The others went on talking; Loder became silent again; but I noticed
that he kept my cigarette case in his hand, and looked at it from time to
time with an interest that neither its design nor its costliness seemed
to explain. Presently I caught his eye. "A pretty case," he remarked, putting it down on the table. "I once had
one exactly like it." I answered that they were in every shop window. "Oh yes," he said, putting aside any question of rarity.... "I lost
mine." "Oh?..." He laughed. "Oh, that's all right--I got it back again--don't be afraid
I'm going to claim yours. But the way I lost it--found it--the whole
thing--was rather curious. I've never been able to explain it. I wonder
if you could?" I answered that I certainly couldn't till I'd heard it, whereupon Loder,
taking up the silver case again and holding it in his hand as he talked,
began:

"This happened in Provence, when I was about as old as Marsham there--and
every bit as romantic. I was there with Carroll--you remember poor old
Carroll and what a blade of a boy he was--as romantic as four Marshams
rolled into one. (Excuse me, Marsham, won't you? It's a romantic tale,
you see, or at least the setting is.) ... We were in Provence, Carroll
and I; twenty-four or thereabouts; romantic, as I say; and--and this
happened. "And it happened on the top of a whole lot of other things, you must
understand, the things that do happen when you're twenty-four. If it
hadn't been Provence, it would have been somewhere else, I suppose,
nearly, if not quite as good; but this was Provence, that smells (as you
might say) of twenty-four as it smells of argelasse and wild lavender and
broom....

"We'd had the dickens of a walk of it, just with knapsacks--had started
somewhere in the Ardèche and tramped south through the vines and almonds
and olives--Montélimar, Orange, Avignon, and a fortnight at that blanched
skeleton of a town, Les Baux. We'd nothing to do, and had gone just where
we liked, or rather just where Carroll had liked; and Carroll had had the
_De Bello Gallico_ in his pocket, and had had a notion, I fancy, of
taking in the whole ground of the Roman conquest--I remember he lugged me
off to some place or other, Pourrières I believe its name was, because--I
forget how many thousands--were killed in a river-bed there, and they
stove in the water-casks so that if the men wanted water they'd have to
go forward and fight for it. And then we'd gone on to Arles, where
Carroll had fallen in love with everything that had a bow of black
velvet in her hair, and after that Tarascon, Nîmes, and so on, the usual
round--I won't bother you with that. In a word, we'd had two months of
it, eating almonds and apricots from the trees, watching the women at the
communal washing-fountains under the dark plane-trees, singing _Magali_
and the _Qué Cantes_, and Carroll yarning away all the time about Caesar
and Vercingetorix and Dante, and trying to learn Provençal so that he
could read the stuff in the _Journal des Félibriges_ that he'd never have
looked at if it had been in English....

"Well, we got to Darbisson. We'd run across some young chap or
other--Rangon his name was--who was a vine-planter in those parts, and
Rangon had asked us to spend a couple of days with him, with him and his
mother, if we happened to be in the neighbourhood. So as we might as
well happen to be there as anywhere else, we sent him a postcard and
went. This would be in June or early in July. All day we walked across
a plain of vines, past hurdles of wattled _cannes_ and great wind-screens
of velvety cypresses, sixty feet high, all white with dust on the north
side of 'em, for the mistral was having its three-days' revel, and it
whistled and roared through the _cannes_ till scores of yards of 'em
at a time were bowed nearly to the earth. A roaring day it was, I
remember.... But the wind fell a little late in the afternoon, and we
were poring over what it had left of our Ordnance Survey--like fools,
we'd got the unmounted paper maps instead of the linen ones--when Rangon
himself found us, coming out to meet us in a very badly turned-out trap. He drove us back himself, through Darbisson, to the house, a mile and a
half beyond it, where he lived with his mother. "He spoke no English, Rangon didn't, though, of course, both French and
Provençal; and as he drove us, there was Carroll, using him as a
Franco-Provençal dictionary, peppering him with questions about the names
of things in the patois--I beg its pardon, the language--though there's
a good deal of my eye and Betty Martin about that, and I fancy this
Félibrige business will be in a good many pieces when Frédéric Mistral
is under that Court-of-Love pavilion arrangement he's had put up for
himself in the graveyard at Maillanne. If the language has got to go,
well, it's got to go, I suppose; and while I personally don't want to
give it a kick, I rather sympathise with the Government. Those jaunts of
a Sunday out to Les Baux, for instance, with paper lanterns and Bengal
fire and a fellow spouting _O blanche Venus d'Arles_--they're well
enough, and compare favourably with our Bank Holidays and Sunday League
picnics, but ... but that's nothing to do with my tale after all.... So
he drove on, and by the time we got to Rangon's house Carroll had learned
the greater part of _Magali_....

"As you, no doubt, know, it's a restricted sort of life in some respects
that a young _vigneron_ lives in those parts, and it was as we reached
the house that Rangon remembered something--or he might have been trying
to tell us as we came along for all I know, and not been able to get a
word in edgeways for Carroll and his Provençal. It seemed that his mother
was away from home for some days--apologies of the most profound, of
course; our host was the soul of courtesy, though he did try to get at
us a bit later.... We expressed our polite regrets, naturally; but I
didn't quite see at first what difference it made. I only began to see
when Rangon, with more apologies, told us that we should have to go back
to Darbisson for dinner. It appeared that when Madame Rangon went away
for a few days she dispersed the whole of the female side of her
establishment also, and she'd left her son with nobody to look after
him except an old man we'd seen in the yard mending one of these
double-cylindered sulphur-sprinklers they clap across the horse's back
and drive between the rows of vines.... Rangon explained all this as we
stood in the hall drinking an _apéritif_--a hall crowded with oak
furniture and photographs and a cradle-like bread-crib and doors opening
to right and left to the other rooms of the ground floor.