OF DOMESTIC ECONOMY, OF DAY-DREAMS, AND OF A FAR COUNTRY AND ITS
SOVEREIGN LADY
L'indiscretion d'un de ces amis officieux qui ne sauraient
garder inedite la nouvelle susceptible de vous causer un
chagrin.--Murger: _Scenes de la Vie de Boheme_.
You would have said that it behooved a man in Charlie Cartaret's
situation to devote his evenings to a consideration of its
difficulties and his days to hard work; but Cartaret, though he did,
as you will see, try to work, devoted the first evening of his new
regime to thoughts that, if they affected his situation at all, tended
only to complicate it. He thought, as he had so much of late, and as
he was to think so much more in the future, of the Lady of the Rose.
Who was she? Whence did she come? What was this native land of hers
that she professed to love so well? And, if she did love it so well,
why had she left it and come to Paris with a companion that appeared
to be some strange compromise between guardian and servant?
He wondered if she were some revolutionary exile: Paris was always
full of revolutionary exiles. He wondered if she were a rightful
heiress, dispossessed of a foreign title. Perhaps she was the lovely
pretender to a throne. In that mysterious home of hers, she must have
possessed some exalted position, or the right to it, for Chitta had
kneeled to her on the dusty floor of this studio, and the Lady's
manner, he now recalled, was the manner of one accustomed to command.
Her beauty was of a type that he had read of as Irish--the beauty of
fair skin, hair black and eyes of deepest blue; but the speech was the
English of a woman born to another tongue.
What was her native speech? Both her French and her English were
innocent of alien accent--he had heard at least a phrase or two of the
former--yet both had a precision that betrayed them as not her own and
both had a foreign-born construction. Her frequent use of the word
"sir" in addressing him was sufficiently peculiar. She employed the
word not as one that speaks frequently to a superior, but rather as if
she were used to it in a formal language, or a grade of life, in which
it was a common courtesy. It was something more usual than the French
"monsieur," even more usual than the Spanish "senor."
Cartaret leaned from a window. The air was still keen, but the night
was clear. The rue du Val de Grace was deserted, its houses dark and
silent. Overhead, in the narrow ribbon of indigo sky, hung a pallid
moon: a disk of yellow glass.
What indeed was she, this Lady of the Rose? He pictured as hers a
distant country of deep valleys full of clamoring streams and high
mountains where white roses grew. He pictured her as that country's
sovereign. Yet the rose which she treasured had not yet faded on the
day of her arrival: she could not come from anywhere so far away.
He was cold. He closed the window, shivering. He was ridiculous: why,
he had been in danger of falling in love with a woman of whom he knew
nothing! He did not even know her name....
* * * * *
The passage of slow-footed time helped him, however, not at all. He
would sit for hours, idle before his easel, listening for her light
step on the stair and afraid to go to meet her when at last he heard
it, for he was desperately poor now, and poverty was making him the
coward that it will sooner or later make any man.
He had antagonized the concierge by preparing his own coffee in the
morning instead of continuing to pay Mme. Refrogne for it. When he had
something to cook, he cooked badly; but there were days when he had
nothing, and lived on pastry and bricks of chocolate, and others when
it seemed to him that such supplies as he could buy and store on that
shelf outside the window were oddly short-lived.
For a while he called daily at the shop of M. Lepoittevin, but that
absurd picture of a boy tearing a rose would not sell, and Cartaret
soon grew ashamed of calling there; Fourget he would not face. He
managed at first to dispose of one or two sketches and so kept barely
alive, yet, as the days went by, his luck dwindled and his greatest
energy was expended in keeping up a proud pretense of comfort to his
friends of the Quarter.
Pear-shaped Devignes was easy to deceive: the opera-singer lived too
well to want to believe that anybody in the world could starve.
Garnier, the cadaverous poet, saved trouble, indulging his dislike of
other people's poverty by remaining away from it; but Seraphin, who
came often and sat about the studio in a silence wholly
uncharacteristic, was difficult. Houdon, finally, was frequent and
expensive: he always foraged about what he called Cartaret's "tempting
window-buffet," but he regarded the condition of affairs as the
passing foible of a young man temporarily wearied by the pleasures of
wealth.
