I, Aristide Pujol, who have to come to Perpignan to teach you your business!"

"What do you want me to do?" asked the brigadier stolidly.

"Do?" cried Aristide. "Do you think I want you to kiss them and cover them with roses? What do you generally do with thieves in Perpignan?"

"Arrest them," said the brigadier.

"_Eh bien!_" said Aristide. Then he paused--possibly the drama of the situation striking him. "No, wait. Go and find them. Don't take your eyes off them. I will run and fetch Monsieur le Maire and he will identify his property--_et puis nous aurons la scene a faire_."

The stout brigadier grunted an assent and rolled monumentally down the Avenue. Aristide, his pulses throbbing, his heart exulting, ran to the Mayor's house. He was rather a panting triumph than a man. He had beaten the police of Perpignan. He had discovered the thief. He was the hero of the town. Soon would the wedding bells be playing.... He envied the marble of the future statue. He would like to be on the pedestal himself.

He dashed past the maid-servant who opened the door and burst into the prim salon. Madame Coquereau was alone, just preparing to retire for the night. Mademoiselle Stephanie had already gone to bed.

"_Mon Dieu_, what is all this?" she cried.

"Madame," shouted he, "glorious news. I have found the thief!"

He told his tale. Where was Monsieur le Maire?

"He has not yet come back from the cafe."

"I'll go and find him," said Aristide.

"And waste time? Bah!" said the iron-faced old lady, catching up a black silk shawl. "I will come with you and identify the ring of my sainted sister Philomene. Who should know it better than I?"

"As you like, Madame," said Aristide.

Two minutes found them on their journey. Madame Coquereau, in spite of her sixty-five years trudged along with springing step.

"They don't make metal like me, nowadays," she said scornfully.

When they arrived at the gate of the Avenue, the police on guard saluted. The mother of Monsieur le Maire was a power in Perpignan.

"Monsieur," said Aristide, in lordly fashion, to a policeman, "will you have the goodness to make a passage through the crowd for Madame Coquereau, and then help the Brigadier Pesac to arrest the burglar who broke into the house of Monsieur le Maire?"

The man obeyed, went ahead clearing the path with the unceremoniousness of the law, and Aristide giving his arm to Madame Coquereau followed gloriously. As the impressive progress continued the revellers ceased their revels and followed in the wake of Aristide. At the end of the Avenue Brigadier Pesac was on guard. He approached.

"They are still there," he said.

"Good," said Aristide.

The two police-officers, Aristide and Madame Coquereau turned the corner. At the sight of the police the guilty couple started to their feet. Madame Coquereau pounced like a hawk on the masked lady's hand.

"I identify it," she cried. "Brigadier, give these people in charge for theft."

The white masked crowd surged around the group, in the midst of which stood Aristide transfigured. It was his supreme moment. He flourished in one hand his red mask and in the other a pompon which he had extracted from his pocket.

"This I found," said he, "beneath the wall of Monsieur le Maire's garden. Behold the shoe of the accused."

The crowd murmured their applause and admiration. Neither of the prisoners stirred. The pig's head grinned at the world with its inane, painted leer. A rumbling voice beneath it said:

"We will go quietly."

"_Attention s'il vous plait_," said the policemen, and each holding a prisoner by the arm they made a way through the crowd. Madame Coquereau and Aristide followed close behind.

"What did I tell you?" cried Aristide to the brigadier.

"It's Puegas, all the same," said the brigadier, over his shoulder.

"I bet you it's not," said Aristide, and striding swiftly to the back of the male prisoner whipped off the pig's head, and revealed to the petrified throng the familiar features of the Mayor of Perpignan.

Aristide regarded him for two or three seconds open-mouthed, and then fell back into the arms of the Brigadier Pesac screaming with convulsive laughter. The crowd caught the infection of merriment. Shrieks filled the air. The vast mass of masqueraders held their sides, swayed helplessly, rolled in heaps, men and women, tearing each other's garments as they fell.

Aristide, deposited on the ground by the Brigadier Pesac laughed and laughed. When he recovered some consciousness of surroundings, he found the Mayor bending over him and using language that would have made Tophet put its fingers in its ears. He rose. Madame Coquereau shook her thin fists in his face.

"Imbecile! Triple fool!" she cried.

Aristide turned tail and fled. There was nothing else to do.

