Louvre, through gilded gates well guarded by reckless imperial Zouaves,
up the arcaded Rue de Rivoli as far as the Rue Castiglione, where they
would stare with greedy eyes at the window of the great corner
pastry-cook, and marvel at the beautiful assortment of bonbons,
pralines, dragées, marrons glacés--saccharine, crystalline substances of
all kinds and colors, as charming to look at as an illumination;
precious stones, delicately frosted sweets, pearls and diamonds so
arranged as to melt in the mouth; especially, at this particular time of
the year, the monstrous Easter-eggs of enchanting hue, enshrined like
costly jewels in caskets of satin and gold; and the Laird, who was well
read in his English classics and liked to show it, would opine that
"they managed these things better in France."
Then across the street by a great gate into the Allée des Feuillants,
and up to the Place de la Concorde--to gaze, but quite without base
envy, at the smart people coming back from the Bois de Boulogne. For
even in Paris "carriage people" have a way of looking bored, of taking
their pleasure sadly, of having nothing to say to each other, as though
the vibration of so many wheels all rolling home the same way every
afternoon had hypnotized them into silence, idiocy, and melancholia.
And our three musketeers of the brush would speculate on the vanity of
wealth and rank and fashion; on the satiety that follows in the wake of
self-indulgence and overtakes it; on the weariness of the pleasures that
become a toil--as if they knew all about it, had found it all out for
themselves, and nobody else had ever found it out before!
Then they found out something else--namely, that the sting of healthy
appetite was becoming intolerable; so they would betake themselves to an
English eating-house in the Rue de la Madeleine (on the left-hand side
near the top), where they would renovate their strength and their
patriotism on British beef and beer, and household bread, and bracing,
biting, stinging yellow mustard, and horseradish, and noble apple-pie,
and Cheshire cheese; and get through as much of these in an hour or so
as they could for talking, talking, talking; such happy talk! as full of
sanguine hope and enthusiasm, of cocksure commendation or condemnation
of all painters, dead or alive, of modest but firm belief in themselves
and each other, as a Paris Easter-egg is full of sweets and pleasantness
(for the young).
And then a stroll on the crowded, well-lighted boulevards, and a bock at
the café there, at a little three-legged marble table right out on the
genial asphalt pavement, still talking nineteen to the dozen.
Then home by dark, old, silent streets and some deserted bridge to their
beloved Latin quarter, the Morgue gleaming cold and still and fatal in
the pale lamplight, and Notre Dame pricking up its watchful twin towers,
which have looked down for so many centuries on so many happy, sanguine,
expansive youths walking arm in arm by twos and threes, and forever
talking, talking, talking....
The Laird and Little Billee would see Taffy safe to the door of his
hôtel garni in the Rue de Seine, where they would find much to say to
each other before they said good-night--so much that Taffy and Little
Billee would see the Laird safe to _his_ door, in the Place St. Anatole
des Arts. And then a discussion would arise between Taffy and the Laird
on the immortality of the soul, let us say, or the exact meaning of the
word "gentleman," or the relative merits of Dickens and Thackeray, or
some such recondite and quite unhackneyed theme, and Taffy and the Laird
would escort Little Billee to _his_ door, in the Place de l'Odéon, and
he would re-escort them both back again, and so on till any hour you
please.
* * * * *
Or again, if it rained, and Paris through the studio window loomed
lead-colored, with its shiny slate roofs under skies that were ashen and
sober, and the wild west wind made woful music among the chimney-pots,
and little gray waves ran up the river the wrong way, and the Morgue
looked chill and dark and wet, and almost uninviting (even to three
healthy-minded young Britons), they would resolve to dine and spend a
happy evening at home.
[Illustration: "THREE MUSKETEERS OF THE BRUSH"]
Little Billee, taking with him three francs (or even four), would dive
into back streets and buy a yard or so of crusty new bread, well
burned on the flat side, a fillet of beef, a litre of wine, potatoes and
onions, butter, a little cylindrical cheese called "bondon de
Neufchâtel," tender curly lettuce, with chervil, parsley, spring onions,
and other fine herbs, and a pod of garlic, which would be rubbed on a
crust of bread to flavor things with.
Taffy would lay the cloth Englishwise, and also make the salad, for
which, like everybody else I ever met, he had a special receipt of his
own (putting in the oil first and the vinegar after); and indeed his
salads were quite as good as everybody else's.