"Ah," he snorted one day when he had come in with Varachon, "you fail
wholly to deceive me, Cartarette. You say you are not well-to-do so
that we shall think that you are not, but I know, I! Had you not your
own income, you would try to sell more pictures, and your pictures are
superb. They would fetch a pretty sum. Believe not that because I have
a great musical genius I have no eye for painting. I know good
painting. All Arts are one, my brother."
He jabbed Cartaret's empty stomach and, whistling a theme and twisting
his little mustache, went to the window and took a huge bite of the
last apple there.
Cartaret watched the composer toss half the apple into the concierge's
garden.
Varachon, the sculptor, grunted through his broken nose.
"Your work is bad," he whispered to Cartaret--"very bad. You require a
long rest. Go to Nice for a month."
The weeks passed. Cartaret was underfed and discouraged. He was too
discouraged now to attempt to renew his acquaintance with the Lady of
the Rose. He was pale and thin, and this from reasons wholly physical.
Meanwhile, through the scented dawns, April was coming up to that
city in which April is most beautiful and most seductive. From the
spicy Mediterranean coasts, along the Valley of the Rhone, Love was
dancing upon Paris with laughing Spring for his partner. Already the
trees had blossomed between the Place de La Concorde and the Rond
Point, and out in the Bois the birds were singing to their mates.
One morning, when Cartaret, with unsteady hand, drew back his curtain,
_rouge-gorges_ were calling from the concierge's garden, and seemed to
be calling to him.
"Seize hold of love!" they chorused in that garden. "Life is short;
time flies, and love flies with it. Love will pass you by. Take it,
take it, take it, while there still is time! Like us, it is a bird
that flies, but, unlike us, it never more returns. It is a rose that
withers--a white rose: take it while it blooms. Take it, though it
leave you soon; take it, though it scratch your fingers. Take it, take
it, take it now!"
On that day the annual siege of Paris ended, the city fell before her
invaders, and by the time that Cartaret went into the streets, the
army of occupation was in possession. The Luxembourg Gardens, the very
benches along the Boul' Miche' were full of lovers: he could not stir
from the house without encountering them.
From it, however, he had to go: the Spring called him with a sad
seductiveness that he could no longer resist. He wandered aimlessly,
trying the impossible: trying to keep his eyes from the couples that
also wandered, but wandered hand in hand, and trying to keep his
thoughts from roses and the Lady of the Rose.
He found himself before one of the riverside bookstalls, fingering an
old book, leather-bound. The text, he realized, was English, or what
once was so: it was a volume of Maundeville, and Cartaret was reading:
"Betwene the cytee and the chirche of Bethlehem is the felde Floridus;
that is to seyne, the field florsched. For als moche as a fayre mayden
was blamed with wrong ... for whiche cause sche was demed to the
dethe, and to be brent in that place, to the which she was ladd. And,
as the fyre began to brenne about hire, she made her preyeres to oure
Lord, that als wissely as sche was not gylty ... that he would help
hire, and make it to be knowen to alle men of his mercyfulle grace.
And, whanne sche had thus seyd, sche entered into the fuyer; and anon
was the fuyer quenched and oute, and the brondes that weren brennynge
becomen white roseres, full of roses; and theise werein the first
roseres and roses, both white and rede, that ever ony man saughe. And
thus was this mayden saved by the grace of God." ...
All that week--while the contents of his window-sideboard dwindled, he
was sure, faster than he ate from it--he had tried to forget
everything by painting heavily at pot-boilers. He had begun with the
aim of earning enough to resume his studies; he had continued with the
hope of getting together enough to keep alive--in Paris. And yet,
fleeing from that bookstall, he was fool enough to walk all the way to
Les Halles, to walk into Les Halles, and to stop, fascinated by a
counter laden with boxes of strawberries, odorous and red, the
smallest box of which was beyond the limits of his economy.
That was bad enough--it was absurd that his will should voluntarily
play the Barmecide for the torture of his unrewarded Shacabac of a
stomach--but worse, without fault of his own, was yet to follow this
mere aggravation of his baser appetites. Spring and Paris are an
irresistible combination on the side of folly, and that evening
another sign of them presented itself: there was a burst of music; a
hurdy-gurdy was playing in the rue du Val de Grace, and Cartaret, from
his window, listened eagerly. It has been intimated from the best of
sources that all love lives on music, and it is the common experience
that when any love cannot get the best music, it takes what it can
get:
"Her brow is like the snaw-drift;
Her throat is like the swan;
Her face it is the fairest
That e'er the sun shone on--
That e'er the sun shone on--
And dark blue is her e'e----"
That French hurdy-gurdy was playing "Annie Laurie," and, since the
lonely artist's heart ached to hear the old, familiar melody, when the
bearded grinder looked aloft, Cartaret drew a coin from his pocket.