And that was the end of his career at Perpignan. Vanished were the dreams of civic eminence; melted into thin air the statue on the Quai Sadi-Carnot; faded, too, the vision of the modest Stephanie crowned with orange-blossom; gone forever the two hundred and fifty thousand francs. Never since Alnaschar kicked over his basket of crockery was there such a hideous welter of shattered hopes.

If the Mayor had been allowed to go disguised to the Police Station, he could have disclosed his identity and that of the lady in private to awe-stricken functionaries. He might have forgiven Aristide. But Aristide had exposed him to the derision of the whole of Roussillon and the never ending wrath of Madame Coquereau. Ruefully Aristide asked himself the question: why had the Mayor not taken him into the confidence of his masquerading escapade? Why had he not told him of the pretty widow, whom, unknown to his mother, he was courting? Why had he permitted her to wear the ring which he had given her so as to spite his sainted Aunt Philomene? And why had he gone on wearing the pig's head after Aristide had told him of his suspicions? Ruefully Aristide found no answers save in the general chuckle-headedness of mankind.

"If it hadn't been such a good farce I should have wept like a cow," said Aristide, after relating this story. "But every time I wanted to cry, I laughed. _Nom de Dieu!_ You should have seen his face! And the face of Madame Coquereau! She opened her mouth wide showing ten yellow teeth and squealed like a rabbit! Oh, it was a good farce! He was very cross with me," he added after a smiling pause, "and when I got back to Paris I tried to pacify him."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"I sent him my photograph," said Aristide.

VI

THE ADVENTURE OF FLEURETTE

One day, when Aristide was discoursing on the inexhaustible subject of woman, I pulled him up.

"My good friend," said I, "you seem to have fallen in love with every woman you have ever met. But for how many of them have you really cared?"

"_Mon Dieu!_ For all of them!" he cried, springing from his chair and making a wind-mill of himself.

"Come, come," said I; "all that amorousness is just Gallic exuberance. Have you ever been really in love in your life?"

"How should I know?" said he. But he lit a cigarette, turned away, and looked out of window.

There was a short silence. He shrugged his shoulders, apparently in response to his own thoughts. Then he turned again suddenly, threw his cigarette into the fire, and thrust his hands into his pockets. He sighed.

"Perhaps there was Fleurette," said he, not looking at me. "_Est-ce qu'on sait jamais?_ That wasn't her real name--it was Marie-Josephine; but people called her Fleurette. She looked like a flower, you know."

I nodded in order to signify my elementary acquaintance with the French tongue.

"The most delicate little flower you can conceive," he continued. "_Tiens_, she was a slender lily--so white, and her hair the flash of gold on it--and she had eyes--_des yeux de pervenche_, as we say in French. What is _pervenche_ in English--that little pale-blue flower?"

"Periwinkle," said I.

"Periwinkle eyes! My God, what a language! Ah, no! She had _des yeux de pervenche_.... She was _diaphane_, diaphanous ... impalpable as cigarette-smoke ... a little nose like nothing at all, with nostrils like infinitesimal sea-shells. Anyone could have made a mouthful of her.... Ah! _Cre nom d'un chien!_ Life is droll. It has no common sense. It is the game of a mountebank.... I've never told you about Fleurette. It was this way."

And the story he narrated I will do my best to set down.

* * * * *

The good M. Bocardon, of the Hotel de la Curatterie at Nimes, whose grateful devotion to Aristide has already been recorded, had a brother in Paris who managed the Hotel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse (strange conjuncture), a flourishing third-rate hostelry in the neighbourhood of the Halles Centrales. Thither flocked sturdy Britons in knickerbockers, stockings, and cloth caps, Teutons with tin botanizing boxes (for lunch transportation), and American school-marms realizing at last the dream of their modest and laborious lives. Accommodation was cheap, manners were easy, and knowledge of the gay city less than rudimentary.

To M. Bocardon of Paris Aristide, one August morning, brought glowing letters of introduction from M. and Mme. Bocardon of Nimes. M. Bocardon of Paris welcomed Aristide as a Provencal and a brother. He brought out from a cupboard in his private bureau an hospitable bottle of old Armagnac, and discoursed with Aristide on the seductions of the South. It was there that he longed to retire--to a dainty little hotel of his own with a smart clientele. The clientele of the Hotel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse was not to his taste. He spoke slightingly of his guests.