THE Lotus Club was the oddest society I have met. The premises
consisted of one long dingy room with two dingy windows: the
furniture of a long table covered with dirty American cloth, a
multitude of wooden chairs, an old sofa, two dilapidated dinner-waggons,
and a frame against the wall from which, by means of clips, churchwarden
pipes depended stem downwards; and by each clip was a label bearing a
name. On the table stood an enormous jar of tobacco. A number of
ill-washed glasses decorated the dinner-waggons. There was not a curtain,
not a blind, not a picture. The further end of the room away from the
door contained a huge fireplace, and on the wooden mantelpiece ticked
a three-and-sixpenny clock.
During the daytime it was an abode of abominable desolation. No one came
near it until nine o'clock in the evening, when one or two members
straggled in, took down their long pipes and called for whisky or beer,
the only alcoholic beverages the club provided. These were kept in great
barrels in the scullery, presided over by Mrs. Housekeeper until it was
time to prepare the supper, when Cherubino and I helped ourselves. At
eleven the cloth was laid. From then till half past members came in
considerable numbers. At half past supper was served. A steaming dish of
tripe furnished the head of the table in front of Paragot, and a cut of
cold beef the foot.
There were generally from fifteen to thirty present; men of all classes:
Journalists, actors, lawyers, out-at-elbows nondescripts. I have seen
one of Her Majesty's Judges and a prizefighter exchanging views across
the table. A few attended regularly; but the majority seemed to be
always new-comers. They supped, talked, smoked, and drank whisky until
two or three o'clock in the morning and appeared to enjoy themselves
prodigiously. I noticed that on departing they wrung Paragot fervently
by the hand and thanked him for their delightful evening. I remembered
his telling me that they came to hear him talk. He did talk: sometimes
so compellingly that I would stand stock-still rapt in reverential
ecstasy: once to the point of letting the potatoes I was handing round
roll off the dish on to the floor. I never was so rapt again; for
Cherubino picking up the potatoes and following my frightened exit,
broke them over my head on the landing, by way of chastisement. The best
barbers do not use hot mealy potatoes for the hair.
When the last guest had departed, Paragot mounted to his attic, Mrs.
Housekeeper and Cherubino went their several ways--each went several
ways, I think, for they had unchecked command during the evening over
the whisky and beer barrels--and I, dragging a bundle of bedclothes from
beneath the sofa, went to bed amid the fumes of tripe, gas, tobacco,
alcohol and humanity, and slept the sleep of perfect happiness.
In the morning, at about eleven, I rose and prepared breakfast for
Paragot and myself, which we ate together in his room. For a couple of
hours he instructed me in what he was pleased to call the humanities.
Then he sent me out into the street for air and exercise, with
instructions to walk to Hyde Park, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's
Cathedral, Whiteley's--he always had a fresh objective for me--and to
bring him back my views thereon and an account of what I had noticed on
the way. When I came home I delivered myself into the hands of Mrs.
Housekeeper and turned scullion again. The plates, glasses, knives and
forks of the previous evening's orgy were washed and cleaned, the room
swept and aired, and a meal cooked for Mrs. Housekeeper and myself which
we ate at a corner of the long table. Paragot himself dined out.
On Sunday evenings the Club was shut, and as Mrs. Housekeeper did not
make her appearance on the Sabbath, the remains of Saturday night's
supper stayed on the table till Monday afternoon. Imagine remains of
tripe thirty six hours old!
I mention this, not because it is of any great interest, but because it
exhibits a certain side of Paragot's character. In those early days I
was not critical. I lived in a maze of delight. Paragot was the Wonder
of the Earth, my bedroom a palace chamber, and the abominable Sunday
night smell pervaded my senses like the perfumes of all the Arabies.
"My son," said Paragot one morning, in the middle of a French
lesson--from the first he was bent on my learning the language--"My son,
I wonder whether you are going to turn out a young Caliban, and after I
have shewn you the True Divinity of Things, return to your dam's god
Setebos?"
He regarded me earnestly with his light blue eyes which looked so odd in
his swarthy black-bearded face.
"Is there any hope for the race of Sycorax?"
As we had read "The Tempest" the day before, I understood the
allusions.
"I would sooner be Ariel, Master," said I, by way of showing off my
learning.
