Читать книгу The Town of Tombarel - William J. Locke - Страница 3

Table of Contents

My acquaintance with Monsieur Alcide Tombarel was formed in a very pleasant way; for Bacchus at his most innocent and most charming brought us together.

No one who lives in any part of wine-growing France can despise the little wines of the country—the little wines, like the children of the soil, that pine away and die if transplanted far from their own district, that laugh out their butterfly life for a season or two, and then perish from premature old age. In the south especially they are part and parcel of the sunshine of the midday meal. Now, such a wine, pale gold, full, with a faint perfume of hyacinth and a touch of the flavour of flint to give it character, did I drink at the table of my friend, General Duhamel, who has a villa of the modern stucco world in the Mont Boron quarter of Nice, super-imposed on a cellar of Paradise. He was good enough to give me the address of the vine-grower; for thus do the wise buy their little wines of the country—not in commonplace bottles from pettifogging wine merchants, but in casks filled from generous tuns in the vineyards themselves.

“If you go to Creille, a little town away back in the mountains”—he waved an indicating hand—“and ask for Monsieur Tombarel, and mention my name, no doubt he’ll let you have some.”

You see, there is a certain amount of polite ceremonial in the matter. You don’t buy wine in the offhand way in which you buy ducks. The most grizzled and stringy-necked old peasant with an acre of vines offers, and demands at the same time, what for a better term one might call the courtesy of the grape. An old inhabitant of the Azure Coast, I was familiar with the observances. Wherefore I thanked my host gratefully—for one doesn’t give away one’s pet vineyard to all and sundry—and a few days afterwards I journeyed through many devious and precipitous paths through the mountains to the tiny little town of Creille which stood perched, or rather piled somewhat ridiculously, on the top of a hill set sentinel-wise in the wild sweep of a gorge.

From declivitous desolation I found myself suddenly pulled up in a gay little cobble-stoned square. On the left was l’Hôtel du Commerce, with a rusty, moth-eaten, sun-eaten, time-eaten car standing before the closed doors. There were a few funny little shops with women sitting on the thresholds. Across the way, two or three vague, swarthy, shirt-sleeved men sat at little tables outside the Café Pogomas. To this apparently quivering centre of the life of Creille did I, leaving my car, address my inquiring footsteps. I approached the swarthy men who were drinking the greyest of grey wine from demi-setiers—tiny, squat tumblers holding about a gill—and raised my hat.

“Pardon, Messieurs”—they responded courteously—“can you direct me to the house of Monsieur Tombarel?”

One of them began, when another interrupted him:

“Tiens. Here is Marius.”

“The patron,” the first explained.

And there issued from the interior of the café, the landlord, Marius Pogomas himself. He was a heavy-browed, powerfully built man, with an extraordinarily deep furrow running horizontally across his forehead. The closely cut hair on his bullet head seemed scarcely more of a crop than that on his two or three days’ unshaven fat cheeks. His glance was kind, yet singularly commanding. He wore a fairly clean white suit and espadrilles—rope-soled, canvas shoes—and a coarse blue shirt destitute of collar.

“Monsieur ... ?” he questioned.

I repeated my inquiry.

“Ah,” said he, “Monsieur le Maire.”

Thus I learned that Monsieur Tombarel was Mayor of Creille. I explained that it was not in his official quality of Mayor, but as a private viticulteur that I desired to visit Monsieur Tombarel.

“You wish to buy wine, Monsieur?”

“Of course,” said I.

He gave me to understand, with a flicker of fingers to lips, that I had come to the right market. But, he added, with a warning hand and a deepening of his furrow, Monsieur le Maire was very jealous of his wine, and wouldn’t sell it to the first comer. He seemed quite sorry for me, a foreigner, for though I speak French as well as most people, I can’t help looking an uncompromising Englishman. I explained that I had an appointment with him, arranged by telegram, and that I bore the introduction of General Duhamel.

He threw out his arms. That was a different matter altogether. General Duhamel. He was of the country. An old Chasseur Alpin. “I who speak to you, Marius Pogomas, served under him when he was simple captain. I’ll have you shown the way at once,” said he.

He turned towards the interior of the café and bawled out something in the unintelligible Franco-Italian Provençal patois of the mountains, and presently an indiscriminate sort of boy of thirteen or so appeared. The infant, said Pogomas, would guide me to the house of Monsieur Tombarel.

He led me through the tortuous main street of an amazing mediæval town, smelling cold and sour. Once the rows of houses on each side with their narrow stone staircases yawning on the pavement were broken by an open space. On three sides of it ran fifteenth-century arcading, and a low building with an eighteenth-century façade, pediment and all—the Mairie—nearly filled up the fourth. In the middle was an agreeably carved well-head surmounted by wrought iron. The main occupation of the inhabitants here and in the streets seemed to be to sit about and think.

