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THE MILLIONS OF MONSIEUR LE COLONEL.

BY A. C. COMPTON.

I SAW him first in Paris the year after the war. He was moving out of a smart caféa short broad man with small feet and a very big nose. His clothes and manner were all right, but somehow he did not look quite like the rest of us.

"There goes the millionaire," said some one at the next table.

Shortly afterwards I met him at a distinguished gathering, where he seemed to have many friends. I was duly presented, and he looked me straight in the eyes with a very sweet friendly smile. When, later in the evening, I fell in with a friend in the diplomatic service who prided himself on knowing all about everybody, I asked him about my new acquaint

ance.

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didn't. Always the same explanation. 'It was to look for Monsieur le Colonel.'"

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Queer regiment and queer discipline," said I.

"Yes," said he; "but queer things happened in those days. They were Catalans from Roussillon, and it seems a Catalan's will is his way. The Colonel's one of them, and they adored him. Well, they found him at last, at the farthest point they had got to on the day he disappeared. Somebody said his batman recognised one of his boots sticking up. They uncovered him, and he wasn't dead, by way of a double miracle. The story got about, and the name has stuck."

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Oh, have you heard about That?" said he; 'that's that? he said. "They're Monsieur le Colonel.' the millions of a Catalan profiteer who died and left all he had to the Colonel as a token of sincere homage and for the glorification of la petite patrie, as he said in his will. I hear the Colonel's awfully sick about it."

"I know that much," said I. 16 But he's the Monsieur le Colonel," broke in my friend. "Don't you know the story He was reported missing in one of the big fights, and the men of his regiment simply would keep on going out to look for him. They were fighting over about the same ground, and they kept it up for days. Slipped off by twos and threes whenever they saw a chance. Some came back and some

"Dirty money?" said I. "Exactly."

I was interested. I had been trying to get back to my work as an artist, but the war seemed to have left a nasty taint at the back of my mind.

I could not shake it off. I was dissatisfied in consequence with myself and with everything I did, and life had been looking very flat. But I liked the idea of the Colonel whose men adored him, and who was disgusted at becoming a millionaire, and I understood the allusion to la petite patrie, the Frenchman's "home," his own special little corner of France. I found myself wondering rather often what Monsieur le Colonel would do with his dirty millions for the glorification of beautiful Roussillon.

A few weeks afterwards I found myself at Perpignan, and there, sauntering in the great shady avenue, I met my friend. He seemed rather pleased to see me, said he had an hour to waste, and would I come with him to the Public Garden, where there would be at this hour a nice breeze from the

sea. I went willingly enough, for the Public Garden at Perpignan is a nice place, well watered, and very pleasantly laid out under its fine old planetrees. We visited the African gazelles, and the various waterbirds, and the pea-hen with her brood in the cage; and then we sat down to watch the peacocks.

"I do love them," said the Colonel. "Look at the colour of that neck! It makes me think of heaven."

Presently we saw an old woman unlocking the door of the central kiosk.

"Oh, there's my friend the duck-woman," he said. "Do

you mind if we go round with her?"

The birds were tame and greedy, and she fed them carefully. There was due mourning over a dead duckling of some rare species, and careful choosing of a young bird for the Colonel's dinner from a brood reared for the table.

"Yes, he's very handsome," said the old woman wistfully, as the condemned one swam jauntily away. "And he has such nice ways! It's a pity to have to kill him! But the world's made like that."

So she dismissed the subject, and presently locked up her kiosk with her pails and pans and the store of food, and went away. The Colonel had

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been talking to her for a while in Catalan, which I did not understand, and as she left I saw him give her money. a nice woman,' Such he said to me. said to me. "Two of her boys were in my regiment. One died in hospital. I was able to see him, and took her his messages. We've been friends ever since. She tells me all the illnesses and troubles of her district. Now she's going to sit up all night with a lot of babies who've got whoopingcough. The mother works so hard all day that she sleeps through everything, and Mother Duck on the floor above hears the poor little things choking, and she says she can't stand it any longer, so she's taking the lot into her bed to-night. I told her what to give them. Excellent cough-mixture. Equal

should rival the Côte d'Azur if we brought water and drains. They'd have a casino in every village and build great hotels! I know them! They'd bring down crowds of strangersgamblers and cocottes, and all the scum of Europe. Places

parts rum and lemon juice and honey, with a pinch of red pepper. Ever hear of it? She'll get the stuff on her way home," he went on, without waiting for my answer, "but I wish I'd told her to get some chocolate as well." "I think you Catalans are a where, if I had my will, no kind-hearted race," I said.

"We understand each other," was his answer, and he fell into a moody silence. I got up to go.

Then suddenly he burst out, as if he could contain himself no longer. He spoke, of course, in French, but I give as nearly as I can the English equivalent. "Sapristi!" he began; "what fools men are!"

"We are," said I, feeling rather bewildered.

"Not you," he said, with careful civility; "the others." "What have they done? said I.

