Meanwhile Melville, who had come to take his leave before proceeding
to Paris under orders from the Vatican, found his hostess evidently
_ennuyée_; she was not in her usual serene humour.
'What has irritated you, Princess?' that very observant person presumed
at last to ask. 'Have you actually discovered that doubled rose-leaf of
whose existence you have been always sure and I always sceptical?'
'The doubled rose-leaf is that enormous nuisance, _la bêtise humaine_,'
she replied with ennui, breaking off some blossoms of an odontoglossum
standing near her. 'It is like the fog in London, it penetrates
everywhere, you cannot escape it; there has been no rose-glass made
which could shut it out. If Balzac had written for centuries, he would
never have come to an end of it. Do you ever find any variety in your
confessional? I never do in my drawing-rooms.'
'And yet who should find it, if not Madame Napraxine?' said Melville,
who, when in his worldly moods, did not especially care to be reminded
that he was a churchman.
'I do not know who should,--I know that I never do,' she replied. 'I
have made _la chasse au caractère_ ever since I was old enough to know
what character meant; and my only wonder is how, out of such a sameness
of material, St.-Simon and La Bruyère and Ste.-Beuve, and all those
people who write so well, ever were able to make such entertaining
books. I suppose it is done by the same sort of science which enables
mathematicians to make endless permutations out of four numbers. For
myself, I should like other numbers than those we know by rote.'
'Good heavens!' thought Melville, 'when men have died because she
laughed! Is that so very commonplace? or, is it not tragic enough?'
Aloud he said, in his courtliest manner:
'Princess, I fear the sameness of human nature tries you so greatly
because of the sameness of the emotions which you excite in it; I can
imagine that too much adoration may cloy like too much sugar. Also, in
your _chasse au caractère_ you have, like all who hunt, left behind
you a certain little bourgeois quality called pity; an absurd little
quality, no doubt, still one which helps observation. I am sure you
have read Tourguenieff's little story of the quail?'
'Yes; but one eats them still, you know, just the same as if he had
never written it. Pity may be a microscope, I do not know; besides, you
must admit that a quail is a much lovelier little life than a man's,
and so can excite it so much more easily. A quail is quite a charming
little bird. Myself, I never eat birds at all; it is barbarous.'
'What I meant to say was,' suggested Melville, 'that, in that tiny
tale, Tourguenieff, like a poet, as he was, at heart, describes
precisely what sympathy will do to open the intelligence to the closed
lives of others, whether bird or man. Perhaps, madame, sympathy would
even do something to smooth the creases out of your rose-leaf--if you
tried it.'
'I suppose I am not sympathetic,' said Nadine Napraxine, stripping the
petals of the odontoglossum; 'they all say so. But I think it is their
own fault; they are so uninteresting.'
'The quail,' said Melville, 'to almost everybody is only a little juicy
morsel to be wrapped in a vine-leaf and roasted; but Tourguenieff
had the vision to see in it the courage of devotion, the heroism of
maternity, the loveliness of its life, the infinite pathos of its
death. Yet, the exceptional estimate of the student's view of it was
quite as true as the general view of the epicure.'
'Am I an epicure?' said Nadine Napraxine, amused.
'Spiritually, intellectually, you are,' replied Melville; 'and so
nothing escapes the fastidiousness of your taste; yet perhaps, madame,
something may escape the incompleteness of your sympathies.'
'That is very possible; but, as I observed to Lady Brancepeth when she
made me a similar reproach, one is as one is made. One is Tourguenieff
or one is Brillat-Savarin, all that is arranged beforehand for
one--somewhere.'
Melville had learned the ways of the world too well not to know
how to glide easily, with closed eyes and averted ears, over such
irreverences; but he ventured to say:
'One cannot dispute the fact of natural idiosyncrasy and inclination,
of course; but may not one's self-culture be as much of the character
as of the mind? Might it not become as interesting to strive and expand
one's moral as one's intellectual horizon? It seems so to me, at the
least.'
She laughed, and rang a little silver bell for Mahmoud to bring them
some fresh tea.
'My dear Monsignore,' she said, with amusement and admiration; 'for
enwrapping a kernel of religious advice in an envelope of agreeable
social conversation, there is not your equal anywhere--you may well be
beloved of the Propaganda! But, alas! it is all wasted on me.'
Melville reddened a little with irritation:
'I understand,' he answered. 'I fear, Princess, that you are like
Virschow or Paul Bert, who are so absorbed in cutting, burning, and
electrifying the nerves of dogs that the dog, as a sentient creature,
a companion, and a friend, is wholly unknown to them. Humanity, poor
Humanity, is your dog.'
'Will you have some tea?' she said, as Mahmoud brought in her service
made by goldsmiths of the Deccan, who sat on mats under their banana
trees, with the green parrots flying over the aloes and the euphorbia,
and who produced work beside which all the best which Europe can do
with her overgrown workshops is clumsy, inane, and vulgar.
