Chapter 6

“Oh yes.”

But he felt that there was some anxiety weighing upon her. He was always at or near the Hotel de la Plage now, so that she could call him from the window or the door. One day--a day of cloud and drizzle, which are common enough at Yport in the early summer--he went into the little front room, which the Mother Senneville fondly called her salon, to read the daily office from the cloth-bound book he ever carried in his pocket. He was engaged in this devout work when the Englishwoman came hastily into the room, closing the door and standing with her back against it.

“There is a gendarme in the street,” she said, in little more than a whisper, her eyes glittering. She was breathless.

“What of it, mademoiselle? It is my old friend the Sergeant Grall. It is I who christen his children.”

“Why is he here?”

“It is his duty, mademoiselle. The village is peaceful enough now that the men are away at the fisheries. You have nothing to fear.”

She glanced round the room with a hunted look in her eyes.

“Oh,” she said, “I cannot keep it up any longer. You must have guessed--you who are so quick--that my brother is a great criminal. He has ruined thousands of people. He was escaping with the money he had stolen when the steamer was wrecked.”

The cure did not say whether this news surprised him or not, but walked to the window and looked thoughtfully out to sea. The windows were dull and spray-ridden.

“Ah!” the girl cried, “you must not judge hastily. You cannot know his temptation.”

“I will not judge at all, mademoiselle. No man may judge of another's temptation. But--he can restore the money.”

“No. It was all lost in the steamer.”

She had approached the other window, and stood beside the little priest looking out over the grey sea.

“It was surely my duty to come here and help him, whatever he had done.”

“Assuredly, mademoiselle.”

“But he says you can give him up if you like.”

She glanced at him and caught her breath. The priest shook his head.

“Why not? Because you are too charitable?” she whispered; and again he shook his head. “Then, why not?” she persisted with a strange pertinacity.

“Because he is your brother, mademoiselle.”

And they stood for some moments looking out over the sea, through the rime-covered windows, in a breathless silence. The cure spoke at length.

“You must get him removed to Havre,” he said, in his cheery way, “as soon as possible. There he can take a steamer to America. I will impress upon the doctor the necessity of an early departure.”

It was not lately, but many years ago, that the Ocean Waif was wrecked in a summer storm. And any who penetrate to Yport to-day will probably see in the sunlight on the sea-wall a cheery little cure, who taps his snuff-box, while he exchanges jokes with the idlers there. Yport has slowly crept into the ken of the traveller, and every summer sees English tourists pass that way. They are not popular with the rough natives, who, after all, are of the same ancestry as ourselves; but the little cure is quick and kind with information or assistance to all who seek it. When the English tongue is spoken he draws near and listens--snuff-box in hand; when the travellers speak in French his eyes travel out to sea with a queer look, as if the accent aroused some memory.

And in an obscure English watering-place there lives a queer little old maid--churchy and prim--who does charitable work, gives her opinion very freely concerning the administration of matters parochial, thinks the vicar very self-indulgent and idle--and in her own heart has the abiding conviction that there are none on earth like the Roman clergy.

“GOLOSSA-A-L”

“Golossa-a-l!” I heard him say. “Golossa-a-l, these Englishmen! Are they not everywhere?”

A moment later I was introduced to him, and he rose to shake hands--a tall, fair, good-natured German student. Heavy if you will--but clean withal, and of a cleanly mind.

“Honour,” he muttered politely. “It is not often we have an English student at Gottingen--but perhaps we can teach you something--eh?” And he broke into a boyish laugh. “You will take beer?” he added, drawing forward an iron chair--for we were in the Brauerei Garden.

“Thank you.”

“A doctor of medicine--the Herr Professor tells me,” he said pleasantly. “Prosit,” he added, as he raised his great mug to his lips.

“Prosit! Yes, a doctor of medicine--of the army.”

“Ah, of the army, that is good. I also I hope, some day! And you come to pass our Gottingen examination. Yes, but it is hard--ach Gott!--devilish hard.”