Fifty yards farther on brought us to waste land by the mountain-side. My boy conductor bade me turn to the right, for a quarter of a kilometre off was the vineyard of Monsieur le Maire. But, curious as to the view, I walked straight on and found myself standing on a tongue of rock projecting far out into the wild semi-circular valley and commanding an unfathomable abyss. All around for miles were the rolling slopes either thick with pines or terraced out bleakly for vine and olive, with here and there a red roof showing, and, in the far distance, the crumbling yellow of another little craggy town. But, on the sheer sides of this monstrous wedge whereon I stood, no vegetation could grow. Compared with it the Tarpeian Rock was a gentle hillock. I seemed to stand poised in the centre of the world. The small boy drew a half-consumed cigarette from his breeches pocket and, lighting it, smoked in patient leisure during my foolish contemplation.

In an untidy rustic garden in front of a long, two-storied, pink-washed dwelling, I met one of the surprises of my life. Instead of a kindly peasant proprietor, I saw a most courteous gentleman. It was obvious that he had attired himself in ceremonious raiment, in order to greet with dignity the friend of General Duhamel. But, no matter how he might have been dressed, the man of the world betrayed himself by his smile and by the manner of his outstretched hand.

He wore a hat, a Provençal hat, a soft, black felt hat with a prodigiously high crown and a prodigious brim. Beneath it a mean little clean-shaven face would have been lost. To set it off a full beard was essential. And the full beard did Monsieur Tombarel wear—a white moustache with the ends curling upwards in a suggestion of truculence, and a white, stiff beard trimmed to a point. Below the back of the brim swept a majestic white mane. His black jacket was buttoned at the throat. Such was the poet Mistral of my imaginings. Necessity compelled a wide black silk cravat tied in a floppy bow.

After preliminary courtesies he conducted me to a large shed behind the house, in whose vast coolness were ranged many formidable hogsheads of wine. A smiling, coarse-aproned man with rolled-up sleeves brought a tray with a myriad little tumblers. The hogsheads were tapped. For the next half-hour the glasses were filled with wines red and rosy and golden. The afternoon sun crept in and set them all aflame.

“Monsieur Fontenay,” said my host—for what else could I call him?—when I had made my choice, “I am rejoiced to see you can discriminate between the lavish bounty of the gods and their more subtle gifts.”

He whispered a word to the cellarer, bowed me out, and led me to the ragged garden where were set a table and chairs beneath a sprawling cedar.

“I will now ask you to do me the pleasure of drinking with me a glass of wine, of which, alas, I have only a few bottles left.”

Did I not say that Bacchus at his simplest and most delightful brought us together?

Then of course, painter-wise, I fell in love with the picturesque old gentleman, and begged him to sit to me for his portrait. I explained, so that he should not think himself at the mercy of an amateur:

“I am a member of the Royal Academy which, in England, you know, more or less corresponds with the Institut—the Académie des Beaux-Arts.”

He smiled. “Of course. Your President, for the first time in your history, is a distinguished architect.”

I gasped. How many well-fed Britons in any sumptuous dining-saloon could tell you off-hand the name of the President of the Royal Academy? And here, in this neglected corner of the world, was a fantastically attired, Mistral-looking old vine-grower who knew all about it.

“It is very simple,” he said, with a smile. “I am interested in all those things. In my youth I went from here, where I was born, to Paris to study art. I tried painting, sculpture, architecture. I was good for nothing. I drifted into land-surveying which I detested. At last, after many years, I found that God had decreed it my vocation to come back here and plant my cabbages or my vines. You behold another Cincinnatus. But the unconquered country—the land of Art—is always the country of my dreams.... For my portrait, if my old Provençal head—ma tête de vieux Provençal—can interest you, I am at your entire disposition.”

If what I set out to tell you had not essentially to do with Pogomas, the landlord of the café, I could talk about Monsieur Tombarel, the baffled artist, all day long. But all the foregoing is merely to explain, in a reasonable manner, how I gained admission to the innermost secrets of the God-and-man-forgotten little town of Creille.

I painted Monsieur Tombarel’s portrait, and it was my privilege to win his friendship.

Now we come to the point of the story.

Creille, like every other town, wished to erect a war monument. It took a long time after the war was over for the necessary money to dribble in. The Mayor put his foot down on rubbish. Better nothing than a cheap monstrosity which would make the town ridiculous in the eyes of the world. And the inhabitants of Creille, realizing that the eyes of the world were upon them, submitted meekly to the Mayor.

