manner of his life, passed aloof from actuality, in a studio au
cinquième, alone with his colour-tubes and his ideals; but I think it
was due in part also to his temperament. He was the sort of man of whom
those who know him will exclaim, when his name comes up, “Ah yes—the
dear fellow!” Everybody liked him, and all laughed at him more or
less. He was extremely simple-minded and trustful, very quiet, very
modest, very gentle and sympathetic; by no means without wit, nor
altogether without humour, yet in the main disposed to take things a
trifle too seriously in a world where levity tempered by suspicion is
the only safe substitute for a wholesome, whole-souled cynicism. Though
an uncompromising realist in his theories, I suspect that down at bottom
he was inclined to be romantic, if not even sentimental. His friends
would generally change the subject when he came into the room, because
to the ordinary flavour of men’s talk he showed a womanish repugnance.
In the beginning, on this account, they had of course voted him a prig;
but they had ended by regarding it as a bothersome little eccentricity,
that must be borne with in view of his many authentic virtues.
For the rest, he had a sweet voice, a good figure and carriage, a
clean-cut Saxon face, and a pleasing, graceful talent, which, in the
course of time, fostered by industry, had brought him an honourable
mention, several medals, then the red ribbon, and at last the red
rosette.
He was what they call a successful man; and he had succeeded in a career
where success carries a certain measure of celebrity: yet it was a habit
of his mind to think of himself as a failure. This was partly because
he had too just a realising sense of the nature of art, to fancy that
success in art—success in giving material form to the visions of the
imagination—is ever possible; an artist might be defined as one whose
mission it is to fail. At all events, neither medals nor decorations
could blind him to the circumstance that there was a terrible gulf
between what he had intended and what he had accomplished, between the
great pictures of his dreams and the canvasses that bore his signature.
But in thinking of himself as a failure, I am sure he was chiefly
influenced by the recollection that he had not been able to marry that
dark-eyed young American girl twenty years before.
At first it had changed life to a sort of waking nightmare for him. He
had come abroad with a heart that felt as if it had been crushed between
the upper and the nether millstones. His ambition was dead, and his
interest in the world. He could not work, because he could see no colour
in the sky, and nothing but futility in art; and he could not play,—he
could not throw himself into the dissipations of the Quarter, and so
benumb his hurt a little with immediate physical excitements,—because
pleasure in all its forms had lost its savour. Then a kindly Providence
interposed, and ordained that he should drink a glass of infected water,
or breathe a mouthful of poisoned air, and fall ill of typhoid fever,
and forget; and when he was convalescent, and remembered again, he
remembered this: that she had sworn on her soul to be constant to him.
Whereupon he said, “I will work like twenty Trojans, and annihilate
time, and earn money, and go home with an assured position; and then her
parents can have no further pretext for withholding their consent.” In
this resolution he found great comfort.
He had been working like twenty Trojans for about a twelvemonth, when he
got the news of her marriage to the other man.
It chanced to reach him (in a letter from a friend, saying it would be
celebrated in a fortnight) on the very day of its occurrence; and that,
by a pleasant coincidence, was his birthday. In a fit of cynical
despair he asked a lot of his schoolfellows, and a few, ladies of the
neighbourhood, to dine with him; and they feasted and made merry till
well into the following morning, when, for the first and almost the
only time in his life, he had to be helped home, drunk. His drunkenness,
though, was perhaps not altogether to be regretted. It kept him from
thinking; and for that particular night it was conceivably better, on
the whole, that he should not think.
His mood of cynical recklessness lasted for a month or two. He
celebrated the wedding—faisait la noce, as the local idiom runs—in
a double sense, and with feverish diligence. For a moment it seemed
a toss-up what would become of him: whether he would sink into the
condition of a chronic noceur, or return to the former decent tenor of
his way. It happened, however, that he had no appetite for alcohol, and
that bad music, bad air, evil communications, gaslight, and late hours
failed to afford him any permanent satisfaction: whilst, as for other
women,—who that has savoured nectar can care for milk and water?—who
that has lost a rose can be consoled with an artificial flower? This was
how he put it to himself All the women he knew on the right bank of the
Seine were, to his taste, mortally insipid; those whom he knew on the
left were stuffed with sawdust.