Anxious to pay for his pain, as the human kind always is, he tossed
his last franc to that vendor of emotions in the twilit street.
He was drunk at last with the wine that his own misery distilled. He
abandoned himself to the admission that he was in love: he abandoned
himself to his dream of the Lady of the Rose.
Seraphin, in a wonderful new suit of clothes, found him thus the next
morning--it was a Friday--and found him accordingly resentful of
intrusion. Cartaret was sitting before an empty easel, his hands
clasped in his lap, his eyes looking vacantly through the posts of the
easel.
"Good-day," said Seraphin.
Cartaret said "Good-day" as if it were a form of insult.
Seraphin's hands tugged at his two wisps of whisker.
"You are not well, _hein_?"
"I was never better in my life," snapped Cartaret, turning upon his
friend a face that was peaked and drawn.
The Frenchman came timidly nearer.
"My friend," he said, "I have completed my _magnum opus_. It has not
sold quite so well as I hoped, not of course one thousandth of its
value. That is this Spanish cow of a world. But I have three hundred
francs. If you need----"
"Go away," said Cartaret, looking at his empty easel. "Can't you see
I'm trying to begin work?"
Seraphin himself had suffered. His dignity was not offended: he kept
it for only his creditors and other foes. He guessed that Cartaret was
at last penniless, and he guessed rightly.
"Come, my friend," he began; "none shall know. Will you not be so kind
as to let me----"
Cartaret got up and, for all his weakness, gripped the Frenchman's
hand until Dieudonne nearly screamed.
"I'm a beast, Seraphin!" said Cartaret. "I'm a beast to treat a
friendly offer this way. Forgive me. It's just that I feel a bit rocky
this morning. I drank too much champagne last night. I do thank you,
Seraphin. You're a good fellow, the best of the lot, and a sight
better than I am. But I'm not hard up; really I'm not. I'm poor, but
I'm not a sou poorer than I was this time last year."
It was a magnificent lie. Seraphin could only shrug, pretend to
believe it, and go away.
Cartaret scarcely heeded the departure. He had relapsed into his
day-dream. He took from against the wall the two portraits that he had
painted of the Lady of the Rose and hung them, now here, now there,
trying them in various lights. There were at least ten more sketches
of her by this time, and these, too, he hung in first one light and
then another. He studied them and tried to be critical, and forgot to
be.
His thoughts of her never took the shape of conscious words--he loved
her too much to attempt to praise her--but, as he looked at his
endeavors to portray her, his mind was busy with his memories of all
that loveliness--and passed from memories to day-dreams. He saw her as
something that might fade before his touch. He saw her as a Princess,
incognito, learning his plight, buying his pictures secretly, and,
when she came to her throne, letting him serve her and worship from
afar. And then he saw her even as a Galatea possible of miraculous
awakening. Why not? Her eyes were the clear eyes of a woman that has
never yet loved, but they were also, he felt, the eyes of one of those
rare women who, when they love once, love forever. Cartaret dared, in
his thoughts, to lift the heavy plaits of her blue-black hair and,
with trembling fingers, again to touch that hand at the recollection
of touching which his own hand tingled.
Why not, indeed? Already a stranger thing had happened in his meeting
her. Until that year he had not guessed at her existence; oceans
divided them; the barriers of alien race and alien speech were raised
high between them, and all of these things had been in vain. The
existence was revealed, the ocean was crossed, the bar of sundering
speech was down. He was here, close beside her, as if every event of
his life had been intended to bring him. Through blind ways and up
ascents misunderstood, unattracted by the many and lonely among the
crowd, he had, somehow, always been making his way toward--Her.
Thus Cartaret dreamed while Seraphin made a hurried journey to the rue
St. Andre des Arts and the shop of M. Fourget.
"But no, but no, but no!" Fourget's bushy brows met in a frown. "It is
out of the question. Something has happened to the boy. He can no
longer paint."
Oh, well, at least monsieur could go to the boy's rooms and see what
he had there.
