“This is a pretty good print, but I shall get better,” he said, holding
the sheet of paper under the lamp.
“How many shall you print?” I asked.
“Thirty.”
“You might put me down for one.”
“All right. I think it will give you pleasure,” he said with impartial
and dignified conviction.
After another ten minutes, we were put on the quay.
“Grand autumn night?” he said appreciatively. “Where shall we have the
_apéritif?_
“_Apéritif!_ It’s after eight o’clock, man!”
“I think we shall have time for an _apéritif_” he insisted, mildly
shocked.
Drawing-rooms have their ritual. His life, too, had its ritual.
*****
At nearly midnight we were sitting, three of us, in a _café_ of the
Montparnasse quarter, possibly the principal _café_ of the Montparnasse
quarter. Neither notorious nor secretly eccentric; but an honest _café_,
in the sense of “honest” applied to certain women. Being situated close
to a large railway terminus, it had a broad and an indulgent attitude
towards life. It would have received a frivolous _habitué_ of the Place
Blanche, or a nun, or a clergyman, with the same placidity. And although
the district was modified, and whole streets, indeed, de-Parisianised
by wandering cohorts of American and English art-amateurs of both sexes,
this _café_ remained, while accepting them, characteristically French.
The cohorts thought they were seeing French life when they entered it;
and they in fact were.
This _café_ was the chief club of the district, with a multitudinous and
regular _clientèle_ of billiard-players, card-players, draught-players,
newspapers readers, chatterers, and simple imbibers of bock. Its doors
were continually a-swing, and one or the other of the two high-enthroned
caissières was continually lifting her watchful head from the desk to
observe who entered. Its interior seemed to penetrate indefinitely
into the hinterland of the street, and the effect of unendingness was
intensified by means of mirrors, which reflected the shirt-sleeved arms
and the cues of a score of billiard-players. Everywhere the same
lively and expressive and never ungraceful gestures, between the marble
table-tops below and the light-studded ceiling above! Everywhere the
same murmur of confusing pleasant voices broken by the loud chant of
waiters intoning orders at the service-bar, and by the setting down of
heavy glass mugs and saucers upon marble! Over the _café_, unperceived,
unthought of, were the six storeys of a large house comprising perhaps
twenty-five separate and complete homes.
[Illustration: 0060]
The third man at our table was another exile, also a painter, but a
Scotchman. He had lived in Paris since everlasting, but before that
rumour said that he had lived for several years immovable at the little
inn of a Norman village. Now, he never left Paris, even in summer. He
exhibited, with marked discretion, only at the Indépendants. Beyond
these facts, and the obvious fact that he enjoyed independent means,
nobody knew anything about him save his opinions. Even his age was
exceedingly uncertain. He looked forty, but there were acquaintances
who said that he had looked forty for twenty years. He was one of those
extremely reserved men who talk freely. Of his hopes, ambitions, ideals,
disappointments, connections, he never said a word, but he did not
refuse his opinion upon any subject, and on every subject he had a
definite opinion which he would express very clearly, with a sort of
polite curtness. His tendency was to cynicism--too cynical to be bitter.
He did not complain of human nature, but he thoroughly believed the
worst of it. These two men, the ’cellist and the Scotchman, were fast
friends; or rather--as it might be argued in the strict sense neither
of them had a friend--they were very familiar acquaintances, each with a
profound respect for the other’s judgment and artistic probity. Further,
the Scotchman admired his companion for a genius, as everybody did.
They talked together for ever and ever, but not about politics. They
were impatient on politics. Both were apparently convinced that politics
are an artificiality imposed upon society by adventurers and interferes,
and that if such people could be exterminated politics would disappear.
Certainly neither had any interest in the organic aspect of society.
