Monsieur Jonquelle (10 page)

“Not a sou less!”

The Prefect looked down at the red tiles under his feet.

“It is impossible!” he said. “Consider, Monsieur, how great a sum is five hundred thousand francs—half a million—a fortune in France! Why, Monsieur, I can find you a thousand men in Paris who will pluck out an eye for a tenth of the money. Five hundred thousand francs!
Mon Dieu
! the half of Europe would sell their souls at that figure! It is impossible!”

Then it was that avarice dispossessed the Viscount's irascible mood.

“Bah!” he said. “I'll warrant the singer considers five hundred thousand francs no very great sum.”

The Prefect reflected.

“Well,” he said, “you know how careless of money actresses are. To them it has no value. It is the need of it only that they measure. If they are down they will haggle for a franc. If they are in funds you may fill your pockets. It is so with all temperaments that create. Did not Dumas keep a bowl of gold coins on the mantelpiece from
which any one could help himself? If Monsieur were in Paris to-day he might find Mademoiselle willing to consider a sum that a week later she would think out of the question.”

The Prefect flung away the fragment of his cigarette and rose.

“
Bonjour
, Monsieur!” he said. “I came out from Paris to see if the Vicomte Macdougal could not be induced to withdraw this demand upon Mademoiselle Valzomova; but it is clear, I think, that my mission is quite hopeless. Monsieur will adhere to his own ideas.”

Then he stopped suddenly and turned about.

“Pardon, Monsieur,” he said. “Can you tell me which turn of the highway yonder I must take in order to enter Paris on the road from Rouen? There is a sharp curve on that road about which the Department of Highways has been several times advised. It promised yesterday to put up a proper warning and I wish to see how that promise has been kept.”

The old man had followed him for a step or two on the terrace.

“It is the second turn to the right,” he answered. “But a moment, sir. Why do you tell me that if I were in Paris to-day I might find this woman more—er—reasonable than later?”

“Because, Monsieur,” replied the Prefect, “it is to-day that Mademoiselle receives the advance
payment on her engagement at the opera. And so to-day she will have a very large sum of money in bulk, but she will not keep it. No one of them ever does.… Ah,
merci
, Monsieur. It is the second turn to the right then.”

But the Viscount called after him:

“A word, if you please: Do you think I ought to go to Paris to-day?”

“The Vicomte will do about that as he likes,” replied the Prefect.

“Wait!” And the old man followed after him. There was the lust of money in his hard, irascible face. “Would you take me up in your automobile?”

Monsieur Jonquelle suppressed a gesture of annoyance.

“I suppose I could come back,” added the old man hurriedly, “on the evening train.”

The Prefect shrugged his shoulders—he was not entirely able to conceal how little the suggestion pleased him; but he replied with a show of courtesy:

“If Monsieur does not object to half an hour's delay by reason of the Rouen Road I shall be very glad to take him.”

The old man snapped at the invitation. It was a chance to reach Paris at no cost and he shuffled into the château for his coat. The Prefect
looked after him, making a gesture of contempt.

“
Pardieu
!” he said. “When these creatures become intolerable in their own countries they buy an estate in France! Under what curse of God are we?”

The Viscount presently returned in an old weather-beaten coat and the two men went down the steep path to the village. The great roadster was standing as the Prefect had left it, before the door of the inn; the boy in the blue blouse had wiped it clean as a jewel.

Monsieur Jonquelle put on his goggles and gloves; then he went round the car to make sure that the petrol tank had been filled. To see clearly into the opening of the tank he removed the goggles and held them in his hand. He was impatient and in no gentle temper, and there was presently a tinkle of broken glass. He looked down with an exclamation of annoyance. One of the eyepieces of the goggles had been shattered against the fender of the car.

“
Diable
!” he said. “It is the only pair I have!” And he began to break the cracked glass out of the rim with his thumb.

The Viscount came forward with expressions of regret. Now that he was using Monsieur Jonquelle for his own ends, he could afford to be good-humored. One would have said that the
temperaments of the two men had changed about. The Prefect was now irascible and the Viscount suave.