"He was an ungrateful beggar too," said Paragot. He went on talking, but
I heard him not; for my childish mind quickly associated him with
Prospero, and I wondered where lay his magic staff with which he could
split pines and liberate tricksy spirits, and whether he had a beautiful
daughter hidden in some bower of Tavistock Street, and whether the
cadaverous Cherubino might not be a metamorphosed Ferdinand. He appeared
the embodiment of all wisdom and power, and yet he had the air of one
cheated of his kingdom. He seemed also to be of reverential age. As a
matter of fact he was not yet forty.
My attention was recalled by his rising and walking about the room.
"I am making this experiment on your vile body, my little Asticot," said
he, "to prove my Theory of Education. You have had, so far as it goes,
what is called an excellent Board School Training. You can read and
write and multiply sixty-four by thirty-seven in your head, and you can
repeat the Kings of England. If you had been fortunate and gone to a
Public school they would have stuffed your brain full of Greek verbs and
damned facts about triangles. But of the meaning of life, the value of
life, the art of life, you would never have had a glimmering perception.
I am going to educate you, my little Asticot, through the imagination.
The intellect can look after itself. We will go now to the National
Gallery."
He caught up his hat and threw me my cap, and we went out. He had a
sudden, breathless way of doing things. I am sure thirty seconds had
not elapsed between the idea of the National Gallery entering his head
and our finding ourselves on the stairs.
We went to the National Gallery. I came away with a reeling
undistinguishable mass of form and colour before my eyes. I felt sick.
Only one single picture stood out clear. Paragot talked Italian art to
my uncomprehending ears all the way home.
"Now," said he, when he had settled himself comfortably in his old
wicker-work chair again, "which of the pictures did you like best?"
Why that particular picture (save that it is the supreme art of a
supreme genius) should have alone fixed itself on my mind, I do not
know. It has been one of the psychological puzzles of my life.
"A man's head, master," said I; "I can't describe it, but I think I
could draw it."
"Draw it?" he echoed incredulously.
"Yes, Master."
He pulled a stump of pencil from his pocket and threw it to me. I felt
luminously certain I could draw the head. A curious exaltation filled me
as I sat at a corner of the table before a flattened-out piece of paper
that had wrapped up tea. Paragot stood over me, as I drew.
"_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_" cried he. "It is Gian Bellini's Doge
Loredano. But what made you remember that picture, and how in the name
of Board schools could you manage to draw it?"
He walked swiftly up and down the room.
"_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_"
"I used to draw horses and men on my slate at school," said I modestly.
Paragot filled his porcelain pipe and walked about strangely excited.
Suddenly he stopped.
"My little Asticot," said he, "you had better go down and help Mrs.
Housekeeper to wash up the dirty plates and dishes, for your soul's
sake."
What my soul had to do with greasy crockery I could not in the least
fathom; but the next morning Paragot gave me a drawing lesson. It would
be false modesty for me to say that I did not show talent, since the
making of pictures is the means whereby I earn my living at the present
moment. The gift once discovered, I exercised it in and out of season.
"My son," said Paragot, when I showed him a sketch of Mrs. Housekeeper
as she lay on the scullery floor one Saturday night, unable to go any
one of her several ways, "I am afraid you are an artist. Do you know
what an artist is?"
I didn't. He pronounced the word in tones of such deep melancholy that I
felt it must denote something particularly depraved.
"It is the man who has the power of doing up his soul in whitey-brown
paper parcels and selling them at three halfpence apiece."
This was at breakfast one morning while he was chipping an egg. Only two
eggs furnished forth our repast, and I was already deep in mine. He
scooped off the top of the shell, regarded it for a second and then rose
with the egg and went to the window.
"Since you have wings you had better fly," said he, and he threw it into
the street.
"My little Asticot," he added, resuming his seat. "I myself was once an
artist: now I am a philosopher: it is much better."
He cheerfully attacked his bread and butter. Whether it was a sense of
his goodness or my own greediness that prompted me I know not, but I
pushed my half eaten egg across to him and begged him to finish it. He
looked queerly at me for a moment.
"I accept it," said he, "in the spirit in which it is offered."
The great man solemnly ate my egg, and pride so filled my heart that I
could scarcely swallow. A smaller man than Paragot would have refused.
From what I gathered from conversations overheard whilst I was serving
members with tripe and alcohol, it appeared that my revered master was a
mysterious personage. About eight months before, he had entered the then
unprosperous Club for the first time as a guest of the founder and
proprietor, an old actor who was growing infirm. He talked vehemently.