The Laird, bending over the stove, would cook the onions and beef into a
savory Scotch mess so cunningly that you could not taste the beef for
the onions--nor always the onions for the garlic!
And they would dine far better than at le Père Trin's, far better than
at the English Restaurant in the Rue de la Madeleine--better than
anywhere else on earth!
And after dinner, what coffee, roasted and ground on the spot, what
pipes and cigarettes of "caporal," by the light of the three shaded
lamps, while the rain beat against the big north window, and the wind
went howling round the quaint old mediæval tower at the corner of the
Rue Vieille des Mauvais Ladres (the old street of the bad lepers), and
the damp logs hissed and crackled in the stove!
What jolly talk into the small hours! Thackeray and Dickens again, and
Tennyson and Byron (who was "not dead yet" in those days); and Titian
and Velasquez, and young Millais and Holman Hunt (just out); and
Monsieur Ingres and Monsieur Delacroix, and Balzac and Stendhal and
George Sand; and the good Dumas! and Edgar Allan Poe; and the glory that
was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome....
Good, honest, innocent, artless prattle--not of the wisest, perhaps, nor
redolent of the very highest culture (which, by-the-way, can mar as well
as make), nor leading to any very practical result; but quite
pathetically sweet from the sincerity and fervor of its convictions, a
profound belief in their importance, and a proud trust in their
life-long immutability.
Oh, happy days and happy nights, sacred to art and friendship! oh, happy
times of careless impecuniosity, and youth and hope and health and
strength and freedom--with all Paris for a playground, and its dear old
unregenerate Latin quarter for a workshop and a home!
And, up to then, no kill-joy complications of love!
No, decidedly no! Little Billee had never known such happiness as
this--never even dreamed of its possibility.
* * * * *
A day or two after this, our opening day, but in the afternoon, when the
fencing and boxing had begun and the trapeze was in full swing, Trilby's
"Milk below!" was sounded at the door, and she appeared--clothed this
time in her right mind, as it seemed: a tall, straight, flat-backed,
square-shouldered, deep-chested, full-bosomed young grisette, in a snowy
frilled cap, a neat black gown and white apron, pretty faded,
well-darned, brown stockings, and well-worn, soft, gray, square-toed
slippers of list, without heels and originally shapeless; but which her
feet, uncompromising and inexorable as boot-trees, had ennobled into
everlasting classic shapeliness, and stamped with an unforgettable
individuality, as does a beautiful hand its well-worn glove--a fact
Little Billee was not slow to perceive, with a curious conscious thrill
that was only half æsthetic.
Then he looked into her freckled face, and met the kind and tender
mirthfulness of her gaze and the plucky frankness of her fine wide smile
with a thrill that was not æsthetic at all (nor the reverse), but all of
the heart. And in one of his quick flashes of intuitive insight he
divined far down beneath the shining surface of those eyes (which seemed
for a moment to reflect only a little image of himself against the sky
beyond the big north window) a well of sweetness; and floating somewhere
in the midst of it the very heart of compassion, generosity, and warm
sisterly love; and under that--alas! at the bottom of all--a thin slimy
layer of sorrow and shame. And just as long as it takes for a tear to
rise and gather and choke itself back again, this sudden revelation
shook his nervous little frame with a pang of pity, and the knightly
wish to help. But he had no time to indulge in such soft emotions.
Trilby was met on her entrance by friendly greetings on all sides.
"Tiens! c'est la grande Trilby!" exclaimed Jules Guinot through his
fencing-mask. "Comment! t'es déjà debout après hier soir? Avons-nous
assez rigolé chez Mathieu, hein? Crénom d'un nom, quelle noce! V'là une
crémaillère qui peut se vanter d'être diantrement bien pendue, j'espère!
Et la petite santé, c'matin?"
"Hé, hé! mon vieux," answered Trilby. "Ça boulotte, apparemment! Et toi?
et Victorine? Comment qu'a s'porte à c't'heure? Elle avait un fier coup
d'chasselas! c'est-y jobard, hein? de s'fich 'paf comme ça d'vant
l'monde! Tiens, v'là, Gontran! ça marche-t-y, Gontran, Zouzou d'mon
coeur?"
[Illustration: TAFFY MAKES THE SALAD]
"Comme sur des roulettes, ma biche!" said Gontran, _alias_ l'Zouzou--a
corporal in the Zouaves. "Mais tu t'es donc mise chiffonnière, à
présent? T'as fait banqueroute?"