“Too bad!” the latter continued to say. “Perhaps you can get a pair from the innkeeper.”

“No such luck,” replied the Prefect; “but if by chance there is a
horloger
in this village I might get a lens put in without delay.”

“There is one at the end of the street,” said the Viscount. “I will show you.” And he began to walk toward the sign of the gilded watch that the Prefect had marked from the terrace of the château.

The Prefect followed. He walked rapidly, like one dominated by ill temper.

“Monsieur,” said the little workman when the two men were come into the shop, “a lens like this is not to be had outside of Paris.” And he turned the goggles about, shaking his head.

“Well,” snapped the Prefect, “you can put in a piece of window glass then—it will keep the dust out of my eye.”

“
Oui
, Monsieur,” replied the workman; “I can do that.”

He measured the eyepiece, cut out a disk of glass and fitted it quickly into the rim. He worked swiftly and with little nervous glances at the Prefect. When he had finished Monsieur
Jonquelle threw a five-franc piece on the watch case and the two men returned to the inn.

The engine spun under the touch of the electric button and the great gray car glided out of the village, Monsieur Jonquelle driving and the Viscount in the seat beside him. They had taken the second crossing into the Rouen Road when Monsieur Jonquelle turned to his companion like one sharply seized with an important memory.

“
Diable
!” he said. “I think only of myself!” And putting up his free hand he unhooked his goggles and handed them to the Viscount. “Pardon, Monsieur,” he said, “I had forgotten your injured eye. These will at least keep out the dust.” The Viscount began to refuse, saying there was little dust and that he was in no discomfort; but the Prefect would not hear him.

“I have always heard that when one eye is lost the other is more susceptible to strain,” he continued as he helped the Viscount to adjust the goggles; “and it is this brilliant sun on the white road that plays the devil with one's sight.…
Voilà
! We have the green lens over monsieur's sound eye! That was a lucky accident to break the left glass. Monsieur le Vicomte will be protected in both eyes from the dust and in his good eye from the glare of the road.… And now,
ma beauté
!” And he pressed his foot on the throttle. The car shot out like a racer under a
lash and the hedges along the roadside leaped backward.

The car traveled without any sound except a low hum as of a distant beehive. It gained speed like an arrow and the dust trailed behind in a long rolling cloud. They traveled swiftly on the white road in the brilliant sun.

It was at the beginning of a long descent toward Paris that Monsieur Jonquelle began to have trouble with his brakes, and he ducked down among his levers to see what the trouble was. As he took a turning on the steep hill, with his head a moment among his nest of levers, he called suddenly to his companion: “Is there a signal before us?”

“Yes,” replied the Viscount.

The Prefect sat up, with a volley of Parisian oaths, turned the car into the hill and, braking with a twist of the front wheel, stopped against a signpost by the road a hundred meters from the curve.

“
Nom d'un chien
!” he cried. “Does the Department of Highways believe itself to conduct a tram that it puts up a signal like that!”

“What's the matter with it?” said the Viscount. “The letter A stands for the word to stop in your language and red is a danger warning.”

“Precisely,” cried the Prefect; “but what danger is there if one knows of the curve? And why
stop when the road is open? Does one take on and discharge passengers at this point as he travels into Paris, like a bus to the Gare du Nord? There should be here the usual signal indicating a sharp descent on a curve—and they put up a thing like that! … Well, they shall hear from me—and soon!”

He got out and tightened the brake band of his car with a heavy wrench, and the two men continued their journey. The brakes held now and the car swept down the long descent, sped away on the great road and presently entered Paris. On his way to the Place de l'Opéra the Prefect stopped before the Department of Highways.

It was strange how completely the trivial incident of a roadmark had dispossessed the great matter upon which the Prefect had set out. His mind seemed emptied of it. Placarded on the walls of Paris were the beautiful lithographs of Mademoiselle Valzomova, this idol of the opera, whose conspicuous generosity had so tremendously impressed him, and he passed them with no sign.