'What you suggested was very pretty,' she continued, pouring out
the clear golden stream on the slices of lemon; 'and I had no right
to laugh at you for wrapping up a sermon in _nougat_. Of course the
character ought to be trained and developed just like the body and the
mind, only nobody thinks so; no education is conducted on those lines.
And so, though we overstrain the second, and pamper the third, we
wholly neglect the first. I imagine that it never occurs to anyone out
of the schoolroom to restrain a bad impulse or uproot a bad quality.
Why should it? We are all too busy in trying to be amused, and failing.
Do you not think it was always so in the world? Do you suppose La
Bruyère, for instance, ever turned his microscope on himself? And do
you think, if he had done, that any amount of self-scrutiny would have
made La Bruyère Pascal or Vincent de Paul?'
'No; but it might have made him comprehend them, or their likenesses.
I did not mean to moralise, madame; I merely meant that the issue of
self-analysis is sympathy, whilst the issue of the anatomy of other
organisations is cruelty even where it may be wisdom.'
'That may be true in general, and I daresay is so; but the exception
proves the rule, and I am the exception. Whenever I do think about
myself I only arrive at two conclusions; the one, that I am not as well
amused as I ought to be considering the means I have at my disposal,
and the other is that, if I were quite sure that anything would amuse
me very much, I should sacrifice everything else to enjoy it. Neither
of those results is objective in its sympathies; and you would not, I
suppose, call either of them moral.'
'I certainly should not,' said Melville, 'except that there is always a
certain amount of moral health in any kind of perfect frankness.'
'I am always perfectly frank,' said the Princess Nadine; 'so is
Bismarck. But the world has made up its mind that we are both of us
always feigning.'
'That is the world's revenge for being ruled by each of you.'
'Is it permitted in these serious days for churchmen to make pretty
speeches? I prefer your scoldings, they are more uncommon.'
'The kindness which permits them is uncommon,' said Melville, as he
took up his tea-cup.
'Ah! I can be kind,' said Nadine Napraxine. 'Ask Mahmoud and my little
dog. But then Mahmoud is dumb, and the dog is--a dog. If humanity were
my dog, too, as you say, I should make it _aphone_!'
'Poor humanity!' said Melville, with a sigh. 'If it would not offend
you, Princess, there are two lines of Mürger which always seem to me to
exactly describe the attitude, or rather the altitude, from which you
regard all our sorrows and follies.'
'And they are?'
'They are those in which he thinks he hears:
"Le fifre au son aigu railler le violoncelle,
Qui pleure sous l'archet ses notes de crystal;"
only we must substitute for _aigu_ some prettier word, say _perlé_.'
She laughed, thinking of Boris Seliedoff, with more perception of
his absurdities than of his offences, as her first movement of wrath
subsided into that ironical serenity which was most natural to her of
all her varying moods.
'The violoncello does not know itself why it weeps,' she replied, 'so
why should the fife not laugh at it? Really, if I were not so impious
a being, I would join your Church for the mere pleasure of confessing
to you; you have such fine penetration, such delicate suggestion. But
then, there is no living being who understands women as a Catholic
priest does who is also a man of the world. Adieu! or rather, I hope,
_au revoir_. You are going away for Lent? Ours will soon be here. I
shock every Russian because I pay no heed to its sanctity. Did you ever
find, even amongst your people, any creatures so superstitious in their
religion as Russians? Platon is certainly the least moral man the sun
shines on, but he would not violate a fast nor neglect a rite to save
his life. It is too funny! Myself, I have fish from the Baltic and
soups (very nasty ones) from Petersburg, and deem that quite concession
enough to Carême. My dear Monsignore, why _should_ there be salvation
in salmon and sin in a _salmis_?'
Melville was not at all willing to enter on that grave and large
question with so incorrigible a mocker. He took his leave, and bowed
himself out from her presence; whilst Nadine Napraxine went to her own
rooms to dress for dinner and look at the domino which she would wear
some hours later at a masked ball which was to take place that night
in her own house in celebration of the last evening of the Catholic
Carnival.
'Le masque est si charmant que j'ai peur du visage,'
she murmured inconsequently, as she glanced at the elegant disguise
and the Venetian costume to be worn beneath it which had been provided
for her. 'That is the sort of feeling which one likes to inspire, and
which one also prefers to feel. Always the mask, smiling, mysterious,
unintelligible, seductive, suggestive of all kinds of unrealised, and
therefore of unexhausted pleasures; never the face beneath it, the face
which frowns and weeps and shows everything, is unlovely, only just
because it is known and must in due time even grow wrinkled and yellow.
How agreeable the world would be if no one ever took off their masks or
their gloves!'