(For Trilby had a chiffonnier's basket strapped on her back, and carried
a pick and lantern.)
"Mais-z-oui, mon bon!" she said. "Dame! pas d'veine hier soir! t'as bien
vu! Dans la dêche jusqu'aux omoplates, mon pauv' caporal-sous-off! nom
d'un canon--faut bien vivre, s'pas?"
Little Billee's heart sluices had closed during this interchange of
courtesies. He felt it to be of a very slangy kind, because he couldn't
understand a word of it, and he hated slang. All he could make out was
the free use of the "tu" and the "toi," and he knew enough French to
know that this implied a great familiarity, which he misunderstood.
So that Jules Guinot's polite inquiries whether Trilby were none the
worse after Mathieu's house-warming (which was so jolly), Trilby's kind
solicitude about the health of Victorine, who had very foolishly taken a
drop too much on that occasion, Trilby's mock regrets that her own bad
luck at cards had made it necessary that she should retrieve her fallen
fortunes by rag-picking--all these innocent, playful little amenities
(which I have tried to write down just as they were spoken) were couched
in a language that was as Greek to him--and he felt out of it, jealous
and indignant.
"Good-afternoon to you, Mr. Taffy," said Trilby, in English. "I've
brought you these objects of art and virtu to make the peace with you.
They're the real thing, you know. I borrowed 'em from le père Martin,
chiffonnier en gros et en détail, grand officier de la Légion d'Honneur,
membre de l'Institut, et cetera, treize bis, Rue du Puits d'Amour,
rez-de-chaussée, au fond de la cour à gauche, vis-à-vis le
mont-de-piété! He's one of my intimate friends, and--"
"You don't mean to say you're the intimate friend of a _rag-picker_?"
exclaimed the good Taffy.
"Oh yes! Pourquoi pas? I never brag; besides, there ain't any beastly
pride about le père Martin," said Trilby, with a wink. "You'd soon find
that out if _you_ were an intimate friend of his. This is how it's put
on. Do you see? If _you_'ll put it on, I'll fasten it for you, and show
you how to hold the lantern and handle the pick. You may come to it
yourself some day, you know. Il ne faut jurer de rien! Père Martin will
pose for you in person, if you like. He's generally disengaged in the
afternoon. He's poor but honest, you know, and very nice and clean;
quite the gentleman. He likes artists, especially English--they pay. His
wife sells bric-à-brac and old masters: Rembrandts from two francs fifty
upwards. They've got a little grandson--a love of a child. I'm his
god-mother. You know French, I suppose?"
"Oh yes," said Taffy, much abashed. "I'm very much obliged to you--very
much indeed--a--I--a--"
"Y a pas d'quoi!" said Trilby, divesting herself of her basket and
putting it, with the pick and lantern, in a corner. "Et maintenant, le
temps d'absorber une fine de fin sec [a cigarette] et je m'la brise [I'm
off]. On m'attend à l'Ambassade d'Autriche. Et puis zut! Allez toujours,
mes enfants. En avant la boxe!"
She sat herself down cross-legged on the model-throne, and made herself
a cigarette, and watched the fencing and boxing. Little Billee brought
her a chair, which she refused; so he sat down on it himself by her
side, and talked to her, just as he would have talked to any young lady
at home--about the weather, about Verdi's new opera (which she had never
heard), the impressiveness of Notre Dame, and Victor Hugo's beautiful
romance (which she had never read), the mysterious charm of Leonardo da
Vinci's Lisa Gioconda's smile (which she had never seen)--by all of
which she was no doubt rather tickled and a little embarrassed, perhaps
also a little touched.
Taffy brought her a cup of coffee, and conversed with her in polite
formal French, very well and carefully pronounced; and the Laird tried
to do likewise. _His_ French was of that honest English kind that breaks
up the stiffness of even an English party; and his jolly manners were
such as to put an end to all shyness and constraint, and make
self-consciousness impossible.
Others dropped in from neighboring studios--the usual cosmopolite crew.
It was a perpetual come and go in this particular studio between four
and six in the afternoon.
There were ladies, too, _en cheveux_, in caps and bonnets, some of whom
knew Trilby, and thee'd and thou'd with familiar and friendly affection,
while others mademoiselle'd her with distant politeness, and were
mademoiselle'd and madame'd back again. "Absolument comme à l'Ambassade
d'Autriche," as Trilby observed to the Laird, with a British wink that
was by no means ambassadorial.
