Part 41 (1/2)

”Of course not,” said I.

She looked over at the twin spires of the cathedral beneath which the town slumbered in the blue mist of the late afternoon.

”Thanks, Tony,” she said presently. ”I didn't think of it. I should naturally have gone to the best seats, which would have been fatal. But I've been in many circuses. There's always the top row at the back, next the canvas....”

”My dear good child,” I cried, ”you couldn't go up there among the lowest rabble of Clermont-Ferrand!”

She glanced at me in pity and sighed indulgently.

”You talk as if you had been born a hundred years ago, and had never heard of--still less gone through--the late war. What the----” she paused, then thrust her face into mine, so that when she spoke I felt her breath on my cheek, ”What the _h.e.l.l_ do you think I care about the rabble of Clermont-Ferrand?”

That she would walk undismayed into a den of hyenas or Bolsheviks or Temperance Reformers or any other benighted savages I was perfectly aware.

That she would be perfectly able to fend for herself I have no doubt.

But still, among the uneducated dregs of the sugar-less, match-less, tobacco-less populace of a French provincial town who attributed most of their misfortunes to the grasping astuteness of England, we were not peculiarly beloved.

This I explained to her, while she continued to smile pityingly. It was all the more incentive to adventure. If I had a.s.sured her that she would be torn limb from limb, like an inconvincible aristocrat flaunting abroad during the early days of the French Revolution, she would have grown enthusiastic. Finally, in desperation because, in my own way, I was fond of Auriol, I put down a masculine and protecting foot.

”You're not going there without me, anyhow,” said I.

”I've been waiting for that polite offer for the last half hour,” she replied.

What I said, I said to myself--to the midmost self of my inmost being. I am not going to tell you what it was. This isn't the secret history of my life.

A cloud came up over the shoulder of the hills. We descended to the miniature valley of Royat.

”It's going to rain,” I said.

”Let it,” said Auriol unconcerned.

Then began as dreary an evening as I ever have spent.

We dined, long before anybody else, in a tempest of rain which sent down the thermometer Heaven knows how many degrees. Half-way through dinner we were washed from the terrace into the empty dining-room. There was thunder and lightning _ad libitum._

”A night like this--it's absurd,” said I.

”The absurder the better,” she replied. ”You stay at home, Tony dear.

You're a valetudinarian. I'll look after myself.”

But this could not be done. I have my obstinacies as mulish as other people's.

”If you go, I go.”

”As you have, according to your pampered habit, bought a car from now till midnight, I don't see how we can fail to keep dry and warm.”

I had no argument left. Of course, I hate to swallow an early and rapid dinner. One did such things in the war, gladly dislocating an elderly digestion in the service of one's country. In peace time one demands a compensating leisure. But this would be comprehensible only to a well-trained married woman. My misery would have been outside Auriol's ken. I meekly said nothing. The world of young women knows nothing of its greatest martyrs.

When it starts thundering and lightening in Royat, it goes on for hours. The surrounding mountains play an interminable game of which the thunderbolt is the football. They make an infernal noise about it, and the denser the deluge the more they exult.

Amid the futile flashes and silly thunderings--no man who has been under an intensive bombardment can have any respect left for the pitiful foolery of a thunderstorm--and a drenching downpour of rain (which is solid business on the part of Nature) we scuttled from the hired car to the pay-desk of the circus. We were disguised in caps and burberrys, and Lady Auriol had procured a black veil from some shop in Royat. We paid our fifty centimes and entered the vast emptiness of the tent. We were far too early, finding only half a dozen predecessors. We climbed to the remotest Alpine height of benches. The wet, cold canvas radiated rheumatism into our backs. A steady drip from the super-saturated tent above us descended on our heads and down our necks. Auriol b.u.t.toned the collar of her burberry and smiled through her veil.