Moreover, by a curious ironical chance he carried into Paris this mean old man, in his dirty coat, that he might prey upon her. And yet this bitter ending to his pretentious endeavor was hidden from before his eyes—screened off by the petty error of an official of highways. By such
inconsequential incidents are the minds of mortals dominated!

“A moment, Monsieur,” he said to the Viscount, bringing his car to the curb. “I wish to lay a complaint before the Department of Highways. Will you verify my statement?”

“With pleasure,” replied the old man, glad to be a gadfly on any withers; and the two entered the building.

A grave man with a long lean face sat at a desk in the private office of the Department of Highways; and behind him, nosing in a ledger, stood a big Italian, with bristling, close-cropped hair. The Prefect began at once with his complaint. He had hardly got it explained when the man at the desk stopped him.

“Monsieur,” he said, “do you make this charge from your own knowledge or at the information of another?”

“I saw it myself,” replied the Prefect.

“And I saw it too,” said the Viscount, stepping up before the desk.

The official looked up.

“And who are you?” he asked.

“The Viscount Macdougal, my fine sir,” snapped the old man.

“Ah!” said the official, taking up his pen. He turned abruptly from the Prefect as though he
were a person of no concern and addressed himself to the Englishman with grave courtesy.

“Monsieur,” he said, “I shall be pleased to hear you.”

He listened with the closest attention, as to a distinguished person whose every word was to be marked; and on a pad before him on the desk he wrote down precisely and with care the exact statement of the Viscount Macdougal.

The big Italian, who had been deep in his ledger, now rose and came round the official's desk. He stopped directly in front of the Viscount and slowly wagged his head.

“So,” he said, “you saw all this through your goggles!”

“I did!” snapped the Viscount. “What of it?”

The Italian did not reply; but abruptly in the quiet and gravity of the room he laughed. The Viscount turned on him in a fury.

“Why do you laugh, my fine fellow?” he snarled, his face turning livid.

“I laugh,” replied the Italian, “because if the Viscount Macdougal saw a red letter on a black background through the goggles he now wears he saw it with his blind eye!”

“My blind eye!” cried the Viscount.

“Exactly,” replied the Italian—“your blind eye! You have a green lens over your good eye
and it is a principle of optics that red on a black field seen through a green lens is invisible!”

The Viscount opened his mouth as though he would utter some awful invective, but for a moment he did not speak; then he said strangely, as though he addressed an invisible person:

“Will you tell me who these people are?”

And the Prefect, Jonquelle, replied to him:

“With pleasure, Monsieur le Vicomte—the one who writes is the Magistrate Lavelle, and the one who laughs is the oculist Bianchi.”

Early in April the Marquis Banutelli closed his villa at Bordighera, on the Mediterranean, and traveled to Geneva. He was in frail health, enervated by the sun of the Riviera and displeased with life.

He had intended to write a great opera at Bordighera, but he could not get the thing to go upon its legs. The Marquis blamed the commonplace times for this plague upon his opera. There was no longer anything mysterious or unknown in the world. A tram carried tourists to the Sphinx; the Americans had penetrated to the Pole—or pretended to have done so—and the English had entered Tibet.

Moreover the whole race of men was tamed; the big, wild, barbaric passions that used to rend the world were now harnessed to the plow. Men no longer climbed to the stars for a woman or carried a knife a lifetime for an enemy. The tragedies of love and vengeance were settled by the notary and the law court. Romance and adventure had been ejected out of life.

The Marquis was by no means certain he would find in Geneva what he had failed to find in Bordighera—that is to say, inspiration for his opera—though this city was the very realm of romance. It lay across the bluest lake in the world, beneath the sinister ridge of Salève; behind it was the range of the Jura; and beyond it Mont Blanc emerged on clear mornings from the sky. But he was sure to find there a bracing climate when the wind, like a curse of God, did not blow from the north.