Then Svengali came and made some of his grandest music, which was as
completely thrown away on Trilby as fireworks on a blind beggar, for all
she held her tongue so piously.
Fencing and boxing and trapezing seemed to be more in her line; and
indeed, to a tone-deaf person, Taffy lunging his full spread with a
foil, in all the splendor of his long, lithe, youthful strength, was a
far gainlier sight than Svengali at the key-board flashing his languid
bold eyes with a sickly smile from one listener to another, as if to
say: "N'est-ce pas que che suis peau! N'est-ce pas que ch'ai tu chénie?
N'est-ce pas que che suis suplime, enfin?"
[Illustration: "THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE"]
Then enter Durien the sculptor, who had been presented with a baignoire
at the Porte St. Martin to see "La Dame aux Camélias," and he invited
Trilby and another lady to dine with him "au cabaret" and share his box.
So Trilby didn't go to the Austrian embassy after all, as the Laird
observed to Little Billee, with such a good imitation of her wink that
Little Billee was bound to laugh.
But Little Billee was not inclined for fun; a dulness, a sense of
disenchantment, had come over him; as he expressed it to himself, with
pathetic self-pity:
"A feeling of sadness and longing
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain."
And the sadness, if he had known, was that all beautiful young women
with kind sweet faces and noble figures and goddess-like extremities
should not be good and pure as they were beautiful; and the longing was
a longing that Trilby could be turned into a young lady--say the vicar's
daughter in a little Devonshire village--his sister's friend and
co-teacher at the Sunday-school; a simple, pure, and pious maiden of
gentle birth.
For he adored piety in woman, although he was not pious by any means.
His inarticulate, intuitive perceptions were not of form and color
secrets only, but strove to pierce the veil of deeper mysteries in
impetuous and dogmatic boyish scorn of all received interpretations. For
he flattered himself that he possessed the philosophical and scientific
mind, and piqued himself on thinking clearly, and was intolerant of
human inconsistency.
That small reserve portion of his ever-active brain which should have
lain fallow while the rest of it was at work or play, perpetually
plagued itself about the mysteries of life and death, and was forever
propounding unanswerable arguments against the Christian belief, through
a kind of inverted sympathy with the believer. Fortunately for his
friends, Little Billee was both shy and discreet, and very tender of
other people's feelings; so he kept all his immature juvenile
agnosticism to himself.
To atone for such ungainly strong-mindedness in one so young and tender,
he was the slave of many little traditional observances which have no
very solid foundation in either science or philosophy. For instance, he
wouldn't walk under a ladder for worlds, nor sit down thirteen to
dinner, nor have his hair cut on a Friday, and was quite upset if he
happened to see the new moon through glass. And he believed in lucky and
unlucky numbers, and dearly loved the sights and scents and sounds of
high-mass in some dim old French cathedral, and found them secretly
comforting.
Let us hope that he sometimes laughed at himself, if only in his sleeve!
And with all his keenness of insight into life he had a well-brought-up,
middle-class young Englishman's belief in the infallible efficacy of
gentle birth--for gentle he considered his own and Taffy's and the
Laird's, and that of most of the good people he had lived among in
England--all people, in short, whose two parents and four grandparents
had received a liberal education and belonged to the professional class.
And with this belief he combined (or thought he did) a proper democratic
scorn for bloated dukes and lords, and even poor inoffensive baronets,
and all the landed gentry--everybody who was born an inch higher up than
himself.
It is a fairly good middle-class social creed, if you can only stick to
it through life in despite of life's experience. It fosters independence
and self-respect, and not a few stodgy practical virtues as well. At all
events, it keeps you out of bad company, which is to be found both above
and below.
And all this melancholy preoccupation, on Little Billee's part, from the
momentary gleam and dazzle of a pair of over-perfect feet in an
over-æsthetic eye, too much enamoured of mere form!
Reversing the usual process, he had idealized from the base upward!
Many of us, older and wiser than Little Billee, have seen in lovely
female shapes the outer garment of a lovely female soul. The instinct
which guides us to do this is, perhaps, a right one, more often than
not. But more often than not, also, lovely female shapes are terrible
complicators of the difficulties and dangers of this earthly life,
especially for their owner, and more especially if she be a humble
daughter of the people, poor and ignorant, of a yielding nature, too
quick to love and trust. This is all so true as to be trite--so trite as
to be a common platitude!
