The Wonderful Year. William John Locke

sang out:

      “Hallo, Martin!”

      Martin turned and met the welcoming eyes of Corinna Hastings, fair-haired, slender, neatly dressed in blue serge coat and skirt and a cheap little hat to which a long pheasant’s feather gave a touch of bravado.

      “You’re a real Godsend,” she declared. “I was thinking of throwing myself into the river, only there would have been no one on the deserted bridge to fish me out again. I am the last creature left in Paris.”

      “I am more than lucky then to find you, Corinna,” said Martin. “For you’re the only person in Paris that I know.”

      “How did you find my address?”

      “I went down to Wendlebury——”

      “Then you saw them all?” said Corinna, as they took their seats at the window-table. “Father and mother and Bessie and Joan and Ada, etcetera, etcetera down to the new baby. The new baby makes ten of us alive—really he’s the fourteenth. I wonder how many more there are going to be?”

      “I shouldn’t think there would be any more,” replied Martin gravely.

      Corinna burst out laughing.

      “What on earth can you know about it?”

      The satirical challenge brought a flush to Martin’s sallow cheek. What did he know in fact of the very intimate concerns of the Reverend Thomas Hastings and his wife?

      “I’m afraid they find it hard to make both ends meet, as it is,” he explained.

      “Yet I suppose they all flourish as usual—playing tennis and golf and selling at bazaars and quarrelling over curates?”

      “They all seem pretty happy,” said Martin, not overpleased at his companion’s airy treatment of her family. He, himself, the loneliest of men, had found grateful warmth among the noisy, good-hearted crew of girls. It hurt him to hear them contemptuously spoken of.

      “It was the first time you went down since——!” she paused.

      “Since my mother died? Yes. She died early in May, you know.”

      “It must be a terrible loss to you,” said Corinna in a softened voice.

      He nodded and looked out of window at the houses opposite. That was why he was in Paris. For the last ten years, ever since his father’s death had hurried him away from Cambridge, after a term or two, into the wide world of struggle for a living, he had spent all his days of freedom in the little Kentish town. And these days were few. There were no long luxurious vacations at Margett’s Universal College, such as there are at ordinary colleges and schools. The grind went on all the year round, and the staff had but scanty holidays. Such as they were he passed them at his mother’s tiny villa. His father had given up the chaplaincy in Switzerland, where he had married and where Martin had been born, to become Vicar of Wendlebury, and Mr. Hastings was his successor. Mrs. Overshaw, with her phlegmatic temperament, had taken root in Wendlebury and there Martin had visited her and there he had been received into the intimacy of the Hastings family and there she had died; and now that the little villa was empty and Martin had no place outside London to lay his leisured head, he had satisfied the dream of his life and come to Paris. But even in this satisfaction there was pain. What was Paris compared with the kind touch of that vanished hand? He sighed. He was a simple soul in spite of his thirty years.

      The waiter roused him from his sad reflections by bringing the soup and a bottle of thin red wine. Conscious of food and drink and a female companion of prepossessing exterior, Martin’s face brightened.

      “It’s so jolly of them in Paris to throw in wine like this,” said he.

      “I only hope you can drink the stuff,” remarked Corinna. “We call it tord-boyau.”

      “It’s a rare treat,” said Martin. “I can’t afford wine in England, and the soup is delicious. Somehow no English landlady ever thinks of making it.”

      “England is a beast of a place,” said Corinna.

      “Yet in your letter you called Paris a God-forsaken city.”

      “So it is in August. The schools are closed. Not a studio is open. Every single student has cleared out and there’s nothing in the world to do.”

      “I’ve found heaps to do,” said Martin.

      “The Pantheon and Notre Dame and the Folies Bergère,” said Corinna. “There’s also the Eiffel Tower. Imagine a three years’ art-student finding fun on the Eiffel Tower!”

      “Then why haven’t you gone home this August as usual?” asked Martin.

      Corinna knitted her brows. “That’s another story,” she replied shortly.

      “I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to be impertinent,” said Martin.

      She laughed. “Don’t be silly—you think wallowing in the family trough is the height of bliss. It isn’t. I would sooner starve than go back. At any rate I should be myself, a separate entity, an individual. Oh, that being merely a bit of clotted family! How I should hate it!”

      “But you would return to Paris in the autumn,” said Martin.

      Again she frowned and broke her bread impatiently. All that was another story. “But never mind about me. Tell me about yourself, Martin. Perhaps we may fix up something merry to do together. Père la Chaise or the Tomb of Napoleon. How long are you staying in Paris?”

      “I can only afford a week—I’ve already had three days. I must look out for another billet as soon as possible.”

      “Another billet?”

      Her question reminded him that she was ignorant of his novel position as professor in partibus. He explained, over the bœuf flammande. Corinna putting the “other story” of her own trouble aside listened sympathetically. All Paris art-students must learn to do that; otherwise who would listen sympathetically to them? And all art-students want a prodigious amount of sympathy, so uniquely constituted is each in genius and temperament.

      “You can’t go back to that dog’s life,” she said, after a while. “You must get a post in a good public-school.”

      Martin sighed. “Why not in the Kingdom of Heaven? It’s just as possible. Heads of Public Schools don’t engage as masters men who haven’t a degree and have hacked out their youth in low-class institutions like Margett’s. I know only too well. To have been at Margett’s damns me utterly with the public-schools. I must find another Margett’s!”

      “Why don’t you do something else?” asked the girl.

      “What else in the world can I do? You know very well what happened to me. My poor old father was just able to send me to Cambridge because I had a good scholarship. When he died there was nothing to supplement the scholarship which wasn’t enough to keep me at the University. I had to go down. My mother had nothing but my father’s life insurance money—a thousand pounds—and twenty pounds a year from the Freemasons. When she wrote to her relations about her distress, what do you think my damned set of Swiss uncles and aunts and cousins sent her? Two hundred francs! Eight pounds! And they’re all rolling in money got out of the English. I had to find work at once to support us both. My only equipment was a knowledge of French. I got a post at Margett’s through a scholastic agency. I thought it a miracle. When the letter came accepting my application I didn’t sleep all night. I remained there till a week or so ago, working twelve hours a day all the year round. I don’t say I had classes for twelve hours,” he admitted, conscientiously, “but when you see about a couple of hundred pupils a day and they all do written work which needs correcting, you’ll find you have as much work in class as out of class. Last night I dreamed I was confronted with a pile of exercise books eight feet high.”

      “It’s a dog’s life,” Corinna repeated.

      “It