CHAPTER VII

"BLONDEL THE TROUBADOUR"

"Oh," said Murrel rather blankly. "Oh, yes. . . . Anything to oblige."

In her eagerness Olive Ashley had darted past him into the library, without waiting for the assistance of the librarian, who continued to stare into the depths of the distance with blind but shining eyes. She lugged down a lumbering volume from one of the lower shelves and laid it open at a blazoned page on which the letters seemed to have come to life and to be crawling about like gilded dragons. In one corner was the image of the many-headed monster of the Apocalypse; and even to the careless eye of her companion, its tint glowed across the ages with a red that had the purity of flame.

"Do you mean," he asked, "that I am to go hunting that particular animal through the streets of London?"

"I mean you are to go hunting that particular paint," she said, "and as you say you can get anything in the streets of London, you oughtn't to hunt far, I suppose. There was a man called Hendry, in the Haymarket, who used to sell it when I was a child; but I can't get that sort of fine fourteenth century red at any artist's colourmen's round here."

"Well, I've been painting the town red myself in a quiet way, for the last few hours," said Murrel modestly, "but I suppose it wasn't a fine fourteenth century red. It was only a twentieth century red, like Braintree's tie. I told him at the time that the tie might begin to ignite the town."

"Braintree!" said Olive rather sharply. "Was Mr. Braintree with you when youwhen you painted it red?"

"I can't say he was what you call an uproariously festive boon companion," said Murrel apologetically. "These red revolutionists seem to have had awfully little practice in looking on the wine when it is red. By the way, couldn't I go hunting for that, don't you think? Suppose I brought you back a dozen of port, a few dozens of burgundy, some of claret, flasks of Chianti, casks of curious Spanish wines, and so ondon't you think you could get the right colour? Mixing your drinks, like mixing your paints, might perhaps"

"But what was Mr. Braintree doing there?" asked Olive with some severity.

"He was being educated," replied Murrel virtuously. "He was taking a course; following out that course of instruction which your own educational enthusiasm marked out for him. You said he wanted to be introduced to a larger world and hear discussions about things he had never heard of. I'm sure that discussion we had at the Pig and Whistle was one that he'd never heard before in his life."

"You know perfectly well," she retorted a little crossly, "that I never wanted him to go to those horrid places. I meant him to have real discussions with intellectual people about important things."

"My dear girl," replied Murrel quietly, "don't you see yet what that means? Braintree can knock all your heads off at that sort of discussion. He's got ten times more idea of why he thinks what he does think than most of what you call cultured people. He's read quite as much and remembers much more of what he's read. And he has got some tests of whether it's true or not, which he can instantly apply. The tests may be quite wrong, but he can apply them and produce the result at once. Don't you ever feel how vague we all are?"

"Yes," she replied in a less tart accent, "he does know his own mind."

"It's true he doesn't know enough about some sorts of people's minds," went on Murrel, "but he knows our sort better than some; and did you really expect him to be prostrated before the mind of old Wister? No, no, my dear Olive, if you really want to see him prostrated, or anybody prostrated, you must come with me this evening to the Pig and Whistle"

"I don't want to see anybody prostrated," she replied, "and I think it was very wrong of you to take him to such low places."

"And what about me?" asked the gentleman plaintively, "What about my morals? Is my moral training of no importance? Is my immortal soul of no value? Why this levity and indifference to my spiritual prospects at the Pig and Whistle?"

"Oh," she replied with elaborate indifference "everybody knows you don't mind that sort of thing."

"I raise against the Red Tie the more truly democratic blazon of the Red Nose; and appeal from the Marseillaise to the Music Hall," he said, smiling. "Don't you think now that if I went hunting for the Red Nose through London, rejecting the pink, the purple, the merely russet, the too dusky crimson, and so on, I might find at last a nose of that delicate fourteenth century tint which"

"If you can find the paint," retorted Olive, "I don't care whose nose you paint with it. But I'd prefer Mr. Archer's."