A modern teller of tales, most widely (and most justly) popular, tells
us of heroes and heroines who, like Lord Byron's corsair, were linked
with one virtue and a thousand crimes. And so dexterously does he weave
his story that the young person may read it and learn nothing but good.
My poor heroine was the converse of these engaging criminals: she had
all the virtues but one; but the virtue she lacked (the very one of all
that plays the title-role, and gives its generic name to all the rest of
that goodly company) was of such a kind that I have found it impossible
so to tell her history as to make it quite fit and proper reading for
the ubiquitous young person so dear to us all.
Most deeply to my regret. For I had fondly hoped it might one day be
said of me that whatever my other literary shortcomings might be, I at
least had never penned a line which a pure-minded young British mother
might not read aloud to her little blue-eyed babe as it lies sucking its
little bottle in its little bassinet.
Fate has willed it otherwise.
Would indeed that I could duly express poor Trilby's one shortcoming in
some not too familiar medium--in Latin or Greek, let us say--lest the
young person (in this ubiquitousness of hers, for which Heaven be
praised) should happen to pry into these pages when her mother is
looking another way.
Latin and Greek are languages the young person should not be taught to
understand--seeing that they are highly improper languages, deservedly
dead--in which pagan bards who should have known better have sung the
filthy loves of their gods and goddesses.
But at least am I scholar enough to enter one little Latin plea on
Trilby's behalf--the shortest, best, and most beautiful plea I can think
of. It was once used in extenuation and condonation of the frailties of
another poor weak woman, presumably beautiful, and a far worse offender
than Trilby, but who, like Trilby, repented of her ways, and was most
justly forgiven--
"Quia multum amavit!"
[Illustration: TRILBY'S FOREBEARS]
Whether it be an aggravation of her misdeeds or an extenuating
circumstance, no pressure of want, no temptations of greed or vanity,
had ever been factors in urging Trilby on her downward career after her
first false step in that direction--the result of ignorance, bad advice
(from her mother, of all people in the world), and base betrayal. She
might have lived in guilty splendor had she chosen, but her wants were
few. She had no vanity, and her tastes were of the simplest, and she
earned enough to gratify them all, and to spare.
So she followed love for love's sake only, now and then, as she would
have followed art if she had been a man--capriciously, desultorily, more
in a frolicsome spirit of camaraderie than anything else. Like an
amateur, in short--a distinguished amateur who is too proud to sell his
pictures, but willingly gives one away now and then to some highly
valued and much admiring friend.
Sheer gayety of heart and genial good-fellowship, the difficulty of
saying nay to earnest pleading. She was "bonne camarade et bonne fille"
before everything. Though her heart was not large enough to harbor more
than one light love at a time (even in that Latin quarter of genially
capacious hearts), it had room for many warm friendships; and she was
the warmest, most helpful, and most compassionate of friends, far more
serious and faithful in friendship than in love.
Indeed, she might almost be said to possess a virginal heart, so little
did she know of love's heartaches and raptures and torments and
clingings and jealousies.
With her it was lightly come and lightly go, and never come back again;
as one or two, or perhaps three, picturesque bohemians of the brush or
chisel had found, at some cost to their vanity and self-esteem; perhaps
even to a deeper feeling--who knows?
Trilby's father, as she had said, had been a gentleman, the son of a
famous Dublin physician and friend of George the Fourth's. He had been a
fellow of his college, and had entered holy orders. He also had all the
virtues but one; he was a drunkard, and began to drink quite early in
life. He soon left the Church, and became a classical tutor, and failed
through this besetting sin of his, and fell into disgrace.
Then he went to Paris, and picked up a few English pupils there, and
lost them, and earned a precarious livelihood from hand to mouth,
anyhow; and sank from bad to worse.
And when his worst was about reached, he married the famous tartaned and
tamoshantered bar-maid at the Montagnards Écossais, in the Rue du
Paradis Poissonnière (a very fishy paradise indeed); she was a most
beautiful Highland lassie of low degree, and she managed to support him,
or helped him to support himself, for ten or fifteen years. Trilby was
born to them, and was dragged up in some way--_à la grâce de Dieu!_
Patrick O'Ferrall soon taught his wife to drown all care and
responsibility in his own simple way, and opportunities for doing so
were never lacking to her.
Then he died, and left a posthumous child--born ten months after his
death, alas! and whose birth cost its mother her life.