At last a patriotic sculptor of the Midi, whose aunt had come from Creille—so integral and potent is the Family in French psychology—undertook the work for a modest fee, and presented a design to the Conseil Municipal. My friend Tombarel was good enough to show me the maquette or model in clay, and ask my confidential advice. I walked round it as it stood on the long walnut table of the council room of the Mairie, and bestowed on it my enthusiastic admiration. It was new, strong, exciting. On the indication of a rock above the plinth stood, at the end of a leap, a Chasseur Alpin with his trumpet to his lips, sounding the charge, while at the foot of the rock sagged the dead body of a comrade, the trumpet drooping from his hand. But there was something diabolical in the nervous strength of the living man, the very dare-devil spirit of the diables bleus, the proud name of the Alpine regiments to which all the dead of Creille had belonged.

“It is magnificent,” said I. “And where are you going to put it?”

“We are divided,” said the Mayor, with a sigh. “There are politics even here. The Radicals choose the new Place Georges Clemenceau, and the Republicans, with whom I am in sympathy, the venerable old Place de la Mairie, outside these windows.”

“Hm!” said I. In either spot the vivid young god of battle would be out of place. Then I had an inspiration.

“Mon cher ami,” I cried, with a thrill, “there is only one site in Creille for the trumpeter. On the very end of the Pointe de l’Abîme. Imagine it!”

He sent his great hat scudding along the polished table.

“Mon Dieu! To say that no one ever thought of it!”

He wrung my hand, he hugged my shoulder. The artist in him imagined it, and tears stood in his eyes. They would have the trumpeter midway between heaven and earth, ready, when France was in danger, to awaken the echoes of the mountains and summon again to arms the descendants of those that had died. Perhaps he was a bit flamboyant, my friend Tombarel, and went somewhat beyond the original psychology of my idea. But that was all to the good, for, a week or so later, he wrote me to the effect that the Conseil Municipal had sunk their political differences and unanimously voted for the Pointe de l’Abîme. Pogomas, an anti-clerical ironist, but otherwise the salt of the earth, had even gone so far as to declare that Creille would be the only place in the world where there would be a trumpeter always prepared to acknowledge the Last Trump.

Some months afterwards I received an invitation to be present at the unveiling of the memorial. In the interim, though I had not visited Creille, I had seen something of Monsieur Tombarel, who now and then drove in to Cannes in a recently acquired little 5-h.p. yellow car, in which he gave the impression of a majestic Noah navigating a child’s model of the Ark. In cold weather he always wore an ample black cloak, fastened at the neck by great metal cockle-shell clasps. After his third appearance on the Croisette, they gave him the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour. They couldn’t help it. Whether he really came to Cannes on business errands as he declared, or for the purpose of entering his old unconquered kingdom—my studio—and breathing again its captivating atmosphere of turpentine and paint and artistic effort, and talking with some one who knew the difference between a groin and a volute, I am not prepared to say. At any rate, I enjoyed the visits vastly, regarding the old man’s friendship as a peculiar privilege. Incidentally I was kept posted as to the progress of the memorial.

It was a day in early June, a dry day of intense blue and gold, the air clear almost to pain, so that mountains and valleys held no mystery. On turning the bend of the gorge some miles away, I caught sight of the white figure of the draped statue commanding the mighty amphitheatre. Its startling impressiveness exceeded my imagination, and caught my breath.

I left the car at the entrance to the Place Georges Clemenceau, as I had done on the occasion of my first visit. But, for the first time, I beheld the square as a centre of excited life. A policeman, astounding revelation of the potentiality of Creille, waved me to a glittering park of cars. Flags, flying and draped, flaunted all over the place. Tables set before the Hôtel du Commerce, and on the terrace of the Café Pogomas, were thronged with thirsty holiday-makers. Small blue masses, sections of different regiments of Chasseurs Alpins, each with draped colours, and another blue mass, a Chasseur band with glittering trumpets, formed a close and clear background. The Creille Municipal Band, perspiring but determined, sweltered, with their weird instruments, on the sunny side of the square. In the middle were grouped an official yet motley throng, the Municipal Councillors and the Mayors of neighbouring villages, the latter gleaming iridescent in the tricolour sash girt around their portly waists. Some were in the sacred black which their grandfathers before them had worn at funerals; others, perhaps the Radicals deplored by Tombarel, in the broad straw-hatted ease of their Sunday suits. In front stood some elegant gentlemen, one of whom, as I learned later, was the Sous-Préfet, and another a smiling Bishop (recognizable by the ring on his plump finger) in a cassock adorned with a string of decorations; another, a General dazzling all over with medals and crosses and gold lace.

The last, evidently my immediate predecessor, was being greeted ceremoniously by Tombarel, tricolour-sashed, patriarchally magnificent, sweeping his wonderful hat, and bowing as only those who preserve the tradition of courtly days know how to bow.