It is necessary that the long-suffering reader should know something of the central incident in the play called "Blondel the Troubadour," as that alone could have rendered possible or credible the central incident in the story called, "The Return of Don Quixote." In this drama, Blondel leaves his lady-love in a somewhat unnecessary state of mystification and jealousy, supposing that he is touring the Continent serenading ladies of all nationalities and types of beauty; whereas in fact he is only serenading a large and muscular gentleman for purely political reasons. The large and muscular gentleman, otherwise Richard Coeur de Lion, was to be acted on this occasion by a modern gentleman answering to that description as far as externals went; a certain Major Trelawney, a distant cousin of Miss Ashley. He was one of those men, sometimes to be found in the fashionable world, who seem in some mysterious way to be able to act, when they are hardly able to read, and apparently quite unable to think. But though he was a good-natured fellow and excellent in theatricals, he was also an exceedingly casual fellow and had hitherto been very remiss in the matter of rehearsals. Anyhow, the political motives which were supposed to move Blondel to search everywhere for this large and muscular gentleman were of course of the loftiest kind. His motives throughout the play were of an almost irritating disinterestedness; a purity that amounted to perversity. Murrel could never conceal his amusement at hearing these suicidally unselfish sentiments breathed from the lips of Mr. Julian Archer. Blondel, in short, overflowed with loyalty to his king and love of his country and a desire to restore the former to the latter. He wished to bring the king back to restore order to his kingdom and defeat the intrigues of John, that universal and useful, not to say overworked, villain of many crusading tales.

The climax was not a bad piece of amateur drama. When Blondel the Troubadour has at last discovered the castle that contains his master, and has collected (somewhat improbably) a company of courtiers, court ladies, heralds and the like in the depths of the Austrian forest outside the doors of that dungeon, to receive the royal captive with loyal acclamations, King Richard comes out with a flourish of trumpets, takes the centre of the stage, and there before all his peripatetic court, with exceedingly royal gestures, abdicates his royal throne. He declares that he will be a king no longer, but only a knight errant. He had indeed been sufficiently errant in every sense, when his misfortune fell upon him; but it has not cured him of his own version of the view that it is human to err. He had been wandering in those Central European forests, falling into various adventures by the way, when he finally fell into the misadventure of the Austrian captivity. He now declared that these nameless meanderings, despite their conclusion, had been the happiest hours of his life. He delivers a withering denunciation of the wickedness of the other kings and princes of his time and the disgusting condition of political affairs generally. Miss Olive Ashley had quite a pretty talent for imitating the more turgid Elizabethan blank verse. He expresses a preference for the personal society of snakes to that of Phillip Augustus, the King of France; compares the wild boar of the forests favourably with statesmen managing public affairs at the moment; and makes a speech of a hearty and hospitable sort, addressed chiefly to the wolves and winter winds, begging them to make themselves comfortable at his expense, so long as he is not required to meet any of his relatives or recent political advisers. With a peroration ending with a rhymed couplet, in the Shakespearean manner, he renounces his crown, draws his sword, and is proceeding to Exit R., to the not unnatural annoyance of Blondel, who has sacrificed his private romance to his public duty, only to find his public duty doing a bolt off the stage in pursuit of a private romance. The opportune and exceedingly improbable arrival of Berengaria of Navarre, in the depths of the same forests, at length induces him to return to his allegiance to himself. And the reader must be indeed ill acquainted with the laws of romantic drama if he needs to be told that the appearance of the queen, and her reconciliation to the king, are the signal for an exceedingly hasty but equally satisfactory reconciliation between Blondel and his own young lady. Already an atmosphere fills the Austrian forest, accompanied by faint music and evening light, which corresponds to the grouping of figures near the foot-lights and the hasty diving for hats and umbrellas in the pit.

Such was the play of "Blondel the Troubadour," not altogether a bad specimen of the sentimental and old-fashioned romance, popular before the war, but now only remembered because of the romantic results which it afterwards produced in real life. While the rest were occupied in their respective ways with acting or scenery, two other figures in that human drama remained loyal to other enthusiasms, not without effect on their future. Olive Ashley continued to potter about impenitently with paints and pictured missals from the library. And Michael Herne continued to devour volume after volume about the history, philosophy, theology, ethics and economics of the four medieval centuries, in the hope of fitting himself to deliver the fifteen lines of blank verse allotted by Miss Ashley to the Second Troubadour.

It is only fair to say, however, that Archer was quite as industrious in his way as Herne in another. As they were the Two Troubadours they often found themselves studying side by side.

"It seems to me," said Julian Archer one day, flinging down the manuscript with which he had refreshed his memory, "that this fellow Blondel as a lover is a bit of a fraud. I like to put a bit more passion into it myself."

"Certainly there was something curiously abstract, and at first sight artificial, about all that Provençal etiquette," assented the Second Troubadour, otherwise Mr. Herne. "The Courts of Love seem to have been pedantic, almost pettifogging. Sometimes it did not seem to matter whether the lover had seen the lady at all; as with Rudel and the Princess of Tripoli. Sometimes it was a courtly bow to the wife of your liege lord, a worship open and tolerated. But I suppose there was often real passion as well."

"There seems damned little of it in Miss Ashley and her Troubadour," said the disappointed amateur. "All spiritual notions and nonsense. I don't believe he wanted to get married at all."