There was a restrained shyness about the man which I liked. Shy men are so rare. And, although he could have cleared the Brauerei Garden in five minutes, there was no bluster about this Teutonic Hercules. His loud, good-natured laugh was perhaps the most striking characteristic of Carl von Mendebach. Next to that, his readiness to be surprised at everything or anything, and to class it at once as colossal. Hence the nickname by which he was known amongst us. The term was applied to me a thousand times--figuratively. For I am a small man, as I have had reason to deplore more than once while carrying the wounded out of action. It takes so much longer if one is small.

I cannot exactly say why Carl von Mendebach and I became close friends; but I do not think that Lisa von Mendebach had anything to do with it. I was never in love with Lisa, although I admired her intensely, and I never see a blue-eyed, fair-haired girl to this day without thinking of Lischen. But I was not in love with her. I was never good-looking. I did not begin by expecting much from the other sex, and I have never been in love with anybody. I wonder if Lisa remembers me.

The students were pleasant enough fellows. It must be recollected that I speak of a period dating back before the war of 1870--before there was a German Empire. I soon made a sort of place for myself at the University, and I was tolerated good-naturedly. But Carl did more than tolerate me. He gave me all the friendship of his simple heart. Without being expansive--for he was a Hanoverian--he told me all about himself, his thoughts and his aims, an open-hearted ambition and a very Germanic contentment with a world which contained beer and music. Then at last he told me all about his father, General von Mendebach, and Lisa. Finally he took me to his house one evening to supper.

“Father,” he said in his loud, cheery way, “here is the Englishman--a good friend of mine--a great scholar--golossa-a-l.”

The General held out his hand and Lisa bowed, prettily formal, with a quaint, prim smile which I can see still.

I went to the house often--as often, indeed, as I could. I met the Von Mendebachs at the usual haunts--the theatre, an occasional concert, the band on Sunday afternoon, and at the houses of some of the professors. It was Lisa who told me that another young Briton was coming to live in Gottingen--not, however, as a student at the University. He turned out to be a Scotsman--one Andrew Smallie, the dissolute offspring of a prim Edinburgh family. He had been shipped off to Gottingen, in the hope that he might there drink himself quietly to death. The Scotch do not keep their skeletons at home in a cupboard. They ship them abroad and give them facilities.

Andrew Smallie soon heard that there was an English student in Gottingen, and, before long, procured an introduction. I disliked him at once. I took good care not to introduce him to any friends of mine.

“Seem to lead a quiet life here,” he said to me one day when I had exhausted all conversation and every effort to get him out of my rooms.

“Very,” I replied.

“Don't you know anybody? It's a deuced slow place. I don't know a soul to talk to except yourself. Can't take to these beer-drinking, sausage-eating Germans, you know. Met that friend of yours, Carl von Mendebach, yesterday, but he didn't seem to see me.”

“Yes,” I answered. “It is possible he did not know you. You have never been introduced.”

“No,” he answered dubiously. “Shouldn't think that would matter in an out-of-the-way place like this.”

“It may seem out of the way to you,” I said, without looking up from my book. “But it does not do so to the people who live here.”

“D--d slow lot, I call them,” he muttered. He lighted a cigar and stood looking at me for some time and then he went away.

It was about this time that Carl von Mendebach fought his first student duel, and he was kind enough to ask me to be his surgeon. It was, of course, no quarrel of his own, but a point of honour between two clubs; and Carl was selected to represent his “corps.” He was delighted, and the little slit in his cheek which resulted from the encounter gave him infinite satisfaction. I had been elected to the “corps” too, and wore my cap and colours with considerable pride. But, being an Englishman, I was never asked to fight. I did not then, and I do not now, put forward any opinion on student duelling. My opinion would make no difference, and there is much to be said on both sides.

It was a hard winter, and I know few colder places than Gottingen. An ice fete was organized by the University. I believe Carl and I were among the most energetic of the organizers. I wish I had never had anything to do with it.

I remember to this day the pleasure of skating with Lisa's warmly gloved little hands in my own--her small furred form touching me lightly each time we swung over to the left on the outside edge. I saw Andrew Smallie once or twice. Once he winked at me, knowingly, as I passed him with Lisa--and I hated him for it. That man almost spoilt Gottingen for me. Britons are no friends of mine out of their own country. They never get over the fallacy that everywhere except London is an out-of-the-way place where nothing matters.

