"Oh, I like him! He's out of all that, and far above it. But what did
Mademoiselle Paule say?" I inquired.
"She said nothing--she only looked at me."
"Happy man!"
"Not a bit. She looked at me with strange eyes, in which I could read
'Go straight, my friend--go straight!' _Oh, les femmes, les femmes!_"
"What's the matter with them now?"
"They've a mortal hatred of art!"
"It's a true, deep instinct," said Alfred Bonus.
"But what passed further with Madame de Brindes?" I went on.
"She only got into her cab, pushing her daughter first; on which I
slammed the door rather hard and came up here. _Cela m'a porté sur les
nerfs._"
"I'm afraid I haven't soothed them," Bonus said, looking for his hat.
When he had found it he added: "When the English have beaten us and
pocketed our _milliards_ I'll forgive them; but not till then!" And with
this he went off, made a little uncomfortable, I think, by Vendemer's
sharper alternatives, while the young Frenchman called after him: "My
dear fellow, at night all cats are grey!"
Vendemer, when we were left alone together, mooned about the empty
studio awhile and asked me three or four questions about Heidenmauer. I
satisfied his curiosity as well as I could, but I demanded the reason of
it. The reason he gave was that one of the young German's compositions
had already begun to haunt his memory; but that was a reason which, to
my sense, still left something unexplained. I didn't however challenge
him, before he quitted me, further than to warn him against being
deliberately perverse.
"What do you mean by being deliberately perverse?" He fixed me so with
his intensely living French eye that I became almost blushingly
conscious of a certain insincerity and, instead of telling him what I
meant, tried to get off with the deplorable remark that the prejudices
of Mesdames de Brindes were after all respectable. "That's exactly what
makes them so odious!" cried Vendemer.
A few days after this, late in the afternoon, Herman Heidenmauer came in
to see me and found the young Frenchman seated at my piano--trying to
win back from the keys some echo of a passage in the _Abendlied_ we had
listened to on the Sunday evening. They met, naturally, as good friends,
and Heidenmauer sat down with instant readiness and gave him again the
page he was trying to recover. He asked him for his address, that he
might send him the composition, and at Vendemer's request, as we sat in
the firelight, played half-a-dozen other things. Vendemer listened in
silence but to my surprise took leave of me before the lamp was brought
in. I asked him to stay to dinner (I had already appealed to Heidenmauer
to stay), but he explained that he was engaged to dine with Madame de
Brindes--_à la maison_ as he always called it. When he had gone
Heidenmauer, with whom on departing he had shaken hands without a word,
put to me the same questions about him that Vendemer had asked on the
Sunday evening about the young German, and I replied that my visitor
would find in a small volume of remarkable verse published by Lemerre,
which I placed in his hands, much of the information he desired. This
volume, which had just appeared, contained, beside a reprint of
Vendemer's earlier productions, many of them admirable lyrics, the drama
that had lately been played at the Français, and Heidenmauer took it
with him when he left me. But he left me late, and before this occurred,
all the evening, we had much talk about the French nation. In the
foreign colony of Paris the exchange of opinions on this subject is one
of the most inevitable and by no means the least interesting of
distractions; it furnishes occupation to people rather conscious of the
burden of leisure. Heidenmauer had been little in Paris, but he was all
the more open to impressions; they evidently poured in upon him and he
gave them a generous hospitality. In the diffused white light of his
fine German intelligence old colours took on new tints to me, and while
we spun fancies about the wonderful race around us I added to my little
stock of notions about his own. I saw that his admiration for our
neighbours was a very high tide, and I was struck with something bland
and unconscious (noble and serene in its absence of precautions) in the
way he let his doors stand open to it. It would have been exasperating
to many Frenchmen; he looked at them through his clear spectacles with
such an absence of suspicion that they might have anything to forgive
him, such a thin metaphysical view of instincts and passions. He had the
air of not allowing for recollections and nerves, and would doubtless
give them occasion to make afresh some of their reflections on the tact
of _ces gens-là_.
A couple of days after I had given him Vendemer's book he came back to
tell me that he found great beauty in it. "It speaks to me--it speaks to
me," he said with his air of happy proof. "I liked the songs--I liked
the songs. Besides," he added, "I like the little romantic play--it has
given me wonderful ideas; more ideas than anything has done for a long
time. Yes--yes."