The next night he took the presidential chair which he since occupied,
to the Club's greater glory. But whence he came, who and what he was, no
one seemed to know. One fat man whose air of portentous wisdom (and
insatiable appetite) caused me much annoyance, proclaimed him a Russian
Nihilist and asked me whether there were any bombs in his bedroom.
Another man declared that he had seen him leading a bear in the streets
of Warsaw. His manner offended me.
"Have you ever been to Warsaw, Mr. Ulysses?" asked the fat man. Mr.
Ulysses was the traditional title of the head of the Lotus Club.
"This gentleman says he saw you leading a bear there, Master," I piped,
wrathfully, in my shrill treble.
There was the sudden silence of consternation. All, some five and
twenty, laid down their knives and forks and looked at Paragot, who rose
from his seat. Throwing out his right hand he declaimed:
[Greek: "Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polutropon, os mala polla
plagchthê, epei Troiês Ieron ptoliethron epersen
pollôn d' anthrôpôn iden astea, kai noon egnô.]
"Does anyone know what that is?"
A young fellow at the end of the table said it was the opening lines of
the Odyssey.
"You are right, sir," said Paragot, threading his fingers through his
long black hair. "They tell of my predecessor in office, the first
President of this Club, who was a man of many wanderings and many
sufferings and had seen many cities and knew the hearts of men. I,
gentlemen, have had my Odyssey, and I have been to Warsaw, and," with a
rapier flash of a glance at the gentleman who had accused him of leading
bears, "I know the miserable hearts of men." He rapped on the table with
his hammer. "Asticot, come here," he shouted.
I obeyed trembling.
"If ever you lift up your voice again in this assembly, I will have you
boiled and served up with onion sauce, second-hand tripe that you are,
and you shall be eaten underdone. Now go."
I felt shrivelled to the size of a pea. Beneath Paragot's grotesqueness
ran an unprecedented severity. I was conscious of the accusing glare of
every eye. In my blind bolt to the door I had the good fortune to run
headlong into a tray of drinks which Cherubino was carrying.
The disaster saved the situation. Laughter rang out loud and the talk
became general. The interlude was forgotten; but the man who said he had
seen my master leading bears in Warsaw vanished from the Club for ever
after.
The next morning when I entered Paragot's room to wake him I found him
reading in bed. He looked up from his book.
"My little Asticot," said he, "leading bears is better than calumny, but
indiscretion is worse than both."
And that is all I heard of the matter. I never lifted up my voice in the
Club again.
There was a curious black case on the top of a cupboard in his room
which for some time aroused my curiosity. It was like no box I had seen
before. But one afternoon Paragot took it down and extracted therefrom a
violin which after tuning he began to play. Now although fond of music I
have never been able to learn any instrument save the tambourine--my
highest success otherwise has been to finger out "God save the Queen"
and "We won't go home till morning" on the ocarina--and to this day a
person able to play the piano or the fiddle seems possessed of an
uncanny gift; but in that remote period of my fresh rescue from the
gutter, an executant appeared something superhuman. I stared at him with
stupid open mouth. He played what I afterwards learned was one of
Brahms's Hungarian dances. His lank figure and long hair worked in
unison with the music which filled the room with a wild tumult of
movement. I had not heard anything like it in my life. It set every
nerve of me dancing. I suppose Paragot found his interest in me because
I was such an impressionable youngster. When, at the abrupt finale, he
asked me what I thought of it, I could scarce stammer a word.
He gave me one of his queer kind looks while he tuned a string.
"I still wonder, my son, whether it would not be better for your soul
that you should go on scullioning to the end of time."
"Why, Master?" I asked.
"_Sacré mille diables_," he cried, "do you think I am going to give you
a reason for everything? You'll learn fast enough."
He laughed and went on playing, and, as I listened, the more godlike he
grew.
"The streets of Paris," said he, returning the fiddle to its case, "are
strewn with the wrecked souls of artists."
"And not London?"
"My little Asticot," he replied, "I am a Frenchman, and it is our
fondest illusion that no art can possibly exist out of Paris."
I discovered later that he was the son of a Gascon father and an Irish
mother, which accounted for his being absolutely bilingual and, indeed,
for many oddities of temperament. But now he proclaimed himself a
Frenchman, and for a time I was oppressed with a sense of
disappointment.