As the evening wore on, some of the revellers became noisy in a harmless German way. They began to sing part songs with a skill which is not heard out of the Fatherland. Parties of young men and maidens joined hands and swung round the lake in waltz time to the strain of the regimental band.

Lisa was tired, so she sought a seat with the General, leaving Carl and me to practise complicated figures. They found a seat close to us--a seat somewhat removed from the lamps. In the dusk it was difficult to distinguish between the townspeople and the gentlefolk.

We were absorbed in our attempts when I heard a voice I knew--and hated.

“Here, you, little girl in the fur jacket--come and have a turn with me,” it was saying in loud, rasping, intoxicated tones.

I turned sharply. Smallie was standing in front of Lisa with a leer in his eyes. She was looking up at him--puzzled, frightened--not understanding English. The General was obesely dumfounded.

“Come along--my dear,” Andrew Smallie went on. He reached out his hand, and, grasping her wrist, tried to drag her towards him.

Then I went for him. I am, as I have confessed, a small man. But if a man on skates goes for another, he gathers a certain impetus. I gave it to him with my left, and Andrew Smallie slid along the ice after he had fallen.

The General hustled Lisa away, muttering oaths beneath his great white moustache.

When Andrew Smallie picked himself up, Carl von Mendebach was standing over him.

“Tell him,” said Carl in German, “that that was my sister.”

I told Smallie.

Then Carl von Mendebach slowly drew off his fur glove and boxed Smallie heavily on the ear so that he rolled over sideways.

“Golossa-a-l,” muttered Von Mendebach, as we went away hurriedly together.

The next morning Carl sent an English-speaking student with a challenge to Andrew Smallie. I wrote a note to my compatriot, telling him that although it was not our habit in England, he would do well to accept the challenge or to leave Gottingen at once. Carl stood over me while I wrote the letter.

“Tell him,” he said, “where he can procure fencing lessons.”

I gave Smallie the name of the best fencing-master in Gottingen. Then we called for beer and awaited the return of our messenger. The student came back looking grave and pale.

“He accepts,” he said. “But--”

“Well!” we both exclaimed.

“He names pistols.”

“What?” I cried. Carl laughed suddenly. We had never thought of such a thing. Duelling with pistols is forbidden. It is never dreamt of among German students.

“Ah--all right!” said Carl. “If he wishes it.”

I at once wrote a note to Smallie, telling him that the thing was impossible. My messenger was sent back without an answer. I wrote, offering to fight Carl myself with the usual light sword or the sabre, in his name and for him. To this I received no answer. I went round to his rooms and was refused admittance.

The next morning at five--before it was light--Carl and I started off on foot for a little forest down by the river. At six o'clock Andrew Smallie arrived. He was accompanied by an Einjahriger--a German who had lived in England before he came home to serve his year in the army.

We did not know much about it. Carl laughed as I put him in position. The fresh pink of his cheek--like the complexion of a healthy girl--never faded for a moment.

“When I've done with him,” cried Smallie, “I'll fight you.”

We placed our men. The German soldier gave the word. Carl von Mendebach went down heavily.

He was still smiling--with a strange surprise on his simple face.

“Little man,” he said, “he has hit me.”

He lay quite still while I quickly loosened his coat. Then suddenly his breath caught.

“Golossa-a-l!” he muttered. His eyes glazed. He was dead.

I looked up and saw Smallie walking quickly away alone. The Einjahriger was kneeling beside me.

I have never seen or heard of Andrew Smallie since. I am a grey-haired man now. I have had work to do in every war of my day. I have been wounded--I walk very lame. But I still hope to see Andrew Smallie--perhaps in a country where I can hold him to his threat; if it is only for the remembrance of five minutes that I had with Lisa when I went back to Gottingen that cold winter morning.

THE MULE

“Si je vis, c'est bien; si je meurs, c'est bien.”