"What kind of ideas?"
"Well, this kind." And he sat down to the piano and struck the keys. I
listened without more questions, and after a while I began to
understand. Suddenly he said: "Do you know the words of _that_?" and
before I could answer he was rolling out one of the lyrics of the little
volume. The poem was strange and obscure, yet irresistibly beautiful,
and he had translated it into music still more tantalizing than itself.
He sounded the words with his German accent, barely perceptible in
English but strongly marked in French. He dropped them and took them up
again; he was playing with them, feeling his way. "_This_ is my idea!"
he broke out; he had caught it, in one of its mystic mazes, and he
rendered it with a kind of solemn freshness. There was a phrase he
repeated, trying it again and again, and while he did so he chanted the
words of the song as if they were an illuminating flame, an inspiration.
I was rather glad on the whole that Vendemer didn't hear what his
pronunciation made of them, but as I was in the very act of rejoicing I
became aware that the author of the verses had opened the door. He had
pushed it gently, hearing the music; then hearing also his own poetry he
had paused and stood looking at Heidenmauer. The young German nodded and
laughed and, irreflectively, spontaneously, greeted him with a friendly
"_Was sagen Sie dazu?_" I saw Vendemer change colour; he blushed red
and, for an instant, as he stood wavering, I thought he was going to
retreat. But I beckoned him in and, on the divan beside me, patted a
place for him to sit.
He came in but didn't take this place; he went and stood before the fire
to warm his feet, turning his back to us. Heidenmauer played and played,
and after a little Vendemer turned round; he looked about him for a
seat, dropped into it and sat with his elbows on his knees and his head
in his hands. Presently Heidenmauer called out, in French, above the
music: "I like your songs--I like them immensely!" but the young
Frenchman neither spoke nor moved. When however five minutes later
Heidenmauer stopped he sprang up with an entreaty to him to go on, to go
on for the love of God. "_Foilà--foilà!_" cried the musician, and with
hands for an instant suspended he wandered off into mysterious worlds.
He played Wagner and then Wagner again--a great deal of Wagner; in the
midst of which, abruptly, he addressed himself again to Vendemer, who
had gone still further from the piano, launching to me, however from his
corner a "_Dieu, que c'est beau!_" which I saw that Heidenmauer caught.
"I've a conception for an opera, you know--I'd give anything if you'd do
the libretto!" Our German friend laughed out, after this, with clear
good nature, and the rich appeal brought Vendemer slowly to his feet
again, staring at the musician across the room and turning this time
perceptibly pale.
I felt there was a drama in the air, and it made me a little nervous; to
conceal which I said to Heidenmauer: "What's your conception? What's
your subject?"
"My conception would be realized in the subject of M. Vendemer's
play--if he'll do that for me in a great lyric manner!" And with this
the young German, who had stopped playing to answer me, quitted the
piano and Vendemer got up to meet him. "The subject is splendid--it has
taken possession of me. Will you do it with me? Will you work with me?
We shall make something great!"
"Ah, you don't know what you ask!" Vendemer answered, with his pale
smile.
"I do--I do: I've thought of it. It will be bad for me in my country; I
shall suffer for it. They won't like it--they'll abuse me for
it--they'll say of me _pis que pendre._" Heidenmauer pronounced it _bis
que bendre._
"They'll hate my libretto so?" Vendemer asked.
"Yes, your libretto--they'll say it's immoral and horrible. And they'll
say _I'm_ immoral and horrible for having worked with you," the young
composer went on, with his pleasant healthy lucidity. "You'll injure my
career. Oh yes, I shall suffer!" he joyously, exultingly cried.
"_Et moi donc!_" Vendemer exclaimed.
"Public opinion, yes. I shall also make you suffer--I shall nip your
prosperity in the bud. All that's _des bêtises--tes pétisses_," said
poor Heidenmauer. "In art there are no countries."
"Yes, art is terrible, art is monstrous," Vendemer replied, looking at
the fire.
"I love your songs--they have extraordinary beauty."
"And Vendemer has an equal taste for your compositions," I said to
Heidenmauer.
"Tempter!" Vendemer murmured to me, with a strange look.
