A glimmer of irony in his smiling grey eyes or an inflection of it in his persuasive voice would have destroyed the flattering effect of the little speech. Martin had never taken his soul into account. The diagnosis shed a new light on his state of being. The starvation of his soul was certainly the root of the trouble; an infinitely more dignified matter than mere discontent with one’s environment.
“Yes,” said he. “You’re right. I’ve had no chance of development. My own fault perhaps. I’ve not been strong enough to battle against circumstances. Circumstances have imprisoned me, as Corinna says, like a squirrel in a cage, and I’ve spent my time in going round and round in the profitless wheel.”
“And the nature of the wheel?” asked Fortinbras.
“Have you ever heard of Margett’s Universal College?”
“I have,” said Fortinbras. “It is one of the many mind-wrecking institutions of which our beloved country is so proud.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” cried Martin. “I’ve been helping to wreck minds there for the last ten years. I’ve taught French. Not the French language; but examination French. When the son of a greengrocer wants to get a boy-clerkship in the Civil Service, it’s essential that he should know that bal, cal, carnaval, pal, regal, chacal take an ‘s’ in the plural, in spite of the fact that millions of Frenchmen go through their lives without once uttering the plural words.”
“How came you to teach French?”
“My mother tongue—my mother was a Swiss.”
“And your father?”
“An English chaplain in Switzerland. You see it was like this——”
And so, started on his course, and helped here and there by a shrewd and sympathetic question, Martin, the ingenuous, told his story, while Corinna, slightly bored, having heard most of it already, occupied herself by drawing a villainous portrait of him on the tablecloth. When he mentioned details unknown to her she paused in her task and raised her eyes. Like her own, his autobiography was a catalogue of incompetence, but it held no record of frustrated ambitions—no record of any ambitious desire whatever. It shewed the tame ass’s unreflecting acquiescence in its lot of drudgery. There had been no passionate craving for things of delight. Why cry for the moon? With a salary of a hundred and thirty-five pounds a year out of which he must contribute to the support of his widowed mother, a man can purchase for himself but little splendour of existence, and Martin was not one of those to whom splendour comes unbought. He had lived, semi-content, in a fog splendour-obscuring, for the last ten years. But this evening the fog had lifted. The glamour of Paris, even the Pantheon and the Eiffel Tower sarcastically mentioned by Corinna, had helped to dispel it. So had Corinna’s sisterly interest in his dull affairs. And so, more than all, had helped the self-analysis formulated under the compelling power of the philanthropist with shiny coat-sleeves and frayed linen, at once priest, lawyer and physician who had pocketed his five francs fee.
He talked long and earnestly; and the more he talked and the more minutely he revealed the aridity of his young life, the stronger grew within him a hitherto unknown spirit of revolt.
“That’s all,” he said at last, wiping a streaming brow.
“And very interesting indeed,” said Fortinbras.
“Isn’t it?” said Corinna. “And he never even kissed”—so complete had been Martin’s apologia—“the landlady’s daughter who married the plumber.” She challenged him with a glance. “I swear you didn’t.”
With a shy twist of his lips Martin confessed:
“Well—I did once.”
“Why not twice?” asked Corinna.
“Yes, why not?” asked Fortinbras, seeing Martin hesitate, and his smile was archiepiscopal indulgence. “Why but one taste of ambrosial lips?”
Martin reddened beneath his olive skin. “I hardly like to say—it seems so indelicate——”
“Allons donc” cried Corinna. “We’re in Paris, not Wendlebury.”
“We must get to the bottom of this, my dear Martin—it’s a privilege I demand from my clients to address them by their Christian names—otherwise how can I establish the necessary intimate rapport between them and myself? So I repeat, my dear Martin, we must have the reason for the rupture or the dissolution or the termination of what seems to be the only romantic episode in your career. I’m not joking,” Fortinbras added gravely, after a pause. “From the psychological point of view, it is important that I should know.”
Martin looked appealingly from one to the other—from Fortinbras massively serious to Corinna serenely mocking.
“A weeny unencouraged plumber?” she suggested.
He sat bolt upright and gasped. “Good God, no!” He flushed indignant. “She was a most highly respectable girl. Nothing of that sort. I wish I hadn’t mentioned the matter. It’s entirely unimportant.”
“If that is so,” said Corinna, “why didn’t you kiss the girl again?”
“Well, if you want to know,” replied Martin desperately, “I have a constitutional horror of the smell of onions,” and mechanically he sucked through his straw the tepid residue of melted ice in his glass.
Corinna threw herself back in her chair and laughed uncontrollably. It was just the lunatic sort of thing that would happen to poor old Martin. She knew her sex. Instantaneously she pictured in her mind the fluffy, lower middle-class young person who set her cap at the gentleman with the long Grecian nose, and she entered into her devastated frame of mind when he wriggled awkwardly out of further osculatory invitations. And the good, solid plumber, onion-loving soul, had carried her off, not figuratively but literally under the nose of Martin.
“Oh, Martin, you’re too funny for words!” she cried.
Fortinbras smiled always benevolently. “If Cleopatra’s nose had been a centimetre longer—I forget the exact classical epigram—the history of the world would have been changed. In a minor degree—for the destiny of an individual must, of course, be of less importance than the destiny of mankind—had it not been for one spring onion, unconsidered fellow of the robin and the burnished dove and the wanton lapwing, this young man’s fancy would have been fettered in the thoughts of love. One spring onion—and human destinies are juggled. Martin is still a soul-starved bachelor, and—and—her name?”
“Gwendoline?”
“And Gwendoline is the buxom mother of five.”
“Six,” said Martin. “I can’t help knowing,” he explained, “since I still lodge with her mother.”
Corinna turned her head sideways to scrutinise the drawing on the tablecloth, and still scrutinising it, asked:
“And that is your one and only affaire du cœur?”
“I’m afraid the only one,” replied Martin shamefacedly. Even so mild a man as he felt the disadvantage of not being able to hint to a woman that he could talk, and he would, of chimes heard at midnight and of broken hearts and other circumstances hedging round a devil of a fellow. His one kiss seemed a very bread-and-buttery affair—to say nothing of the mirth-provoking onion. And the emotion attending the approach to it had been of a nature so tepid that disillusion caused scarcely a pang. It had been better to pose as an out-and-out Sir Galahad, a