And the consequence was that one morning he went to work again; and in
spite of the dull pain in his heart, he worked steadily, doggedly, from
day to day, from year to year, scarcely noting the progress of time, in
the absorbed and methodical nature of his life, till presently he had
turned forty, and was what they call a successful man. Of course the
dull pain in his heart had softened gradually into something that
was not entirely painful; into something whose sadness was mixed with
sweetness, like plaintive music; but her image remained enshrined as
an idol in his memory, and I doubt if ever a day passed without his
spending some portion thereof in worship before it. He never walked
abroad, either, through the Paris streets, without thinking, “What
if I should meet her!” (It would be almost inevitable that she should
some time come to Paris.) And at this prospect his heart would leap and
his pulses quicken like a boy’s. For art and love between them had
kept him young; it had indeed never struck him to count his lustres, or
to reflect that in point of them he was middle-aged. Besides, he lived
in a country whose amiable custom it is to call every man a lad until he
marries. Regularly once a year, in the autumn, he had sent a picture to
be exhibited at New York, in the hope that she might see it.
He gave his brushes to be washed rather earlier than usual this
afternoon, and went for a stroll in the garden of the Luxembourg. The
air was languorous with the warmth and the scent of spring; in the
sunshine the marble queens, smiling their still, stony smile, gleamed
with a thousand tints of rose and amethyst, as if they had been carved
of some iridescent substance, like mother-of-pearl. The face of the old
palace glowed with mellow fire; the sleek, dark-green foliage of the
chestnut-trees was tipped here and there with pallid gold; and in
the deep shade of the allées underneath innumerable children romped
vociferously, and innumerable pairs of lovers sentimentalised in
silence. Of course they were only mock lovers, students and their
étudiantes; but one could forget that for the moment, and all else that
is ugly, in the circumambient charm.
He took a penny chair by and by, and sat down at the edge of the
terrace, and watched the dance of light and shadow on the waters of the
fountain, and thanked Heaven for the keen, untranslatable delight he
was able to feel in the beauty of the world. He drank it in with every
sense, as if it were an ethereal form of wine; but no wine was so
delicious, no wine could have penetrated and thrilled and stimulated
him as it did. It was a part of his philosophy,—I might almost say an
article of his religion,—to count his faculty for deriving
exquisite pleasure from every phase of the beautiful as in some sort a
compensation for many of the good things of life that he had missed; and
yet, in one way at least, so far from serving as a compensation, it only
added to his loss. In the presence of whatever was beautiful, under the
spell of it, he always longed with intensified pain for her. And now
presently, as he had done in like circumstances countless times before,
he sighed for her, inwardly: “Ah, if she were here! If we could enjoy
it all together!”—I dare say, poor man, it was a little ridiculous
at his age; but he did not see the humour.
He pictured her to himself, her slender figure, her white, eager face,
with its penumbra of brown hair, soft as smoke, and its dark eyes, deep
and luminous, as if pale fires were burning infinitely far within them.
He heard her voice, low and melodious, and her crisp, girlish laughter.
And she smiled upon him, a faint, sad smile, that was full of tenderness
and yearning and regret. He took her hands, her warm little rosy hands,
and marvelled over them, as he caressed them. They were like images in
miniature of herself, so sensitive, so fragile, so helpless-seeming,
yet possessed of such amazing talents: for when he watched them leaping
above the ivory keys of her piano, invariably striking the right note
with the right degree of stress and the right interval of time (although
to an uninitiated witness their movement must have appeared quite
wanton), he wondered at them as a pair of witches.
If he had not reckoned his own years, or marked their action upon
himself, it is certain that he had treated her with no less forbearance.
She came back to him always the same; always the girl of nineteen whom
he had left behind him nearly a quarter of a century ago.