"_C'est juste!_ I mustn't meddle--which will be all the easier as I'm
dining out and must go and dress. You two make yourselves at home and
fight it out here."
"Do you _leave_ me?" asked Vendemer, still with his strange look.
"My dear fellow, I've only just time."
"We will dine together--he and I--at one of those characteristic places,
and we will look at the matter in its different relations," said
Heidenmauer. "Then we will come back here to finish--your studio is so
good for music."
"There are some things it _isn't_ good for," Vendemer remarked, looking
at our companion.
"It's good for poetry--it's good for truth," smiled the composer.
"You'll stay _here_ and dine together," I said; "my servant can manage
that."
"No, no--we'll go out and we'll walk together. We'll talk a great deal,"
Heidenmauer went on. "The subject is so comprehensive," he said to
Vendemer, as he lighted another cigar.
"The subject?"
"Of your drama. It's so universal."
"Ah, the universe--_il n'y a que ça!_" I laughed, to Vendemer, partly
with a really amused sense of the exaggerated woe that looked out of his
poetic eyes and that seemed an appeal to me not to forsake him, to throw
myself into the scale of the associations he would have to stifle, and
partly to encourage him, to express my conviction that two such fine
minds couldn't in the long run be the worse for coming to an agreement.
I might have been a more mocking Mephistopheles handing over his pure
spirit to my literally German Faust.
When I came home at eleven o'clock I found him alone in my studio,
where, evidently, for some time, he had been moving up and down in
agitated thought. The air was thick with Bavarian fumes, with the
reverberation of mighty music and great ideas, with the echoes of that
"universe" to which I had so mercilessly consigned him. But I judged in
a moment that Vendemer was in a very different phase of his evolution
from the one in which I had left him. I had never seen his handsome,
sensitive face so intensely illumined.
"_Ça y est--ça y est!_" he exclaimed, standing there with his hands in
his pockets and looking at me.
"You've really agreed to do something together?"
"We've sworn a tremendous oath--we've taken a sacred engagement."
"My dear fellow, you're a hero."
"Wait and see! _C'est un très-grand esprit._"
"So much the better!"
"_C'est un bien beau génie._ Ah, we've risen--we soar; _nous sommes
dans les grandes espaces!_" my friend continued with his dilated eyes.
"It's very interesting--because it will cost you something."
"It will cost me everything!" said Félix Vendemer in a tone I seem to
hear at this hour. "That's just the beauty of it. It's the chance of
chances to testify for art--to affirm an indispensable truth."
"An indispensable truth?" I repeated, feeling myself soar too, but into
the splendid vague.
"Do you know the greatest crime that can be perpetrated against it?"
"Against it?" I asked, still soaring.
"Against the religion of art--against the love for beauty--against the
search for the Holy Grail?" The transfigured look with which he named
these things, the way his warm voice filled the rich room, was a
revelation of the wonderful talk that had taken place.
"Do you know--for one of _us_--the really damnable, the only
unpardonable, sin?"
"Tell me, so that I may keep clear of it!"
"To profane _our_ golden air with the hideous invention of patriotism."
"It was a clever invention in its time!" I laughed.
"I'm not talking about its time--I'm talking about, its place. It was
never anything but a fifth-rate impertinence here. In art there are no
countries--no idiotic nationalities, no frontiers, nor _douanes_, nor
still more idiotic fortresses and bayonets. It has the unspeakable
beauty of being the region in which those abominations cease, the medium
in which such vulgarities simply can't live. What therefore are we to
say of the brutes who wish to drag them all in--to crush to death with
them all the flowers of such a garden, to shut out all the light of such
a sky?" I was far from desiring to defend the "brutes" in question,
though there rose before me even at that moment a sufficiently vivid
picture of the way, later on, poor Vendemer would have to face them. I
quickly perceived indeed that the picture was, to his own eyes, a still
more crowded canvas. Félix Vendemer, in the centre of it, was an
admirable, a really sublime figure. If there had been wonderful talk
after I quitted the two poets the wonder was not over yet--it went on
far into the night for my benefit. We looked at the prospect in many
lights, turned the subject about almost every way it would go; but I am
bound to say there was one relation in which we tacitly agreed to
forbear to consider it. We neither of us uttered the name of Paule de
Brindes--the outlook in that direction would too serious. And yet if
Félix Vendemer, exquisite and incorruptible artist that he was, had
fallen in love with the idea of "testifying," it was from that direction
that the finest part of his opportunity to do so would proceed.