I approached, in my old Major’s khaki, with its string of perfectly dud ribbons, which, though uncomfortably tight, I thought, with a vague idea of international politeness, I might justifiably wear. Tombarel received me as if I had been a Field-Marshal, and presented me to the notables. Everyone was exceedingly pleasant. I shook hands all round with the Municipal Council, all friends of mine, for, during my painting of the Mayor, was I not free of Creille? Besides, was I not responsible for this selection which any imbecile could have made, of the site for their Trumpeter? Marius Pogomas, the adjoint or Deputy-Mayor, nearly broke my hand in fervent welcome. Had he not run somewhat to fat in his late fifties, he could any day have taken his place as the strong man at a fair. I was struck by the fact, however, that unlike the others, he did not smile as he greeted me. The curious line across his forehead seemed to have grown deeper, and his dark eyes were hard and intense. He wore some kind of grey alpaca and his collarless shirt was open at the neck.

I was introduced to the stranger Mayors and the quintessence of garlic.

The procession was formed. First the trumpeters of the Chasseurs Alpins, then the detachments, then the Municipal Band, then Monsieur le Maire and the General and other notables, and the rest of the population behind. At a short word of command, up went the trumpets, gyrating dizzyingly in the air, to be caught with swaggering perfection, and within a second’s infinitesimal fraction, to be applied to lips and sound the march.

We progressed through the warm, cobble-paved streets, all gaily flagged, through the mouldering old Place de la Mairie, to the open ground before the mighty wedge of cliff. Then we halted, and the non-military of us broke our ranks. The Municipal Band had their few minutes of glorious life wheezing out the “Madelon.” Perspiring Municipal Councillors, with tricolour favours, showed us to our places on the platform at the base of the tongue on the tip of which, jutting out into immensity, stood the draped statue. I noticed that the two sides of the triangular spit were protected by a business-like iron rail.

Soon the population crowded round, leaving but a little space between the platform and the statue guarded by a sergeant of the Chasseurs Alpins. I noticed that nearly all the women were in black. The June afternoon sun blazed pitilessly. On the opposite side of the immense gorge, Heaven knows how far away in the clear, dry light, I saw a red-shirted man toiling on a little terraced yellow patch of vines.

There were the usual orations from Sous-Préfet, Bishop, General, Mayor.... Many of the black-robed women wept bitterly.

Then came the moment for the adjoint, Marius Pogomas, to read the death-roll of the heroes whose names were inscribed in letters of gold on the plinth of the monument.

He began, in a silence as hurtful to the senses as the unmitigated clarity of the light. The commonplace stout official became an impersonal Angel of Doom. He began:

“Abadie—Joseph Marie: mort sur le champ d’honneur, 1917.”

“Angelotti—Ferdinand: mort de ses blessures, 1916. ...”

“Berdelon—Étienne: mort glorieusement à Riamont, 1917. ...”

And so on, down the heart-rending catalogue. And the announcement of every name was followed by some queer sob of a woman and the dash of hands across a man’s eyes. For, you see, there were some hundred and fifty of the dead from this remote tiny town, boys in the flower of their youth, and men in the vigour of their manhood, and all were inter-allied one with the other. The emotional strain made aliens like the General, the Bishop, the Sous-Préfet and myself, grip our knees and set our mouths and teeth tight....

Pogomas—you see him with his cropped bullet head, his creased brow, his clean-shaven fat face, his collarless shirt—went on:

“Pizzo—Jean Mario: mort sur le champ d’honneur, 1916.”

Unaware of what it meant, I was conscious of a tensity of the atmosphere. It seemed as though the assembled township leaned forward to hear the next name. I saw Pogomas pass his hand across his throat. He paused dreadfully.

“Poratti—Gabriel. ...”

There was a gasp from the multitude to which he paid no heed. The Municipal Councillor seated next to me, Monsieur Guiol, proprietor of the shop of Creille—“Aux Arcades de Creille”—threw up his hands and brought them down heavily on his thighs.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“He has omitted the name of his son. I don’t understand.”

I suggested, in a whisper, for the tale of dead was still being told, that the omission was natural. The father feared a breakdown.

“Oui—mais.... After all, the poor boy died gloriously. A hero of Riamont. He redeemed everything.”

The catalogue ended. Pogomas sat down heavy-browed, in his place, a few chairs beyond me, and I saw that with a motion of his hands he forbade his neighbours to question him.

The rest of the ceremonial gave me the impression of anti-climax. There was a fanfare of trumpets. The colours of the four or five regiments of Chasseurs were spread slantwise across the open space. The General pulled the rope, and unveiled the vivid white trumpeter in his eternal appeal to the sons of the mountains. The Municipal Band played the “Marseillaise.”

All was over.

