CHAPTER XIV

A HUMAN DOCUMENT

The inside of the fly being stuffy and the view impeded from that position, I decided to make the return journey from the Pont du Gard on the box. Tartarin was too philosophic and too polite to show any surprise at this new form of Britannic madness, so we set off, and the good cocher proved a most entertaining companion.

He had read a great deal in one way and another, and had developed quite a philosophy of his own, Epicurean in the true, not the popular sense of the word, strange as it may appear. Hard experience had wrung it out of him as wine from the wine-press. He was born at Tarascon, and had one sister who had also lived in the city of St. Martha since her birth. The two did not live together; no, she was a little—enfin, she had her ways of living and he had his. He liked his liberty, and she—well, she did not like it: his liberty, bien entendu. She could not support that he should have a key of the house; she would always sit up for him if he was out in the evenings, and it was gÊnant. Not that Tartarin cared to stay out late, he was quiet in his tastes. "Je ne fais pas la noce moi," he explained; "c'est vide tout Ça; nÉomoins il faut que je suis maÎtre de moi-mÊme; quoique je ne le suis pas," he added with a philosophic shrug and a good-natured "Ain!" to his horse. He lodged "chez Bottin" in the main street with a number of his colleagues. They were hired to drive the carriages, and if they did not get many fares the patron reproached them for laziness. Most of the drivers were eager to make a good haul, for if they were very unsuccessful the employer might discharge them. Tartarin's attitude was characteristic. He made his effort; set forth the attractions of Tarascon and the Castle of Beaucaire, and calmly awaited the result. If the visitors took the carriage he was pleased; if one after another passed him, "Eh! bien, tant pis"; he hoped for better luck next time. And resolutely he abstained from adding to the little turn of ill-fortune the pain of regret.

After all, he had "le bon soleil." When it was cold—and it can be cold in the Midi—he needed all his philosophy: to wait and wait for visitors who never came, to pass hours and days in the bitter wind, and to have time to think about life and what it must always be for him! Yes, there were moments, "Mais que voulez-vous? C'est la vie." One thing he was sure of: la vie was always more or less like that mÊme pour les riches (Oh! deep-visioned Tartarin!).

He had not always lived at Tarascon. When he was a boy he had been full of ambition. He would make his fortune and have a merry time of it. He had wandered far and wide in his own country, seeking fortune and experience. And he had found experience but not fortune. Among other adventures, he joined a band of athletes and used to perform in the streets of Paris, in tights, with two other youths and a girl in spangles. She was the daughter of the employer, his first love, "c'est À dire le premier amour sÉrieux. Ah! comme elle Était belle!" But he had no luck; she loved another, "un animal de joueur sur le mandolin." And she would not look at Tartarin when the gay rival was present.

The rejected one wandered farther afield for fresh adventures; engaged himself with a travelling theatrical company, first in the capacity of scene-shifter, but later he was offered a temporary post as walking-gentleman, and probably he would have gone far in the profession but for another amorous complication. The leading-lady had pleased his fancy and appeared to reciprocate his sentiments. But one day, in the side-scenes, he discovered her in a non-professional love episode with the permanent villain, and after a painful interview, during which he and the villain came to blows, Tartarin resolved to leave the perfidious one and the troupe, and throw up such chances as might there offer themselves. Dispirited and disillusioned, he returned to his native town, where he engaged himself to Bottin and earned his little crust of bread in peace, if not too gaily. He had given up all idea of marriage, not because he was indifferent to les femmes, "au contraire," but he did not care to ask a woman to share so poor a life. "Je suis mieux seul." As it was, he had not to reproach himself for bringing another into the struggle of life.

"Et quelque fois on va au marchÉ et on achette des enfants," he added fantastically, "et alors, que voulez-vous?" After that the deluge, he seemed to imply.

"Je gagne 40 francs," he said, "avec le logement."

"Par semaine?"

"Et mon Dieu non: si c'etait par semaine!" He raised his eyes to heaven as if he had a vision of beatitude. "Non, par mois."

That and a few tips given him by his clients was all he had to live upon.

But that did not trouble him, in itself. His fear was of losing his health and not being able to work. But he put away black thoughts, and turned his mind to the good that he possessed. After all, he had his health and his livelihood, so where was the profit of thinking of a possible time when he might lose both? Would that help him? He had suffered when he was young and full of ambition; mon Dieu, he had always desired something he did not possess, and if after great efforts he acquired what he wanted, always the desire ceased and there was some new thing that made him restless.

"A quoi bon se tourmenter toujours de cette faÇon?"

And so he came to see that all his happiness, if ever he was to enjoy any, was stored in his own consciousness, and that nothing from without would avail him, though it were riches and honours without end.

"NÉomoins," he added, with a naÏve little gesture, "nÉomoins, if chance were to make him the possessor of a little fortune, he would buy a little house—toute petite, with a garden; he would have one servant whom he would treat very well, and he would have a little trap and horse which he would drive himself. And then he would envy no man!"

After all then a desire still lingered.

"Ah Ça ne me fait pas de mal!" he said with a shrug, "Ç'a m'amuse." "I am not unhappy in knowing it can never come. VoilÀ la diffÉrence!"