I was only too conscious of this when, within the week, I received a
hurried note from Madame de Brindes, begging me as a particular favour
to come and see her without delay. I had not seen Vendemer again, but I
had had a characteristic call from Heidenmauer, who, though I could
imagine him perfectly in a Prussian helmet, with a needle-gun,
perfectly, on definite occasion, a sturdy, formidable soldier, gave me a
renewed impression of inhabiting, in the expansion of his genius and the
exercise of his intelligence, no land of red tape, no province smaller
nor more pedantically administered than the totality of things. I was
reminded afresh too that _he_ foresaw no striking salon-picture, no
_chic_ of execution nor romance of martyrdom, or at any rate devoted
very little time to the consideration of such objects. He doubtless did
scant justice to poor Vendemer's attitude, though he said to me of him
by the way, with his rosy deliberation: "He has good ideas--he has good
ideas. The French mind has--for me--the taste of a very delightful
_bonbon_!" He only measured the angle of convergence, as he called it,
of their two projections. He was in short not preoccupied with the
personal gallantry of their experiment; he was preoccupied with its
"æsthetic and harmonic basis."
It was without her daughter that Madame de Brindes received me, when I
obeyed her summons, in her scrap of a _quatrième_ in the Rue de
Miromesnil.
"Ah, _cher monsieur_, how could you have permitted such a horror--how
could you have given it the countenance of your roof, of your
influence?" There were tears in her eyes, and I don't think that for the
moment I have ever been more touched by a reproach. But I pulled myself
together sufficiently to affirm my faith as well as to disengage my
responsibility. I explained that there was no horror to me in the
matter, that if I was not a German neither was I a Frenchman, and that
all I had before me was two young men inflamed by a great idea and nobly
determined to work together to give it a great form.
"A great idea--to go over to _ces gens-là?_"
"To go over to them?"
"To put yourself on their side--to throw yourself into the arms of those
who hate us--to fall into their abominable trap!"
"What do you call their abominable trap?"
"Their false _bonhomie_, the very impudence of their intrigues, their
profound, scientific deceit and their determination to get the advantage
of us by exploiting our generosity."
"You attribute to such a man as Heidenmauer too many motives and too
many calculations. He's quite ideally superior!"
"Oh, German idealism--we know what that means! We've no use for their
superiority; let them carry it elsewhere--let them leave us alone. Why
do they thrust themselves in upon us and set old wounds throbbing by
their detested presence? We don't go near _them_, or ever wish to hear
their ugly names or behold their _visages de bois_; therefore the most
rudimentary good taste, the tact one would expect even from naked
savages, might suggest to them to seek their amusements elsewhere. But
_their_ taste, _their_ tact--I can scarcely trust myself to speak!"
Madame de Brindes did speak however at considerable further length and
with a sincerity of passion which left one quite without arguments.
There was no argument to meet the fact that Vendemer's attitude wounded
her, wounded her daughter, _jusqu'au fond de l'âme_, that it
represented for them abysses of shame and suffering and that for himself
it meant a whole future compromised, a whole public alienated. It was
vain doubtless to talk of such things; if people didn't _feel_ them, if
they hadn't the fibre of loyalty, the high imagination of honour, all
explanations, all supplications were but a waste of noble emotion. M.
Vendemer's perversity was monstrous--she had had a sickening discussion
with him. What she desired of me was to make one last appeal to him, to
put the solemn truth before him, to try to bring him back to sanity. It
was as if he had temporarily lost his reason. It was to be made clear to
him, _par exemple_, that unless he should recover it Mademoiselle de
Brindes would unhesitatingly withdraw from her engagement.
"Does she _really_ feel as you do?" I asked.
"Do you think I put words into her mouth? She feels as a _fille de
France_ is obliged to feel!"
"Doesn't she love him then?"
"She adores him. But she won't take him without his honour."
"I don't understand such refinements!" I said.
