The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol

Part 1

Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Anne Storer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

Transcriber's Note: Table of Contents added.

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR IDOLS SEPTIMUS DERELICTS THE USURPER WHERE LOVE IS THE WHITE DOVE SIMON THE JESTER A STUDY IN SHADOWS A CHRISTMAS MYSTERY THE BELOVÈD VAGABOND AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE THE GLORY OF CLEMENTINA

THE JOYOUS ADVENTURES OF ARISTIDE PUJOL

BY WILLIAM J. LOCKE

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALEC BALL

NEW YORK JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXII

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CONTENTS

I THE ADVENTURE OF THE FAIR PATRONNE II THE ADVENTURE OF THE ARLÉSIENNE III THE ADVENTURE OF THE KIND MR. SMITH IV THE ADVENTURE OF THE FOUNDLING V THE ADVENTURE OF THE PIG'S HEAD VI THE ADVENTURE OF FLEURETTE VII THE ADVENTURE OF THE MIRACLE VIII THE ADVENTURE OF THE FICKLE GODDESS IX THE ADVENTURE OF A SAINT MARTIN'S SUMMER

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

At the Beginning of the Fourth Kiss Out Came Her Father Frontispiece

I Had Knocked Him Down on Purpose. He Was Crippled for Life 14

Anything Less Congruous as the Bride-Elect of the Debonair Aristide Pujol it Was Impossible to Imagine 22

Had Straightway Poured His Grievances into a Feminine Ear 32

I Found Both Tyres Had Been Punctured in a Hundred Places 40

"Madame," said Aristide, "You Are Adorable, and I Love You to Distraction" 50

"The Villain Was a Traveller in Buttons--Buttons!" 60

He Burst into Shrieks of Laughter 64

"And You!" shouted Bocardon, Falling on Aristide; "I Must Embrace You Also" 68

Standing on the Arrival Platform of Euston Station 78

"Ah! the Pictures," cried Aristide, with a Wide Sweep of His Arms 88

"I'll Take Five Hundred Pounds," said He, "to Stay in" 96

Between the Folds of a Blanket Peeped the Face of a Sleeping Child 110

He Demonstrated the Proper Application of the Cure 120

Part 2

It is a Fearsome Thing for a Man to be Left Alone in the Dead of Night with a Young Baby 124

One of the Little Girls in Pigtails Was Holding Him, While Miss Anne Administered the Feeding-Bottle 134

He Must Have Dealt Out Paralyzing Information 180

Fleurette Danced with Aristide, as Light as an Autumn Leaf Tossed by the Wind 188

Aristide Practised His Many Queer Accomplishments 200

He Read It, and Blinked in Amazement 208

He Might as Well Have Pointed Out the Marvels of Kubla Khan's Pleasure-Dome to a Couple of Guinea-Pigs 216

"I've Caught You! At Last, After Twenty Years, I've Caught You" 234

There He Saw a Sight Which for a Moment Paralyzed Him 238

Mr. Ducksmith Seized Him by the Lapels of His Coat 242

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THE JOYOUS ADVENTURES OF ARISTIDE PUJOL

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#The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol#

THE ADVENTURE OF THE FAIR PATRONNE

In narrating these few episodes in the undulatory, not to say switchback, career of my friend Aristide Pujol, I can pretend to no chronological sequence. Some occurred before he (almost literally) crossed my path for the first time, some afterwards. They have been related to me haphazard at odd times, together with a hundred other incidents, just as a chance tag of association recalled them to his swift and picturesque memory. He would, indeed, make a show of fixing dates by reference to his temporary profession; but so Protean seem to have been his changes of fortune in their number and rapidity that I could never keep count of them or their order. Nor does it matter. The man's life was as disconnected as a pack of cards.

My first meeting with him happened in this wise.

I had been motoring in a listless, solitary fashion about Languedoc. A friend who had stolen a few days from anxious business in order to accompany me from Boulogne through Touraine and Guienne had left me at Toulouse; another friend whom I had arranged to pick up at Avignon on his way from Monte Carlo was unexpectedly delayed. I was therefore condemned to a period of solitude somewhat irksome to a man of a gregarious temperament. At first, for company's sake, I sat in front by my chauffeur, McKeogh. But McKeogh, an atheistical Scotch mechanic with his soul in his cylinders, being as communicative as his own differential, I soon relapsed into the equal loneliness and greater comfort of the back.