"No. Am I then a silly philanthropist?"
Seraphin tried to produce his false dignity. What he brought out was
something genuine.
"I ask it from the heart," he pleaded. "Do not I, my God, know what
it is to be hungry?"
"Hungry?" said the dealer. "Hungry! The boy has an uncle famously
rich. What is an uncle for? Hungry? You make _une betise_. Hungry." He
called his clerk and took up his hat. "I will not go," he vowed.
"Hungry, _par example_!"
"Truly you will not," smiled Seraphin. "And do not tell him that I
sent you: he is proud."
* * * * *
The sound of the door opening interrupted Cartaret's dream. He turned,
a little sheepish, wholly annoyed. Spectacled Fourget stood there,
looking very severe.
"I was passing by," he explained. "I have not come to purchase
anything, but I grow old: I was tired and I climbed your stairs to
rest."
It was too late to hide those portraits. Cartaret could only place for
Fourget a chair with its back to them.
"What have you been doing?" asked the dealer.
He swung 'round toward the portraits.
"Don't look at them!" said Cartaret. "They're merely sketches."
But Fourget had already looked. He was on his feet. He was bobbing
from one to the other, his lean hands adjusting his glasses, his
shoulders stooped, his nose thrust out. He was uttering little cries
of approval.
"But this is good! It is good, then. This is first-rate. This is of an
excellence!"
"They're not for sale," said Cartaret.
"_Hein?_" Fourget wheeled. "If they are not for sale, they are for
what, then?"
"They--they are merely sketches, I tell you. I was trying my hand at a
new method; but I find there is nothing in it."
Fourget was unbuttoning his short frock-coat. He was reaching for his
wallet.
"I tell you there is everything in it. There is the sure touch in it,
the clear vision, the sympathy. There is reputation in it. In fine,
there is money."
He had the wallet out as he concluded.
Cartaret shook his head.
"Oh," said Fourget, the dealer in him partially overcoming the lover
of art, "not much as yet; not a great deal of money. You have still a
long way to go; but you have found the road, monsieur, and I want to
help you on your journey. Come, now." He nodded to the first portrait.
"What do you ask for that?"
"I don't want to sell it."
"Poof! We shall not haggle. Tell Fourget what you had thought of
asking. Do not be modest. Tell me--and I will give you half."
He kept it up as long as he could; he tried at last to buy the least
of the preliminary sketches of the Rose-Lady; he offered what, to
Cartaret, were dazzling prices; but Cartaret was not to be shaken:
these experiments were not for sale.
Fourget was first disappointed, then puzzled. His enthusiasm had been
genuine; but could it be possible that Dieudonne was mistaken? Was
Cartaret not starving? The old man was beginning to button his coat
when a new idea struck him.
"Who was your model?" he asked abruptly.
"I--I had none," Cartaret stammered.
"Ah!"--Fourget peered hard at him through those glistening spectacles.
"You painted them from memory?"
"Yes." Cartaret felt his face redden. "From imagination, I mean."
Then Fourget understood. Perhaps he had merely the typical Frenchman's
love of romance, which ceases only with the typical Frenchman's life;
or perhaps he remembered his own youth in Besancon, when he, too, had
wanted to be an artist and when, among the vines on the hillside,
little Rosalie smiled at him and kissed his ambition away--little
Rosalie Poullot, dust and ashes these twenty years in the Cimetiere du
Mont Parnasse....
He turned to a pile of pot-boilers. He took one almost at random.
"This one," he said, "I should like to buy it."
It was the worst pot-boiler of the lot. Before the portraits, it was
hopeless.
Cartaret half understood.
"No," he said; "you don't really want it."
Seraphin had been right: the young man was proud. "How then?" demanded
Fourget. "This also did you paint not-to-sell?"
"I painted it to sell," said Cartaret miserably, "but it doesn't
deserve selling--perhaps just because I did paint it to sell."
To his surprise, Fourget came to him and put an arm on his shoulder, a
withered hand patting the American's back.
"Ah, if but some more-famous artists felt as you do! Come; let me have
it. That is very well. I shall sell it to a fool. Many fools are my
patrons. How else could I live? There is not enough good art to meet
all demands, or there are not enough demands to meet all good art. Who
shall say? Suffice it there are demands of sorts. Daily I thank the
good God for His fools...."