"Oh, _vous autres!_" cried Madame de Brindes. Then with eyes glowing
through her tears she demanded: "Don't you know she knows how her father
died?" I was on the point of saying "What has that to do with it?" but I
withheld the question, for after all I could conceive that it might have
something. There was no disputing about tastes, and I could only express
my sincere conviction that Vendemer was profoundly attached to
Mademoiselle Paule. "Then let him prove it by making her a sacrifice!"
my strenuous hostess replied; to which I rejoined that I would repeat
our conversation to him and put the matter before him as strongly as I
could. I delayed a little to take leave, wondering if the girl would not
come in--I should have been so much more content to receive her strange
recantation from her own lips. I couldn't say this to Madame de Brindes;
but she guessed I meant it, and before we separated we exchanged a look
in which our mutual mistrust was written--the suspicion on her side that
I should not be a very passionate intercessor and the conjecture on mine
that she might be misrepresenting her daughter. This slight tension, I
must add, was only momentary, for I have had a chance of observing Paule
de Brindes since then, and the two ladies were soon satisfied that I
pitied them enough to have been eloquent.
My eloquence has been of no avail, and I have learned (it has been one
of the most interesting lessons of my life) of what transcendent stuff
the artist may sometimes be made. Herman Heidenmauer and Félix Vendemer
are, at the hour I write, immersed in their monstrous collaboration.
There were postponements and difficulties at first, and there will be
more serious ones in the future, when it is a question of giving the
finished work to the world. The world of Paris will stop its ears in
horror, the German Empire will turn its mighty back, and the authors of
what I foresee (oh, I've been treated to specimens!) as a perhaps really
epoch-making musical revelation (is Heidenmauer's style rubbing off on
me?) will perhaps have to beg for a hearing in communities fatally
unintelligent. It may very well be that they will not obtain any hearing
at all for years. I like at any rate to think that time works for them.
At present they work for themselves and for each other, amid drawbacks
of several kinds. Separating after the episode in Paris, they have met
again on alien soil, at a little place on the Genoese Riviera where
sunshine is cheap and tobacco bad, and they live (the two together) for
five francs a day, which is all they can muster between them. It appears
that when Heidenmauer's London step-brother was informed of the young
composer's unnatural alliance he instantly withdrew his subsidy. The
return of it is contingent on the rupture of the unholy union and the
destruction by flame of all the manuscript. The pair are very poor and
the whole thing depends on their staying power. They are so preoccupied
with their opera that they have no time for pot-boilers. Vendemer is in
a feverish hurry, lest perhaps he should find himself chilled. There are
still other details which contribute to the interest of the episode and
which, for me, help to render it a most refreshing, a really great
little case. It rests me, it delights me, there is something in it that
makes for civilization. In their way they are working for human
happiness. The strange course taken by Vendemer (I mean his renunciation
of his engagement) must moreover be judged in the light of the fact that
he was really in love. Something had to be sacrificed, and what he clung
to most (he's extraordinary, I admit) was the truth he had the
opportunity of proclaiming. Men give up their love for advantages every
day, but they rarely give it up for such discomforts.
Paule de Brindes was the less in love of the two; I see her often enough
to have made up my mind about that. But she's mysterious, she's odd;
there was at any rate a sufficient wrench in her life to make her often
absent-minded. Does her imagination hover about Félix Vendemer? A month
ago, going into their rooms one day when her mother was not at home (the
_bonne_ had admitted me under a wrong impression) I found her at the
piano, playing one of Heidenmauer's compositions--playing it without
notes and with infinite expression. How had she got hold of it? How had
she learned it? This was her secret--she blushed so that I didn't pry
into it. But what is she doing, under the singular circumstances, with a
composition of Herman Heidenmauer's? She never met him, she never heard
him play but that once. It will be a pretty complication if it shall
appear that the young German genius made on that occasion more than one
intense impression. This needn't appear, however, inasmuch as, being
naturally in terror of the discovery by her mother of such an anomaly,
she may count on me absolutely not to betray her. I hadn't fully
perceived how deeply susceptible she is to music. She must have a
strange confusion of feelings--a dim, haunting trouble, with a kind of
ache of impatience for the wonderful opera somewhere in the depths of
it. Don't we live fast after all, and doesn't the old order change?
Don't say art isn't mighty! I shall give you some more illustrations of
it yet.