Tombarel had asked me to remain after the Captains and the Kings had departed, and dine with him, if I could conform to the old French fashion of a half-past six dinner, and I had, of course, accepted. The meal, served under the cedar in the ragged garden, was like my host’s courtesy, simple and exquisite. Crayfish from the mountain streams, salad from his own patch, baby lamb from God knows where, and a couple of old, fantastic wines. At the beginning of dinner I had questioned him idly as to the omission by Pogomas of his son’s name, and he had replied with polite evasiveness. But later, over coffee and an ancient marc de Bourgogne, the brandy of Burgundy, which had the perfume of all Arcady, he referred to the incident and, under gentle pressure, relaxed.

“C’est toute une histoire”—quite a story—said he, “and if you like I will tell it you. But, you will understand, mon cher, it is between four ears. If it were told in Creille there would be catastrophe.... Listen.” He took one of my Turkish cigarettes, of which he was childishly fond, with a host’s apologies. “I am ashamed to have nothing of the kind to offer you—I abuse your kindness. Eh bien, it is like this.”

I had to go back, it appeared, some years before the war, and see Marius Pogomas and his wife—a woman of beauty and character, of full-sized personality in every way. Both were of the most honourable families of Creille. He had inherited the café from his father, to whose father it had belonged. She was a Garbarino, a family now extinct. “Curiously extinct,” said Tombarel, after a pause. There was also a son, Dominique, and a cousin of Madame Pogomas, César Garbarino, Dominique’s contemporary, who lived with his widowed mother.

“They had a little farm—tenez, là-bas,” said Tombarel, waving a hand. “After her death, Guiol bought it.”

Now, although brought up in all the Christian virtues and other traditions of Creille, Dominique and César seemed bent, from their earliest years, on evil courses. Dominique was heavily built, like his father, and slouched oaf-wise; César Garbarino seems to have been small and dark and rat-faced and shifty. Not a nice couple. The schoolmaster confessed that he could teach them nothing; the curé could not but regard them as lost lambs; and the town generally held them in wholesome detestation. When César was about sixteen, Madame Garbarino died. The farm very heavily mortgaged—she had been but a drabbled, incapable woman: what could one expect from an étrangère who came from the plains near Cannes?—César’s heritage amounted to little or nothing. The farm bought by Guiol, and César became an inmate of the Pogomas household.

Thinking over the story as told me by Tombarel in the exquisitely chosen French of a cultivated man, whose daily language is patois, I see that Dominique Pogomas was by far the weaker of the two ne’er-do-weels. Also, I have an idea that Pogomas did not go the right way to work with his son. He fortified an indulgent nature with Solomonic ideas. Very likely, with unsparing rod, he thrashed out all the lingering good in Dominique. Anyhow, the boy was a trial to his parents. His friends were the disreputables of the place. Brought into the café to learn the business, he played the Idle Apprentice according to all classical canons. He was slack, he broke glasses, he forgot the reckonings of his riff-raff friends, he committed the unpardonable crime of the publican, and swigged from the bottles of stock. Then eventually honest labourers in other people’s vines and olives, wood-cutters, road-workers—“des pauvres gens, enfin,” came to Pogomas, and said that, if they saw Dominique hanging around their daughters, they would shoot him.

Of César, apprenticed to Artru, wheelwright, bicycle repairer and garagiste, there was much the same tale.

At last arose great scandal. Burglars had entered Monsieur Guiol’s shop in the Place de la Mairie—“Aux Arcades de Creille”—and had robbed the till. Nothing was proved, but the two young rascals were more than suspected. Marise Zublena, the girl, perhaps, of least account in Creille, came out a few days later with a flashing brooch. When challenged she stated that a fine gentleman from Nice in a grand automobile had given it to her. As fine gentlemen in grand automobiles are town-arresting phenomena in Creille, and as none such had been observed of late, her story was received with a measure of incredulity.

“What my good friend Pogomas suffered at that time,” said Tombarel, “I cannot tell you. He would come to me, as he has always done since, with all his troubles—and that is why what I’m telling you is not speculation on my part, but facts, sometimes burning hot, as you will see, from his own lips. And he is a man—although I deplore his politics—but if everybody had the same ideas it would be a world of rabbits and not of human beings—he is, enfin, a man of the highest integrity, of kindness, charity, delicacy of feeling—his wife adored him—and to see him suffer, as he has suffered—ah, my dear friend, it has been heart-rending.”

Then, all sorts of things seem to have happened in a heap. César Garbarino staggered home one night with a knife wound in his neck. He gave a muddled account of the matter. But it was observed that the girl, Zublena, hung around the café and discoursed with Dominique when his parents were not looking. After this, César, with the craving for wider horizons, fled the town. Where he went to, no one knows. The war-net eventually caught him, an undesirable young man, in Belgium. But this is anticipating.