"You think he was affected by the Albigensian doctrines?" inquired the librarian, earnestly and almost eagerly. "It is true, of course, that the seat of the heresy was in the south and a great many of the troubadours seemed to have been in that or similar philosophical movements."

"His movements are philosophical all right," said Archer. "I like my movements to be a little less philosophical when I'm making love to a girl on the stage. It's almost as if she really meant him to be shilly-shallying instead of popping the question."

"The question of avoiding marriage seems to have been essential in the heresy," said Herne. "I notice that in the records of men returning to orthodoxy after the Crusade of Montford and Dominic, there is the repeated entry iit in matrimonium. It would certainly be interesting to play the part as that of some such semi-oriental pessimist and idealist; a man who feels the flesh to be dishonour to the spirit, even in its most lovable and lawful form. Nothing of that comes out very clearly in the lines Miss Ashley has given me to say; but perhaps your part makes the point a little clearer."

"I think he's a long time coming to the point," replied Archer. "Gives a romantic actor no scope at all."

"I'm afraid I don't know anything about any sort of acting," said the librarian, sadly. "It's lucky you've only given me a few lines in the play."

He paused a moment, and Julian Archer looked at him with an almost absent-minded pity, as he murmured that it would be all right on the night. For Archer, with all his highly practical savoir faire, was not the man to feel the most subtle changes in the social climate; and he still regarded the librarian more or less as a sort of odd footman or stable-boy brought in by sheer necessity, merely to say, "My lord, the carriage waits." Preoccupied always by his own practical energies, he took no notice of the man's maunderings about his own hobby of old books, and was only faintly conscious that the man was maundering still.

"But I can't help thinking," the librarian was continuing, in his low meditative voice, "that it might give rather an interesting scope for a romantic actor to act exactly that sort of high and yet hollow romance. There is a kind of dance that expresses contempt for the body. You can see it running like a pattern through any number of Asiatic traceries and arabesques. That dance was the dance of the Albigensian troubadours; and it was a dance of death. For that spirit can scorn the body in either of two ways; mutilating it like a fakir or pampering it like a sultan; but never doing it honour. Surely it will be rather interesting for you to interpret bitter hedonism, the high and wild cries, the horns and hootings of the old heathen revel, along with the underlying pessimism."

"I feel the underlying pessimism all right," answered Archer, "when Trelawney won't come to rehearsals and Olive Ashley will only fidget about with her potty little paints."

He lowered his voice a little hastily with the last words, for he realised for the first time that the lady in question was sitting at the other end of the library, with her back to him, bent over books and fidgeting away as described. She had not apparently heard him; in any case she did not turn round, and Julian Archer continued in the same tone of cheerful grumbling.

"I don't suppose you have much experience of what really grips an audience," he said. "Of course, nobody supposes it won't go off all right in one sense. Nobody's likely to give us the bird"

"Give us what bird?" asked Mr. Herne, with mild interest.

"Nobody's likely to howl at us and hiss us, or throw rotten eggs at us in Lord Seawood's drawing-room, of course," continued Archer, "but you can always tell whether an audience is gripped or not. At least, you can always tell when you've had as much experience as I have. Now unless she can put a little more pep into the dialogue, I'm not sure I can grip my audience."

Herne was trying to listen politely with one half of his mind, but for the other half the garden beyond was taking on, as it so often did, the vague quality of a pageant in a vision. Far away at the end of an avenue of shining grass, among delicate trees, twinkling in the sunlight, he saw the figure of the Princess of the play. Rosamund was clad in her magnificent blue robes with her almost fantastic blue head-dress, and as she came round the curve of the path she made an outward gesture at once of freedom and fatigue, thrusting out her arms or throwing out her hands as if stretching herself. The long pointed sleeves she wore gave it somewhat the appearance of a bird flapping its wings; a bird of paradise, as the actor had said.

A half-thought formed itself in the librarian's mind as to whether it was that sort of bird that nobody would ever give him in Lord Seawood's drawing-room.

As the figure in blue drew nearer down the green avenues, however, even the dreamy librarian began to think that there might be another reason for that outward gesture. Something in her face suggested that the movement had been one of impatience or even of dismay since it cannot help looking like a mask of tragedy over quite trivial irritations. It might be questioned whether she regarded her present irritation as trivial. But she unconsciously carried about with her such a glow of good health and such a confidence of manner, that there was a second incongruity even in the fullness and firmness of her voice. There was something boisterous about it, that made even bad news sound as if it were good.

"And here's a nice state of things," she said indignantly, flapping open a telegram and staring round her in impersonal anger. "Hugh Trelawney says he can't act the King after all."