Ah, if she were only with him now, here in the quaint old garden of the
Luxembourg! How complete and unutterable his joy would be! He would lead
her beside the great basin of the fountain, where the goldfishes flashed
like flames; and they would stop before the statues of the queens, and
tell over for each other the romantic histories of those dead royal
ladies; and how much warmer the sunshine would be, how much greener the
earth, how much sweeter the fragrance of the air! By and by they would
enter the museum, where he would show her that picture of his which the
State had honoured him by buying, and which, he had received a whispered
promise, should some day find its way into the Louvre. Afterwards they
would saunter down the Boulevard, past the Castle of Cluny, across the
bridge, into the open space before Notre Dame. And all the while they
would talk, talk, talk, making up for the time that they had lost; and
their wounds would be healed, and their hearts would be at rest. It was
strange, he thought, that she had never come abroad. All Americans come
sooner or later, and one is perpetually running across those one happens
to know.
He had never run across her, however, though he had never left off
expecting to do so. This very afternoon, for instance, how entirely
natural it would seem to meet her. The annual irruption of his
country-people had begun; thousands of them were in Paris at this
moment: why not she among them? And she would certainly not come to
Paris without visiting the Luxembourg; and to-day was a perfect day for
such a visit; and—if he should look up now....
He looked up, holding his breath for a second, almost thinking to see
her advancing towards him. Surely enough, somebody was advancing towards
him, standing before him there in the path, making signals to him. But,
as the mists of his day-dream cleared away, he perceived that it was
only the old woman come to take his penny for the chair.
He went home, a very lonely man in a very empty world.
It felt cold to him now; the sky had grown gray. He had a fire kindled
in his drawing-room, and sat dejectedly before it through the twilight.
After a while his servant brought in the lamps, at the same time handing
him a parcel that had come from his bookseller’s. The parcel was
wrapped in an old copy of the Paris edition of the New York Herald; and
he spread it out, and glanced at it listlessly. It always filled him
with a vague sort of melancholy to look at an old newspaper; on the day
of its appearance the life that it recorded, the joys and pains, had
seemed of so great importance, such instant interest; and now they
mattered as little, they were as much a part of ancient history, as
the lives and the joys and the sorrows of the Cæsars. His eye fell
presently upon a column headed Obituary; and there he read of the death
of Samuel Merrow. He turned the paper up hurriedly to discover its date;
November of last year; quite six months ago. Samuel Merrow had died at
New York, six months ago; and Samuel Merrow was her husband. II
There were not many passengers on the steamer; at this season the
current of travel ran in the opposite direction. There was a puffy
little white-haired, important man, who accosted him on the deck, the
second day out, and asked whether it was his first visit abroad that
he was returning from. He reflected for a moment, and answered yes; for
though he had lived abroad half a lifetime, he had crossed the ocean
only once before. He was too shy to enter upon an explanation, so he
answered yes. Then the puffy man boasted of the immense numbers of
voyages he had made. “Oh, I know Europe!” he declaimed, and told
how his business—he described himself as “buyer” for a firm of
printing-ink importers—took him to that continent two or three times
a year. He had an inquiring mind, and a great facility for questioning
people. “Excuse me, Mr. Aigrefield,” he said (he had learned our
friend’s name from the passenger-list) “but what does that red
button in your buttonhole mean? Some society you belong to?”
Aigrefield, concealing what he suffered, again sought refuge in an
ambiguous yes; but he slunk away to his cabin, and put the “red
button” in his box: it was absurd to wear the insignia of a French
order outside of France.
Then, of course, the ship’s company was completed by a highly
intelligent lady in eyeglasses, who lay in a deck-chair all day, and
read Mr. Pater’s Mariys (the volume lasted her throughout the
voyage); a statistical clergyman, returning from his vacation, a mine of
practical misinformation; a couple of Frenchmen, travelling no one could
guess why, since they seemed quite cast-down and in despair about it;
a half-dozen Hebrews, travelling one couldn’t help knowing wherefore,
since they discussed “voollens” and prices and shipments at the
tops of their cheerful voices; and the inevitable young Western girl,
travelling alone. For the first time in twenty years, almost, he had
descended from the cloud he lived in, and was rubbing against the
actualities of the earth.