Dominique, in normal course, was called up for his military service. For a few months Marius Pogomas and his wife felt relief from daily scandal and agonizing responsibility. The poor lady must have died of reaction. The doctor, who lived in a more important hill-town, some kilometres off, gave all sorts of scientific reasons for her death.

“But what does it matter?” said Tombarel, with a sweep of the hand. “She was dead. Our good, broken-hearted Pogomas was left alone. He sent naturally for Dominique. Impossible for him to come. Refusal from the military authorities; Dominique was in prison at St. Raphael. You see, mon ami, you who know so well the things that we, nous autres Français, hold sacred, what a shame and disgrace it was for Pogomas to walk alone, without his son, behind his wife’s coffin. ‘Why?’ asked everybody, and everybody guessed. And when Guiol, a good friend, came up with inquiries, Marius said: ‘Don’t mention that name again. He is no longer my son.’ ”

After that, Marius Pogomas, the great St. Bernard dog of a man, who was born to sweetness and happiness and across whose brow misery had already dug a deep furrow, made a great pilgrimage from Creille to St. Raphael, and learned from the Commandant of the regiment his son’s disgraceful record.

Then the war broke out. All was upheaval. Dominique, like most sweepings of the military prisons, was sent off with his regiment. The net caught César Garbarino, of Creille, in Belgium, and the unerring schedule of military France placed him once again by the side of Dominique Pogomas. Now, the war changed many values. The sacredness of the country’s defence was regarded as a purge of every defender’s offences. Pogomas signified to Dominique that his paternal heart was reopened. But Dominique’s responses were unsatisfactory. To him the war was less a sacred duty than a nightmare of discomfort and injustice. He whined for money to save him from cold and starvation. When the time came for leave, unjust military authorities stopped it. Again, Pogomas took the journey to the depot. His sinking heart was not uplifted by the news that his son was a mauvais soldat; and a bad soldier to the French minds is synonymous with the scum of the earth. Of César Garbarino, Pogomas heard nothing and cared less. He grew morose, untidy, sat brooding in a corner of the café while an elderly woman ministered to the wants of the few customers, mostly decrepit, who were left in Creille.

At last, after a couple of years, came news, private and public, of glorious tragedy. News of the heroic stand of a battalion of Chasseurs Alpins against overwhelming numbers in which all had perished save the wounded, who were taken prisoners. And among the dead were a score of the sons of Creille, including Dominique Pogomas. It was a tremendous episode, classic in its magnificent heroism. The names of those who perished therein could only be received with bareheaded reverence. Such Death, even more than War itself, blotted out all the sins of the warriors.

“Mon vieux camarade,” said Tombarel, when the news came, “now your soul can have repose. Finis coronat opus. The end is the crown of the work, and there must have been something divine in the work to merit an end like that.”

And in such terms, though doubtless less elaborate, did the simple elders of Creille condole with Marius Pogomas. Whereupon Pogomas took heart of grace, and ceased to brood and walked about with his head up and looked everyone proudly in the face, whereas heretofore he had been a bowed-headed and furtive man, and, as it were, signed with some enthusiasm a new lease of life.

“You, who have been through it, my dear Fontenay,” said Tombarel, sweeping his beautifully pointed white beard, “know what it means. The Heroes of Riamont. The Heroes of Thermopylæ. Your Charge of the Light Brigade. All that is legendary. And Dominique Pogomas was registered as one of the Heroes of Riamont. What more was to be said? It was the apotheosis of Dominique.”

The years went by. The war was over. The curious human adjustment of things was effected in the tiny town of Creille as in all the rest of the quivering world. As in Paris, London, Berlin, New York, Brussels, Rome—all the palpitating centres of the gigantic cataclysm—so in Creille, the devouring monster of war was laid at rest, and men concerned themselves with the petty hopes and anxieties of everyday existence.

Yet memories and loyalties and pride lingered in men’s minds. Every hamlet in France must have its monument to the dead. And so must Creille. It was at the beginning of this corporate impulse in the little town, if you will remember, that I first made acquaintance with Monsieur le Maire, my venerable friend, Tombarel.

“We come now to close quarters,” said he, a hospitable hand refilling my glass with the old perfumed marc de Bourgogne. “What I’m going to tell you is really extraordinary.”

Twilight had crept upon us. In the Midi, even in June, the days are short. A full moon, hidden behind the shoulder of a mountain, heralded by its glow an immediate bursting into the serene firmament. The gnarled cedar branches cast vague shadows over the little white table, and the old world poet’s face of Alcide Tombarel.