On some matters Julian Archer's mind worked very swiftly indeed. He was as much annoyed in a sense as she was; but before she had spoken again he had considered the possibility of taking a new part himself, and finding time to learn the lines appropriated to the King. It would be a fag; but he had never minded hard work when it was worth his while. The great difficulty he saw was the difficulty of imagining anybody in his part as the Troubadour.

The rest had not yet begun to look ahead, and the lady was still reeling, so to speak, under the blow of the treacherous Trelawney. "I suppose we must chuck the whole thing," she said.

"Oh, come now," said Archer more tolerantly, "I shouldn't do that if I were you. It seems rather rotten, when we've all taken such a lot of trouble." His eye wandered inconsequently to the other end of the room, where the dark head and rigid back of Miss Ashley were obstinately fixed in concentrated interest on the illuminations. It was a long time since she had been apparently concentrated on anything else; save for long disappearances, supposed to be country walks, which had remained something of a mystery.

"Why, I've sometimes got up at six three days running," said Mr. Archer, merely in illustration of the industry of the company.

"But how can we go on with it?" asked Rosamund in exasperation. "Who else is there who could take the King? We had trouble enough in getting hold of an assistant Troubadour, till Mr. Herne was kind enough to help us."

"The trouble is," said Archer, "that if I took the King, you'd have nobody who could take Blondel."

"Well then," said Rosamund rather crossly, "in that case it ought to be dropped."

There was a silence and they stood looking at each other. Then they all simultaneously turned their heads and looked towards the other end of the long room, from which a new voice had spoken.

For Olive Ashley had risen suddenly from her occupation and faced round to speak. They were a little startled, for they had no idea she had even been listening.

"It ought to be dropped," she said, "unless you can get Mr. Herne to act the King himself. He is the only person who knows or cares what it's all about."

"God bless my soul," was the helpful comment of Mr. Herne.

"I don't know what you people imagine it's all about," went on Olive with some bitterness. "You seem to have turned it all into a sort of operaa comic opera. Well, I don't know anything about it, in the way he does; but I did mean something by it, for all that. Oh, I don't imagine I can express it properlynot half so well as any old song like the one that says 'Will ye no come back again?' or 'When the King enjoys his own again.'"

"That's Jacobite," Archer explained kindly. "Mixing up the periods a bit, eh?"

"I don't know what King it is who ought to come back, any more than anybody else does," answered Olive steadily. "King Arthur or King Richard or King Charles or somebody. But Mr. Herne does know something about what those men meant by a king. I rather wish Mr. Herne really were King of England."

Julian Archer threw back his head and hooted with delighted laughter. There was something exaggerated and almost unnatural about his laughter; like the shrill mockery with which men have received prophecies.

"But look here," protested the more practical Rosamund, "even supposing Mr. Herne could act the King, then who is going to take his own part, that we had such a bother about before?"

Olive Ashley turned her back once more and appeared to resume tidying up her paints.

"Oh," she said, rather abruptly, "I could arrange that. A friend of mine will take it on if you like."

The others stared at her in some wonder; and then Rosamund said: "Hadn't we better consult Monkey about this? He knows such a lot of people."

"I'm sorry," returned Olive, still tidying up, "I'm afraid I've sent him off on a job of my own. He very kindly offered to get one of my paints for me."

And indeed it was true that, while the social circle was settling down (to the bewilderment of Mr. Archer) into a sort of acceptance of the idea of Mr. Herne's coronation, their friend Douglas Murrel was in the very act of setting out upon an expedition which was to have a curious effect upon all their fortunes. Olive Ashley had asked him to discover whether a particular pigment was still procurable at the artist's colourmen's. But he had all the cheerful bachelor's exaggerated love of adventure, and especially of preparations for adventure. Just as he had started on his nocturnal round with Mr. Braintree with a general sense that the night would last for ever, so he set out on his little commission for Miss Ashley with a general assumption that it would lead him to the end of the world. And indeed it did perhaps in some sense lead him to the end of the world; or perhaps to the beginning of another one. He took out a considerable sum of money from the bank; he stuffed his pockets with tobacco and flasks and pocket-knives as if he were going to the North Pole. Most intelligent men play this childish game with themselves in one form or another; but he was certainly carrying it rather far and acting as if he expected to meet ogres and dragons when he walked up the street.

And, sure enough, no sooner had he stepped outside the old Gothic gateway of Seawood than he came face to face with a prodigy. He might almost have said a monster. A figure was entering the house as he was leaving it; a figure at once fearfully unfamiliar. He struggled with some confusion of identity; as in a nightmare. Then he sank into a stupefied certainty; for the figure was that of Mr. John Braintree; and he had shaved off his beard.