In this fashion I left Montpellier one morning on my leisurely eastward journey, deciding to break off from the main road, striking due south, and visit Aigues-Mortes on the way.

Aigues-Mortes was once a flourishing Mediterranean town. St. Louis and his Crusaders sailed thence twice for Palestine; Charles V. and Francis I. met there and filled the place with glittering state. But now its glory has departed. The sea has receded three or four miles, and left it high and dry in the middle of bleak salt marshes, useless, dead and desolate, swept by the howling mistral and scorched by the blazing sun. The straight white ribbon of road which stretched for miles through the plain, between dreary vineyards--some under water, the black shoots of the vines appearing like symmetrical wreckage above the surface--was at last swallowed up by the grim central gateway of the town, surmounted by its frowning tower. On each side spread the brown machicolated battlements that vainly defended the death-stricken place. A soft northern atmosphere would have invested it in a certain mystery of romance, but in the clear southern air, the towers and walls standing sharply defined against the blue, wind-swept sky, it looked naked and pitiful, like a poor ghost caught in the daylight.

At some distance from the gate appeared the usual notice as to speed-limit. McKeogh, most scrupulous of drivers, obeyed. As there was a knot of idlers underneath and beyond the gate he slowed down to a crawl, sounding a patient and monotonous horn. We advanced; the peasant folk cleared the way sullenly and suspiciously. Then, deliberately, an elderly man started to cross the road, and on the sound of the horn stood stock still, with resentful defiance on his weather-beaten face. McKeogh jammed on the brakes. The car halted. But the infinitesimal fraction of a second before it came to a dead stop the wing over the near front wheel touched the elderly person and down he went on the ground. I leaped from the car, to be instantly surrounded by an infuriated crowd, which seemed to gather from all the quarters of the broad, decaying square. The elderly man, helped to his feet by sympathetic hands, shook his knotted fists in my face. He was a dour and ugly peasant, of splendid physique, as hard and discoloured as the walls of Aigues-Mortes; his cunning eyes were as clear as a boy's, his lined, clean-shaven face as rigid as a gargoyle; and the back of his neck, above the low collar of his jersey, showed itself seamed into glazed irregular lozenges, like the hide of a crocodile. He cursed me and my kind healthily in very bad French and apostrophized his friends in Provençal, who in Provençal and bad French made responsive clamour. I had knocked him down on purpose. He was crippled for life. Who was I to go tearing through peaceful towns with my execrated locomotive and massacring innocent people? I tried to explain that the fault was his, and that, after all, to judge by the strength of his lungs, no great damage had been inflicted. But no. They would not let it go like that. There were the gendarmes--I looked across the square and saw two gendarmes striding portentously towards the scene--they would see justice done. The law was there to protect poor folk. For a certainty I would not get off easily.

I knew what would happen. The gendarmes would submit McKeogh and myself to a procès-verbal. They would impound the car. I should have to go to the Mairie and make endless depositions. I should have to wait, Heaven knows how long, before I could appear before the juge de paix. I should have to find a solicitor to represent me. In the end I should be fined for furious driving--at the rate, when the accident happened, of a mile an hour--and probably have to pay a heavy compensation to the wilful and uninjured victim of McKeogh's impeccable driving. And all the time, while waiting for injustice to take its course, I should be the guest of a hostile population. I grew angry. The crowd grew angrier. The gendarmes approached with an air of majesty and fate. But just before they could be acquainted with the brutal facts of the disaster a singularly bright-eyed man, wearing a hard felt hat and a blue serge suit, flashed like a meteor into the midst of the throng, glanced with an amazing swiftness at me, the car, the crowd, the gendarmes and the victim, ran his hands up and down the person of the last mentioned, and then, with a frenzied action of a figure in a bad cinematograph rather than that of a human being, subjected the inhabitants to an infuriated philippic in Provençal, of which I could not understand one word. The crowd, with here and there a murmur of remonstrance, listened to him in silence. When he had finished they hung their heads, the gendarmes shrugged their majestic and fateful shoulders and lit cigarettes, and the gargoyle-visaged ancient with the neck of crocodile hide turned grumbling away. I have never witnessed anything so magical as the effect produced by this electric personage. Even McKeogh, who during the previous clamour had sat stiff behind his wheel, keeping expressionless eyes fixed on the cap of the radiator, turned his head two degrees of a circle and glanced at his surroundings.

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