“If a man smitten by adversity, widowed of the wife whom he worshipped, bereaved of his only son, once a sore thorn in the flesh, could be called happy, that man was Marius Pogomas. From the inception of the idea of the monument he was the soul of the movement. Of course he wanted it to be placed in the Place Georges Clemenceau. All that is politics. Besides, it would have been in front of his café—a little advertisement. Human beings are human, mon pauvre ami, and the Frenchman, whether of the mountains or the plains, likes to see the little sous coming in, without having spent anything to attract them. It’s natural. I am saying nothing ill of Pogomas. On the contrary, as I tell you, he is a great soul. A little proof. When you suggested the Pointe de l’Abîme, he was the first to say: ‘We will carry the proposal unanimously.’ ”

I agreed with all the Mayor’s encomiums. From my first encounter I had always found Pogomas the most courteous of men, and whenever I passed the time of day with him in his café, over a tiny glass offered for manners’ sake, a shrewd companion with sweet and mellow philosophy of life.

“You forget,” said he once, “you people of the great world below, that we in the mountains have a bird’s-eye view of the things that happen—and perhaps we see them in better perspective.”

As a man of parts, I take off my hat to Marius Pogomas.

Well....

Lorries and workmen and sculptor at last burst into Creille. Wasps in a bee-hive could not have created greater commotion. The town clustered round the tongue of cliff during the scientific process of the statue’s erection. All crowded round to see the name, carved and gilded on the plinth, of husband or father or son or brother or betrothed. Marius Pogomas spent most of his time there, interested less in the white trumpeter speeding his call down the gorge than in the glittering name of his son, Dominique. For on the proud Roll of Honour, already drafted, to be kept for ever in the archives of Creille, there was the mention:

“Pogomas—Dominique Honoré: mort glorieusement à Riamont, 1917.”

You see, Riamont eclipsed all other heroic fields of honour.

“Ah, voilà. You see the moon,” said Tombarel, as it sailed out from behind the shoulder of the mountain into immensity. “Well, it was only a month ago, the last full moon like this, that the thing happened.” He lit one of my cigarettes. “Tiens, c’est exquis. Oriental tobacco always gives me ideas. Don’t you find it so?”

“It doesn’t give me the faintest idea of what happened under last month’s full moon,” I laughed.

“I was saying ... ? Ah, yes.” He made a humorous gesture. “Forgive an old hedonist. Under last month’s full moon Marius Pogomas stood by the statue, and put his fingers down the lists of gilded names until he came to that of his son Dominique. In fact it was much later than now. All Creille was in bed. He was alone with the monument. ‘Dominique Honoré Pogomas.’ That was all he could see. Twenty years of pain were transfigured into glorious consolation.”

He paused and went on with the story.

The full moonlight fell upon the Pointe and cast the shadow of the Trumpeter over the Gorge. Peace descended on the soul of Marius Pogomas. Presently, with a sigh, he turned and was met by a sneaking figure a yard or two away from him; a thin rat of a man, with hungry eyes. Pogomas challenged.

“What are you doing here?”

The man came forward.

“You don’t recognize me, mon oncle?”

Marius started back and swore.

“It is you? César?”

It was. It was César Garbarino, returning to Creille for the first time since he ran away, long before the war.

“You don’t seem glad to see me, mon oncle!”

“I have no reason to be glad,” said Marius. “Especially at this hour of the night. If you wanted to see me, why didn’t you come to the café? It’s idiotic to spring out of the ground comme ça, like a ghost.”

César explained that he had only just arrived, having journeyed from Nice on foot, save for an occasional lift on a lorry, and, having seen his uncle leave the closed café, had followed him. The more Marius scanned his nephew, the less he liked him. The vicious boy had developed into the town type most detested by the proud and honourable men of the mountains. His face, his attitude, his talk, his poor swagger of attire, were those of the Apache.

“And now you have me, what do you want?”

“First a bed. I am of the family, I suppose. You would not like me to be found sleeping on the bench outside the café.”

“You shall have the bed,” said Marius. “But it’s not only for a bed you have come after all these years.”

The young man laughed. He always knew his uncle to be a man of intelligence. No. He had come to restore his fallen fortunes with his uncle’s kind assistance. First there was the matter of the heritage, his mother’s farm.

“Heritage? Farm? But you are crazy! Maître Landois told me he had settled with you at the beginning of the war, as soon as they took you by the neck and dragged you out of Belgium.”

César snapped his fingers. He cared not a damn for lawyers. They were all thieves. He had been robbed, as a boy, when he knew nothing. Now he had come for his heritage.

Marius shrugged his vast shoulders. “You have come for the moon”—he flung up a hand—“take it!”

“That’s what I’m going to do, mon oncle.”

“Eh?” Marius started. “Repeat that.”

“I have come for the money that Guiol paid for the farm.”