Poor Tartarin! And yet in truth was he to be pitied or envied? He must have seemed somewhat strange to his comrades. They would get excited and troubled over all sorts of trivial things, and they would offend one another and flare up into quarrels. Not so Tartarin. He would quietly evade points of difference, laugh off some threatening dispute, make peace between hot-headed combatants. Such things seemed to him needless, foolish. "A quoi bon?" as he asked. "Ça ne vaut pas la peine, mon Dieu!"

As we were nearing our destination his confidences grew more rapid. After all a man who had thought and felt about things to this extent must have badly needed a means of expression at times.

One is so apt to imagine that the lives one touches thus casually are all more or less what one calls "normal." But when the veil is lifted by some accident, it is not often the purely normal that one finds below it. When Tartarin mentioned that he and his sister were born at Tarascon, I had vaguely pictured an ordinary well-conducted French family. But I found my mistake. The man spoke hesitatingly of his childhood. He had the Frenchman's conventional and inconsequent respect for his mother—inconsequent considering the unceremonious manner in which she has previously been treated, as a woman. In this case the conduct of the mother had been painfully out of order. The Frenchman reverences his mother surprisingly indeed, but on strict condition that she carries out her rÔle in absolute conformity with expected sentiments. La mÈre is la mÈre, neither more nor less, an esteemed functionary rather than a private individual. Is this to be doubted in the country under whose laws the mother is unhesitatingly sacrificed in the case of having to choose between her life and the child's?

So poor Tartarin's state of mind must have been most complex, for his mother had shown a spirit anything but official. She could not stand uninterrupted family life, it appears, and used to go off at intervals in a sort of exasperation, for a week or a month of solitude. Tartarin spoke of it with bated breath, not severely, but sadly, for was she not la mÈre? She appears to have shown singularly small appreciation of the creditable fact. What she had, at moments, permitted herself to remark about les enfants et la famille generally, her good son refrained from quoting, but I gathered that it was something truly appalling! Of course this led to quarrels; the neighbours were scandalised, and incited the husband to take strong measures, and that was the end.

"If you had but let me go now and then I would not have left you," she cried, as she fled from the house never to return. And thus Tartarin and his sister had been deprived in their early years of la tendresse d'une mÈre. He spoke of it with a sort of self-pity, evidently engendered by the comments of indignant neighbours and by the sentiments of a maiden-aunt who joyfully seized the happy opportunity to fill the place thus left vacant. The brother and sister had therefore enjoyed all the tendresse that they could have desired, and evidently it was as like the ordinary tendresse d'une mere as one egg is like another. For there was nothing in the way of alternate embracings and irrelevant punishments that had been lacking in the system of education of that admirable aunt. She had worshipped the children; so altogether it was difficult to see what the pair had missed. They had certainly gained the prestige of their misfortune, for all Tarascon had petted and pitied them.

"And where do I come in?" the aunt might have inquired, but she never did. On the contrary, she started the chorus and shed the signal-tear, so that little Tartarin and Antoinette evidently had a splendid time of it.

And was the truant mother still living? Yes, she had a little property, a little house at Arles where she passed her days. And now and then Tartarin and his sister went to see her. The mother was glad to welcome them, and, as far as I could gather, she was fond of Tartarin, not exactly as a son, but as a good fellow whose bonhomie and urbane philosophy appealed to her. It was a curious story, and a most unexpected one in this out of the way city of the south.

The drive had taken about a couple of hours, time well spent, apart from the charm of the country we had passed through, for a human life, in its emotions as well as in its events, had been unrolled before me.

And strangely pathetic it was; the life of this good-hearted, disillusioned, unembittered philosopher, who, with a sort of sad cheerfulness, waited in fair weather and foul under the plane-trees in the main street, trying to tempt the tourist to take the round of the sights—preferably the whole round, but if that piece of good-luck failed him, then "sans Beaucaire."

Yes, sometimes his heart was a little heavy; he was more or less dependent on his employer, he was solitary though he had many good comrades among the people of his native town. But he was spared anxiety in that his risks were his own and his alone; but he had no one to live for, no one to care for. A wife, as he had before declared, he would not have; la misÈre À deux was not the route to happiness; and in his case la famille had not proved comforting. Often when he went back to Bottin's after the day's work, he felt a sinking of the heart, for, after all, was it a life, this? But "enfin, que voulez-vous?" He was better off than many a poor devil, and so he said to himself: "Raphael" (for that was poor Tartarin's real name), "Raphael, mon vieux, tu es donc un imbÉcile."

And that usually restored him to a more satisfactory frame of mind; though there were times when even this rousing adjuration lost its efficacy. At these moments the gloom would last the night and pursue him when he went to his work next morning, and he would feel as if he could endure the empty monotony no longer.

Then suddenly—a ray of sunshine, the flight of a bird, and all the dark thoughts would melt away!

I almost started as Tartarin said these words. As a philosopher I already knew him, but here was an artist!

We parted with many expressions of good-will, I promising to send him a copy of Maeterlinck's "La Sagesse et la DestinÉe," for I thought he might gain comfort and enjoyment from a philosophy which had many points in common with his own. Perhaps the Belgian poet would help him a step or two further on his road, and teach him to know the value of the wisdom he had already won.

In acknowledgment, he sent me an illustrated post-card of the Pont du Gard, with a charming little inscription expressing his gratitude for my having thus remembered "le pauvre cocher."

And this good-hearted philosopher will hereafter always be to me the real Tartarin de Tarascon.