“Ai-i-ieah,” the people cried, as Juan Quereno passed--the cry of the muleteers, in fact. And this was considered an excellent joke. It had been a joke in the country-side for nearly twenty years; one of perhaps half a dozen, for the uneducated mind is slow to comprehend, and slower to forget. Some one had nicknamed Juan Quereno the “Mule” when he was at school, and Spain, like Italy and parts of Provence, is a country where men have two names--the baptismal, and the so-called. Indeed, the custom is so universal, that official records must needs take cognizance of it, and grave Government papers are made out in the name of so-and-so, “named the monkey.”

There were, after all, worse by-names in the village than the Mule, which is, as many know, a willing enough beast if taken the right way. If taken in the wrong--well, one must not take him in the wrong way, and there is an end of it! A mule will suddenly stop because, it would appear, he has something on his mind and desires to think it out then and there. And the man who raises a stick is, of course, a fool. Any one knows that. There is nothing for it but to stand and watch his ears, which are a little set back, and cry, “Ai-i-ieah,” patiently and respectfully, until the spirit moves him to go on. And then the mule will move on, slowly at first, without enthusiasm, a quality which, by the way, is, of all the animals, only to be found in the horse and the dog.

The quick-witted who had dealings with Quereno knew, therefore, by his name what manner of man this was, and dealt with him accordingly. Juan Quereno was himself a muleteer, and in even such a humble capacity as scrambling behind a beast of burden over a rocky range of mountains and through a stream or two, a man may make for himself a small reputation in his small world. Juan Quereno was, namely, a Government muleteer, and carried the mails over nineteen chaotic miles of rock and river. When the mails were delayed owing, it was officially announced, to heavy snow or rain in the mountains, the delay never occurred on Quereno's etapa.

For nine years, winter and summer, storm and shine, he got his mails through, backwards and forwards, sleeping one night at San Celoni, the next at Puente de Rey. Such was Juan Quereno, “a stupid enough fellow,” the democratic schoolmaster of San Celoni said, with a shrug of his shoulders and a wave of the cigarette which he always carried half-smoked and unlighted in his fingers.

The schoolmaster was, nevertheless, pleasant enough when the Mule, clean-shaven and shy, with a shrinking look in his steady, black eyes, asked one evening if he could speak to him alone.

“But yes--amigo!” he replied; “but yes.” And he drew aside on the bench that stands at the schoolhouse door. “Sit down.”

The Mule sat down, leant heavily against the wall, and thrust out first one heavy foot and then the other. Then he sat forward with his elbows on his knees, and looked at his dusty boots. His face was tanned a deep brown--a stolid face--not indicative of much intelligence perhaps, not spiritual, but not bad on the other hand, which is something in a world that abounds in bad faces. He glanced sideways at the schoolmaster, and moistened his lips with his tongue, openly, after the manner of the people.

“It is about Caterina, eh?” inquired the elder man.

“Yes,” replied the Mule, with a sort of gasp. If the Mule had ever been afraid in his life, it was at that moment--afraid, if you please, of a little democrat of a schoolmaster no bigger than the first-class boys, blinking through a pair of magnifying spectacles which must have made the world look very large, if one could judge from the effect that they had upon his eyes.

The schoolmaster looked up towards the mountains, to the goats poised there upon the broken ground, seeking a scanty herbage in the crannies.

“How many beasts is it that you have--four or five?” he inquired kindly enough, after a moment, and the Mule drew a deep breath.

“Five,” he replied; and added, after a minute's deep and honest thought, “and good ones, except Cristofero Colon, the big one. He eats much, and yet, when the moment comes”--he paused and looked towards the mountains, which rose like a wall to the south, a wall that the Mule must daily climb--“when the moment comes he will sometimes refuse--especially in an east wind.”

The schoolmaster smiled, thinking perhaps of that other Cristofero Colon and the east wind that blew him to immortal fame.

“And Caterina,” he asked. “What does she think of it?”

“I don't know.”