The highly intelligent lady “knew who he was,” as she told him
sweetly, and would speak of nothing but art, in her highly intelligent
way. If he had had more humour, her perfervid enthusiasms, couched in an
extremely rudimental studio-slang (she talked a vast deal of values
and keys, of atmosphere and light, of things being badly modelled or
a little “out”)—if he had had more humour, all this might
have amused him; but he was, as we have said, somewhat too literally
inclined; and the cant of it jarred upon him, and made him sick at
heart. Her formula for opening up a topic, “Now, Mr. Aigrefield, tell
me, what do you think of...” became an obsession, that would descend
upon him in the dead of night, making him dread the morrow. All these
people, he remarked, Mr. Aigrefielded him unpityingly. He wished the
English language had, for the use of his compatriots (in England they
seem to get on well enough without forever naming names) a mode of
address similar to the French monsieur.
But the solitary young Western girl he liked. She had made her first
appeal to his eye, through her form and colour; but when he came to know
her a little he liked her for her spirit. She was tall, with a strong,
supple figure, a face picturesque in the discreet irregularity of
its features, a pair of limpid gray eyes, a fresh complexion, and an
overhanging ornament of warm brown hair. She was much given to smiling,
also,—a smile that played in lovely curves about lips, if anything, a
thought too full, a semitone too scarlet,—whence he inferred that
she had an amiable disposition, a light heart, and an easy conscience.
Hearing her speak, he observed that her voice was of a depth,
smoothness, and rotundity, that atoned in great measure for the
occidental quality of her accent. At all events, he was drawn to her:
they walked the deck a good deal together, and often had their chairs
placed side by side. He philosophised her attraction for him by saying,
“She is a force of nature, she is fresh and simple.” The “buyer”
for the firm of printing-ink importers had struck him as fresh, indeed,
but not as simple; the lady who read Mr. Pater, as simple but not
fresh; the Hebrew gentlemen, even the unhappy Frenchmen, if you will, as
natural forces: but the Western girl combined these several advantages
in her single person, and so she became his favourite amongst his
shipmates.
Her name was Lillian Goddard; she lived in Minneapolis, where, as she
informed him, her father was a judge. She had been abroad nearly a year,
had passed the winter in Rome, could speak a little Italian, a little
French, and an immense deal of American. I have described her as young,
and I hope it will not be considered an anachronism when I add that her
age was twenty-six.
She was tremendously patriotic, and appeared shocked and grieved when
she learned that he had remained continuously absent from his country
for a score of years.
“Why, the more I saw of Europe, the more I loved dear old America,”
she declared, in her deep voice.
She was just as homesick as she could be, she said, and couldn’t get
back to Minneapolis fast enough. Did he know the West?—and again
she appeared shocked at discovering the profundities of his ignorance
concerning it. Oh, he must certainly see the West. No American could
begin to appreciate his country till he had seen the West. The people
out there were so alive, so go-ahead; and they took such an interest
in all forms of culture too, in literature, music, painting, the drama.
“Why, look at the big magazines,—they depend for their circulation
on the West.” And then, the homes of the West! “Oh, if I lived in
Europe, I should lose my faith in human nature. Western people are
so warmhearted. I’m afraid you’re awfully unpatriotic, Mr.
Aigrefield.”
He reminded her that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel; and
anyhow, he pleaded, it was too much to expect of one small man that
he should be patriotic for a continent. But she shook her head at his
perversity, and guessed he’d be proud enough of his Continent if he
had seen it, and insisted that he must come to Minneapolis, and look
round.
He liked her amazingly. As their voyage grew older, he found himself
taking a greater and greater pleasure in her propinquity; looking
forward with something akin to eagerness to meeting her on deck, as he
accomplished his morning toilet; and recalling fondly their commerce
of the day, as he turned in at night. Besides, the charm of her strong,
irregular beauty grew upon him, and he said to her, smiling, “When I
come to Minneapolis you must let me try a portrait of you.”
“Ah, then you are really coming?” she demanded, striving to fix him
in a pious resolution.
He laughed vaguely, and she protested, “Oh, shame, Mr. Aigrefield, now
you are wriggling out!”
He felt that she was sweet and sound and honest: direct, vigorous,
bracing: he wondered if indeed she might not owe these qualities, in
some part, to her native Western soil; and he admitted that the West was
beginning to take a place in his affections. Heretofore, it had been a
mere geographical abstraction for him, and one he would have shrunk from
realising through experience. He imagined the colouring would be hard,
the action violent, the atmosphere raw and rough.