Cartaret went to Les Halles and bought a large box of strawberries.
* * * * *
He had put them carefully on his window-shelf and covered them with a
copy of a last week's _Matin_--being an American, he of course read
the _Matin_--for he was resolved that, now he again had a little
money, these strawberries should be his final extravagance and should
be treasured accordingly--he had just anchored the paper against the
gentle Spring breeze when he became aware that he had another visitor.
Standing by his table, much as she had stood there on the night of his
second sight of her, was the Lady of the Rose.
Cartaret thought that his eyes were playing him tricks. He rubbed his
eyes.
"It is I," she said.
He thought that again he could detect the perfume of the Azure Rose.
He again thought that he could see white mountain-tops in the sun. He
could have sworn that, in the street, a hurdy-gurdy was playing:
"Her brow is like the snaw-drift;
Her throat is like the swan----"
"I came in," she was saying, "to see how you were. I should have sent
Chitta, but she was so long coming back from an errand."
"Thank you," he said--he was not yet certain of himself--"I'm quite
well. But I'm very glad you called."
"Yet you, sir, look pale, and your friend"--her forehead
puckered--"told me that you had been ill."
"My friend?" He spoke as if he had none in the world, though now he
knew better.
"Yes: such a pleasant old gentleman with gray hair and glasses. As I
came in half an hour ago, I met him on the stairs."
"Fourget!"
"Was that his name? He seemed most anxious about you."
"He is my friend."
"I like him," said the Lady of the Rose.
"Then you understand him. I didn't understand him--till this morning.
He is an art-dealer: those that he won't buy from think him hard; the
friends of those that he buys from think him a fool."
Although he had reassured her of his health, she seemed charmingly
willing to linger. Really, she was looking at Cartaret's haggard
cheeks with a wonderful sympathy.
"So he bought from you?"
Cartaret nodded.
"Only I hope _you_ won't think him a fool," he said.
"I shall consider," she laughed. "I must first see some of your work,
sir."
She came farther into the room. She moved with an easy dignity, her
advance into the light displaying the lines of her gracile figure, the
turn of her head discovering the young curve of her throat; her eyes,
as they moved about his studio, were clear and starry.
In the presence of their original, Cartaret had forgotten the
portraits. Now she saw them and turned scarlet.
It was a time for no more pride on the part of the painter: already,
head high in air, she had turned to go. It was a time for honest
dealing. Cartaret barred her way.
"Forgive me!" he cried. "Won't you please forgive me?"
She tried to pass him without a word.
"But listen. Only listen a minute! You didn't think--oh, you didn't
think I'd sold him one of those? They were on the wall when he came
in, and I couldn't get them away in time. I'd put them up--Well, I'd
put them up there because I--because I couldn't see you, so I wanted
to see them."
His voice trembled; he looked ill now: she hesitated.
"What right had you, sir, to paint them?"
"I don't know. I hadn't any. Of course, I hadn't any! But I wouldn't
have sold them to the Luxembourg."
What was it that Fourget had told her when he met her on the
stair?--"Mademoiselle, you will pardon an old man: that Young
Cartarette cannot paint pot-boilers, and in consequence he starves.
For more things than money, mademoiselle. But because he cannot paint
pot-boilers and get money, he starves literally."--Her heart smote her
now, but she could not refrain from saying:
"Perhaps the Luxembourg did not offer--in the person of M. Fourget?"
The last vestige of his pride left Cartaret.
"He wanted to buy those portraits," he said. "I know that my action
loses by the telling of it whatever virtue it might have had, but I'd
rather have that happen than have you think what you've been thinking.
He offered me more for them than for all my other pictures together,
but I couldn't sell."
It was a mood not to be denied: she forgave him.
"But you, sir, must take them all down," she said, "and you must
promise to paint no more of them."
He would have promised anything: he promised this, and he had an
immediate reward.
"To-morrow," she asked, "perhaps you will eat _dejeuner_ with Chitta
and me?"
Would he! He did not know that she invited him because of Fourget's
use of the phrase "starving literally." He accepted, declaring that he
would never more call Friday unlucky.
"At eleven o'clock?" she asked.
"At eleven," he bowed.
When she was gone, Cartaret went again to the window that looked on
the concierge's garden. The robins were still singing:
"Seize hold of love! It is a rose--a white rose. Take it--take
it--take it now!"