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"Well," said he, settling down with a sigh of relief to pour out his grievance, "you've heard about those abominable millions, gained by I don't know what iniquity; I am expected to spend them on something that will be a credit to the country, and everybody is at me about it. I have no peace! I daren't go any more to the café to get my little aperatif and curse the government! I dare hardly show my face anywhere! They're plaguing my life out! They want to make me start a syndicate," he went on, "to set up a watersupply and drainage-system all along the coast. They say we

decent lad or girl of our people should ever take service! And that all along our beautiful coast! And the roads not passable for their villainous motors! Killing chickens and old women as if they were flies! Damnation! I'll have nothing to do with it! Curious thing," he went on after a pause, "I think sanitation is a tool of the devil. I never knew a bad hat yet, of our class, who was not afraid of a nasty smell."

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'You don't mind that sort of thing?" I hazarded.

"C'est naturel,” said he. "It's part of our human nature. Besides," he went on, "we want our country for ourselves. Our sands are quite clean, and there's lots of room. Plenty of little bungalows for people to sleep in who can afford it, and the others get out on bicycles, or on foot, or by the tram or something. When the working hours and the heat of the day are past, the people are all over the place, whole families together just enjoying themselves quietly. And it costs next to nothing. A bit of bread and chocolate that they bring with them, and for five sous a glass of good wholesome wine to wash it down

red tiles and pale-green outside shutters, solid wood for greater coolness. There were glorious big oleander-bushes, pink and white and crimson, single and double, planted round the enclosure. There was a great fig-tree in one corner, spreading over an old stone well, and on the north side of the house was a wide

with, will last them for hours. And how long would that go on if we brought a lot of fashionable strangers down?" he demanded, glaring at me, "with painted, half-naked ladies peacocking about to make our silly girls envious, and smart men flinging their money around and making eyes at the women.' 'They'd never come in sum- stone-flagged verandah, where mer," I said.

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I had played the part of a good listener, and he seemed satisfied with me. Before we separated, he invited me to go and see him. He told me of his town-house, a noble, old building that I had noticed, where he and his sister occupied a flat, the rest being let. But now, he said, they were at their little country place outside the town, where their vines needed attending to, and if I could endure simplicity (it was said with the utmost demureness) I should be wel

come.

A few days afterwards I went. It was a plain little white house among the vineyards, looking very joyous in the sunshine, with its light

the Colonel met me. He introduced me to his sister, a nice middle-aged lady, in a flat white lace cap, shaped something like a sailor's. She greeted me in pretty broken English, and told me they had English cousins, emigrants from the great revolution, and that she exchanged visits with them.

They invited me to share their feast of fruit and fresh cold water from the well, and the Colonel produced a bottle of fine old wine, made from their own grapes and matured in their own cellars. We talked of the Catalans, their manners and customs, their music and dances and legends. When we touched on matters of history, I was told of little personal touches that had been handed down from one generation to another in local families. I began to realise the continuity of their provincial life, and its oneness with the general stream of history. Of course, they knew all about Maréchal Joffre, who belongs to Riveshaltes, a little town close by.

Then we talked of Régionalisme, and the Colonel deplored the modern tendency

to make it a political move- forgotten the man in the corner. ment towards decentralisation. "We love our petite patrie," he said, "but that has nothing to do with politics. You English can't understand that feeling of ours. You move about too much. You must go to London to amuse yourselves, or, if you are ambitious, to make your mark; and then you must run off to one end of your country to shoot one sort of beast, and to another end of it for the hunting of another sort of beast, and then down to your own part of the country for a week or two to see after your estates and to let your ancestral home, and then you must come over to us for what you call your holiday," he concluded with a grin.

"But those are only the rich people," I said.

"Well," he said, "I've met different sorts of Englishmen, but I don't ever remember meeting one who loved his own countryside in quite the same personal jealous way that we love ours. Why, I remember once I nearly had to fight a duel with a man from Narbonne, because I said it was the most detestable town in France."

"Good gracious!" said his sister. "How rude of you!" "Yes. It's too true to be a proper thing to say," the Colonel admitted. ("It's so windy," he explained to me; "that awful mistral.") "But we were in the train coming down from Paris, and I had

I knew where all the others came from. But this one, he put down his newspaper. Narbonne,' he said; 'but that's my own town! Mine!' Of course, I ought to have made some sort of excuse, but I was in a teasing mood, and I saidsomething. We had a grand war of words, but he went too far. He knew by my accent where I came from, and he abused us Catalans. Certainly there would have been a duel if he had not reached his junction and had to bundle out in a hurry. I remember he called "canaille!" after me when our train was moving out, and he was just barging into a fat woman with a dog in her arms. Luckily I had not got his address!"

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We don't see things in the same light as you do," I said.

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"No," said he; but I don't think you feel them either. Once an Englishman was talking to me about the old glass in our French cathedrals, so, naturally, I said what beautiful glass you have in England-at York, for instance. He didn't care a bit; he simply said he had never been to York. I might have been speaking of the glass in Spain or Flanders."

"He might have acknowledged the compliment," I said, answering his thought.

"He never even saw it," said the Colonel. "You don't mean it," he went on, “but you sometimes seem to think that all our things are as much

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