The schoolmaster looked at his companion with an upward jerk of the head. It was evident that he thought him a dull fellow. But that assuredly was Caterina's affair. It was, on the other hand, distinctly the affair of Caterina's father to remember those five beasts of the Mule's, than which there were none better in the country-side--to recollect that the Mule himself had a good name at his trade, and was trusted by the authorities. There was no match so good in all the valley, and certainly none to compare with this dull swain in the accursed village of San Celoni. The schoolmaster never spoke of the village without a malediction. He had been planted there in his youth with a promise of promotion, and promotion had never come. For a man of education it was exile--no newspapers, no passing travellers at the Cafe. The nearest town was twenty miles away over the Sierra Nevada, and Malaga--the paved Paradise of his rural dreams--forty rugged miles to the south. No wonder he was a democrat, this disappointed man. In a Republic, now, such as his father had schemed for in the forties, he would have succeeded. A Republic, it must be remembered, being a community in which every man is not only equal, but superior to his neighbour.

“You don't know?”

“No,” answered the Mule, with a dull look of shame at his own faint-heartedness. Moreover, he was assuredly speaking an untruth. The man who fears to inquire--knows.

As a matter of fact, he had hardly spoken to Caterina. Conversation was not the Mule's strong point. He had exchanged the usual greetings with her at the fountain on a fiesta day. He had nodded a good morning to her, gruff and curt (for the Mule had no manners), more times than he could count. And Caterina had met his slow glance with those solemn eyes of hers, and that, so to speak, had settled the Mule's business. Just as it would have settled the business of five out of six men. For Caterina had Moorish eyes--dark and solemn and sad, which said a hundred things that Caterina had never thought of--which seemed to have some history in them that could hardly have been Caterina's history, for she was only seventeen. Though, as to this, one cannot always be sure. Perhaps the history was all to come. Of course, the Mule knew none of these things. He was a hard-working, open-air Andalusian, and only knew that he wanted Caterina, and, as the saying is, could not live without her. Meantime he lived on from day to day without that which he wanted, and worked--just as the reader may be doing. That, in fact, is life--to live on without something or other, and work. Than which there is one thing worse, namely, to live on and be idle.

“But--” said the schoolmaster, slowly, for Andalusian tongues are slow, if the knives are quick--“but one may suppose that you would make her a good husband.”

And a sudden gruff laugh was the answer. A woman would have understood it; but Caterina had no mother. And the schoolmaster was thinking of the five beasts and the postal appointment. The muleteer's face slowly sank back into stolidity again. The light that had flashed across it had elevated that dull physiognomy for a moment only.

“Yes,” said the Mule slowly, at length.

“You can read and write?” inquired the man of education.

“Yes, but not quickly!”

“That,” said the schoolmaster, “is a matter of practice. You should read the newspapers.”

Which was bad advice, for the Mule was simple and might have believed what he read.

The conversation was a long one; that is to say, it lasted a long time; until, indeed, the sun had set and the mountains had faded from blue to grey, while the far-off snow peaks reared their shadowy heads into the very stars. The schoolmaster had a few more questions to ask, and the Mule answered them in monosyllables. He was tired, perhaps, after his day's journey; for he had come the northward trip, which was always the hardest, entailing as it did a rocky climb on the sunny side of the mountains. He had nothing to say in his own favour, which is not such a serious matter as some might suspect. The world does not always take us at our own valuation, which is just as well--for the world.

Indeed, the schoolmaster only succeeded in confirming his own suspicion that this was nothing but a dull fellow, and he finally had to dismiss the Mule, who had not even the savoir faire to perceive when conversation was ended.

“Vederemos,” he said, judicially, “we shall see.”

And the Mule went away with that heaviness of heart which must surely follow a mean action. For he knew that in applying to Caterina's father he had placed Caterina at a disadvantage. The schoolmaster, be it remembered, was a democrat, and such are usually autocrats in their own house. He was, moreover, a selfish man, and had long cherished the conviction that he was destined to be great. He thought that he was an orator, and that gift, which is called by those who do not possess it the gift of the gab, is the most dangerous that a man can have. There was no one in San Celoni to listen to him. And if Caterina were married and he were a free man, he could give up the school and go to Malaga, where assuredly he could make a name.