“Well, whether I really come or not, I am sure I should really like
to,” he said now.
“That’s such an innocent desire,” she cried, with a touch of
mockery. “I don’t think it would be selfish to indulge it.”
“And if I do come, you will sit for me?”
“Oh, I’d do anything in such a cause—to make a patriot of you!”
At the outset of his journey, his impatience to reach the end of it was
so great, the progress of the steamer had seemed exasperatingly slow.
But as they began to near New York, a vague dread of what might await
him there, a vague recoil from the potential and the unknown, made him
almost wish that the throbbing of the engines were not so rapid. A
cloud of dismal possibilities haunted his imagination, filling it with a
strange chill and ache. He had never paused before to think of the
many things that had had time to happen in twenty years; and now they
assailed his mind in a mass, and appalled it. Even the preliminary
business of discovering her whereabouts, for instance, might prove
difficult enough; and then——-? In matters of this sort, at any
rate, it is the next step which costs. In twenty years what ties and
affections she might have formed, that would make him a necessary
stranger to her life, and leave no room for him in her heart. He was
jealous of a supposititious lover (he had lived in France too long to
remember that in America lovers are not the fashion), of supposititious
children, supposititious interests and occupations: jealous and afraid.
And of course it was always to be reckoned with as in the bounds of the
conceivable, that she might be disconsolate for the loss of Mr.
Merrow: though this, for some reason, seemed the least likely of
the contingencies he had to face. Mr. Merrow, he knew, had been a
cotton-broker; he had always fancied him as a big, rather florid person,
with a husky voice: capable perhaps of inspiring a mild fondness, but
not of a character to take hold upon the deeper emotional strands of
Pauline’s nature.
His nervousness increased inordinately after the pilot came aboard. He
marched rapidly backwards and forwards on the deck, scarcely conscious
of what he was saying to Miss Goddard, who kept pace with him. She
laughed presently—her deep contralto laughter; and then he inquired
very seriously whether he had said anything absurd.
“Don’t you know what you said?” she exclaimed.
“I—I don’t just remember. I was thinking of something else,” he
confessed, knitting his brows.
“Well, that’s not very complimentary to me, now, is it? Still, if
you can say such things without knowing it, I suppose I must forgive
you. I asked you what you thought was the best short definition of life,
and you said a chance to make mistakes.”
“I never could have said anything so good if I had had my wits about
me,” he explained.
Countless old memories and associations were surging up within him now;
and as he leaned over the rail and gazed into the murky waters of
the New York Bay, the European chapters of his life became a mere
parenthesis, and the text joined itself to the word at which it had been
interrupted when he was four and twenty. Sorry patriot though he might
be, he was still made of flesh and blood; and he could not approach
the land of his childhood, his youth, his love and loss, without some
stirrings of the heartstrings besides those that were evoked by the
prospect of meeting her. His other old companions would no doubt be
dead or scattered; or they would have forgotten him as he, indeed, till
yesterday had forgotten them. Anyhow, he would not attempt to look them
up. He knew that he should feel an alien among his own people; he would
not heighten the dreariness of that situation by ferreting out former
intimates to find himself unrecognized, or by inquiring about them to
be told that they were dead. He hadn’t very clearly formulated his
positive intentions, but they probably lay in his sub-consciousness,
brief and to the point, if somewhat short-sighted and unpractical:
he would do his wooing as speedily as might be, and bear his bride
triumphantly over-sea, to his home in Paris.
He bade Miss Goddard good-bye on the dock, whilst his trunks were being
rifled by the Custom House inspector.
“Now, mind, you are to come to Minneapolis,” she insisted, as her
hand lay in his, returning its pressure; and he could perceive a shade
of earnestness behind the smile that lighted up her eyes.
“Good-bye, good-bye,” he answered, fervently, moved all at once by
a feeling he would have had some difficulty in naming. “I may surprise
you by turning up there one of these days.”
Then her hand was withdrawn, and she disappeared in a hackney-carriage.
He went back to the task of getting his luggage examined, with a sense
of having been abandoned by his last friend.