Marius laughed. “How are you going to get it?”

César pointed to the plinth of the monument.

“Violà,” said he.

Marius, like most mountain-folk, was a man of slow and deliberate thought. The gesture put him on a wrong track.

“Tiens! That reminds me,” he said. “You were of the Battalion of Riamont. Why is your name not there? Explain that.”

“Explain? Why, naturally, ‘Je ne suis pas foutu comme les autres.’ I’m alive, I am.”

“Why?” asked Marius.

“I suppose there was a bon Dieu, all the same, who looked after his little César. I was wounded. I had a Boche bullet through here. I could show you”—he pointed to his shoulder—“and I was taken prisoner with twenty others. I was prisoner till the end of the war. They talk about the heroes of Riamont. But, nom de Dieu! I was one of them, and now I who live would be starving, unless I made my own little war, à moi, on Society, while Society puts up monuments to these dead rabbits.”

He spat towards the plinth.

Marius took him by the collar and shook him.

“Silence!” he thundered, and then called him by every opprobrious name he could think of. At last he cast him off. “Go,” said he. “Sleep where you will. But not in my house.”

“If you say so,” replied César, wriggling into comfort of attire. “Only to-morrow all Creille shall know how Dominique Honoré Pogomas—mort glorieusement pour la patrie—isn’t that the way they call it?—really met his death.” He edged away from Marius. “And everyone will believe me, because they know the character of our good Dominique. When one stabs a comrade from the back—do you remember when I came home that night with the knife-wound? Well, it was Dominique—one is capable of anything. I, I said nothing. You grant me that. I didn’t want to make ill blood.”

Marius stood over him, shaking with the terror of a ghastly surmise, on that moon-beat platform hanging in the centre of space.

“Tell me. I don’t understand.”

“I speak the truth, for I saw it with my own eyes.”

And he told the dismal and circumstantial story. For two days there had been attack and counter-attack, before the final German avalanche finished all. And during a French attack, when the line of poor devils was two hundred yards ahead, Monsieur Dominique Honoré Pogomas, the hero, was found skulking behind a rock rifling the pockets of a dead Boche.

The officer who found him shot him dead on the spot.

There was a silence as cold and merciless as the moon.

Pogomas at last broke it.

“And you? Why weren’t you in the attack two hundred yards ahead?”

“I was orderly of the officer who was bringing up some troops of the second line.”

Pogomas staggered back like a drunken man, and sat on the step of the plinth, burying his head in his hands.

The story was true. All that he had known of Dominique convinced him that it was true. He felt the awful agony of death in life. The torture of all the shame and all the dishonours that make life a bestial parody of existence.

César Garbarino lit a cigarette. Marius, at last looking up, became conscious of the spirals of grey smoke mounting into the still air. He rose ponderously.

“You say that you will spread this infamy over Creille unless I pay you money. That is blackmail.”

“As you like,” said the Apache imperturbably.

“My God, it shall be as I like,” cried Marius, and with a sudden irresistible gesture, he picked the man up, and threw him into the abyss.

“One single action. Like that,” said Tombarel, with illustrative pantomime. “Phuitt! He is a colossus. Just as easy as for us to hurl away this wine bottle.”

“Good God!” said I, and I wiped the perspiration from my forehead. “But——” I added, when I had recovered my wits, “how do you know all this that you have been telling me so vividly?”—for what I have written down is but a poor adumbration of a masterpiece of nervous and imaginative prose—“how do you know it?”

“As I said before ... from his own lips. He came straight here, found me, as we are sitting now, smoking a last pipe before going to bed, and gave himself up to justice.”

“What did you do?”

“Mon Dieu! Had not enough justice been done already? I told him to go home without calling on the Commissary of Police, who would be peacefully sleeping and would be annoyed at being disturbed at that time of night. He took my advice. Outside politics, Marius is as gentle as a lamb.”

It took me a moment or two to attune the Anglo-Saxon in me to the Latin psychology. Tombarel really believed that the man who had thrown a fellow-creature into eternity was as gentle as a lamb! And in his way he was right.

“They found the body a day or two afterwards. Of course it was an accident. As the dead man’s chief possessions were a vicious little Browning and a nasty knife, Creille regarded it as a lucky accident.... It’s droll that the only good César Garbarino did should have been posthumous. To prevent less fortunate accidents in the future, the Conseil Municipal put up the iron railing which otherwise would not have occurred to anybody.”

A light breeze had arisen, and played on the thin patch that crowned Tombarel’s mane of white hair. He reached for the vast hat on the ground beside him.

“Eh bien,” said he, “it has been a long story which I hope you have not found wearisome; but I think it explains why Marius Pogomas passed over his son’s name.” He sighed deeply. “My poor Marius!”