At the Board School I had bolted enough indigestible historical facts to
know that the English had always beaten the French, and I had drawn the
natural conclusion that the French were a vastly inferior race of
beings. It was, I verily believe, the first step in my spiritual
education to realise that the god of my idolatry suffered no diminution
of grandeur by reason of his nationality. Indeed he gained accession,
for after this he talked often to me of France in his magniloquent way,
until I began secretly to be ashamed of being English. This had one
advantage, in that I set myself with redoubled vigour to learn his
language.
So extraordinary was the veneration I had for the man who had
transplanted me from the kicks and soapsuds of my former life into this
bewildering land of Greek gods and Ariels and pictures and music; for
the man who spoke many unknown tongues, wore a gold watch chain, had
been to Warsaw and every city mentioned in my school geography, and
presided like a king over an assembly of those whom as a gutter urchin I
had been wont to designate "toffs"; for the beneficent being who had
provided me, Gus Smith alias Asticot, with a nightshirt, condescended to
eat half my egg and to allow me to supervise his bedchamber and maintain
it in an orderly state of disintegration, hair-brushes from butter and
tobacco-ash from fish; for the man who, God knows, was the first of
human creatures to awaken the emotion of love within my child's
breast--so extraordinary was the veneration I had for him, that although
I started out on this narrative by saying it was Paragot's story and not
my own I proposed to tell, I hope to be pardoned for a brief egotistical
excursion.
Like the gentleman in Chaucer, Paragot had over "his beddes hedde" a
shelf of books to which, careless creature that he was, he did not dream
of denying me access. In that attic in Tavistock Street I read Smollett
and Byron and somehow spelt through "Nana." I also found there the _De
Imitatione Christi_, which I read with much the same enjoyment as I did
the others. You must not think this priggish of me. The impressionable
child of starved imagination will read anything that is printed. In my
mother's house I used to purloin the squares of newspaper in which the
fried fish from Mr. Samuel's had been wrapped, and surreptitiously read
them. Why not Saint Thomas à Kempis?
I have in my possession now a filthy piece of paper, dropping to bits,
on which is copied, in my round Board School boy handwriting, the
eleventh chapter of the _De Imitatione_.
It runs:
"_My Son, thou hast still many things to learn, which thou hast not well
learned yet._"
"_What are they, Lord_?"
"_To place thy desire altogether in subjection to my good pleasure and
not to be a lover of thyself, but an earnest seeker of my will. Thy
desires often excite and urge thee forward: but consider with thyself
whether thou art not more moved for thine own objects than for my
honour. If it is myself that thou seekest thou shalt be well content
with whatsoever I shall ordain; but if any pursuit of thine own lieth
hidden within thee, behold it is this which hindreth and weigheth thee
down._
"_Beware, therefore, lest thou strive too earnestly after some desire
which thou hast conceived, without taking counsel of me: lest haply it
repent thee afterwards, and that displease thee which before pleased,
and for which thou didst long as for a great good. For not every
affection which seemeth good is to be forthwith followed: neither is
every opposite affection to be immediately avoided. Sometimes it is
expedient to use restraint even in good desires and wishes, lest through
importunity thou fall into distraction of mind, lest through want of
discipline thou become a stumbling-block to others, or lest by the
resistance of others thou be suddenly disturbed and brought to
confusion._
"_Sometimes indeed it is needful to use violence, and manfully to strive
against the sensual appetite, and not to consider what the flesh may or
not will; but rather to strive after this, that it may become subject,
however unwillingly, to the spirit. And for so long it ought to be
chastised and compelled to undergo slavery, even until it be ready for
all things; and learn to be contented with little, to be delighted with
things simple, and never to murmur at any inconvenience._"
Let no one be shocked. It was one of the great acts of devotion of my
life. I copied this out as a boy, not because it counselled me in my
duty towards God, but because it summed up my whole duty to Paragot.
Paragot was "Me." I saw the relation between Paragot and myself in every
line. Had not I often fallen into distraction of mind over my drawing
and books when I ought to have been helping Mrs. Housekeeper downstairs?
Was it not want of discipline that made me a stumbling-block that
memorable night in the Club? Ought I not to be content with everything
Paragot should ordain? And was it not my duty to murmur at no
inconvenience?
Years afterwards I showed this paper to Paragot. He wept. Alas! I had
not well chosen my opportunity.
I remember, the night after I copied the chapter, Cherubino and I helped
Paragot up the stairs and put him to bed. It was the first time I had
seen him the worse for liquor. But when one has been accustomed to see
one's mother and all her adult acquaintances dead drunk, the spectacle
of a god slightly overcome with wine is neither here nor there.