Their political desire was to be let alone. Nor did they often or for
long “talk bawdy”; after opinions had been given which no sensible man
ever confides to more than two reliable others at a time, the Scotchman
would sweep all that away as secondary. Nor did they talk of the events
of the day, unless it might be some titillating crime or mystery such as
will fill whole pages of the newspaper for a week together. They talked
of the arts, all the arts. And although they seemed to be always either
in that _café_, or in their studios, or in bed, they had the air of
being mysteriously but genuinely abreast of every manifestation of art.
And since all the arts are one, and in respect to art they had a real
attitude and real views, all that they said was valuable suggestively,
and their ideas could not by any prodigality be exhausted. As a patron
of the arts even the State interested them, and herein they showed
glimmerings of a social sense. In the intervals of this eternal and
absorbing “art,” they would discuss with admirable restrained gusto
the exacerbating ridiculousness of the cohorts of American and English
art-amateurs who infested and infected the quarter.
*****
Little bands of these came into the _café_ from time to time, and
drifting along the aisles of chairs would sit down where they could see
as much as possible with their candid eyes. The girls, inelegant and
blousy; the men, inept in their narrow shrewdness: both equally
naïve, conceited, uncorrupted, and incorruptible, they were absolutely
incapable of appreciating the refined and corrupt decadence, the
stylistic charm, the exquisite tradition of the civilisation at which
they foolishly stared, as at a peep-show. Not a thousand years would
teach them the human hourly art of life as it was subtly practised
by the people whose very language they disdained to learn. When loud
fragments of French phrases, massacred by Americans who had floated on
but not mingled with Paris for years, reached us from an Anglo-Saxon
table, my friends would seem to shudder secretly, ashamed of being
Anglo-Saxon. And if they were obliged to salute some uncouth Anglo-Saxon
acquaintance, and thus admit their own unlatin origin, their eyes would
say: “Why cannot these people be imprisoned at home? Why are not we
alone of Anglo-Saxons permitted to inhabit Paris?”
Occasionally a bore would complacently present himself for sufferance.
Among these the chief was certainly the man whose existence was an
endless shuttle-work between the various cities where art is or has been
practised, from Munich to Naples. He knew everything about painting, but
he ought to have been a bookmaker. He was notorious everywhere as the
friend of Strutt, Strutt being the very famous and wealthy English
portrait-painter of girls. All his remarks were _àpropos_ of Tommy
Strutt, Tommy Strutt--Tommy. He was invariably full of Tommy. And this
evening he was full of Tommy’s new German model, whose portrait had been
in that year’s Salon.. . . How Tommy had picked her up in the streets of
Berlin; how she was nineteen, and the rage of Berlin, and was asked to
lunch at the embassies, and had received five proposals in three months:
how she refused to sit for any one but Tommy, and even for him would
only sit two hours a day: how Tommy looked after her, and sent her to
bed at nine-thirty of a night, and hired a woman to play with her; and
how Tommy had once telegraphed to her that he was coming to Berlin, and
how she had hired a studio and got it painted and furnished exactly
to his fastidious taste all on her own, and met him at the station and
driven him to the studio, and tea was all ready, etc.; and how pretty
she was.. . .
“What’s her figure like?” the Scotchman inquired gruffly.
“The fact is,” said Tommy’s friend, dashed, “I haven’t seen her posing
for the nude. I’ve seen her posing to Tommy in a bathing-costume on the
seashore, but I haven’t yet seen her posing for the nude...” He became
reflective. “My boy, do you know what my old uncle used to say to me
down at the old place in Kildare, when I was a youngster? My old uncle
used to say to me--and he was dying--‘My boy, I’ve always made a rule of
making love to every pretty woman I met. It’s a sound rule. But let me
warn you--you mustn’t expect to get more than five per cent, on your
outlay!’”
“‘The old place in Kildare!’” murmured the Scotchman, in a peculiarly
significant tone, after Tommy Strutt’s friend had gone; and this was the
only comment on Tommy Strutt’s friend.
*****
The talk on art was resumed, the renowned Tommy Strutt being reduced to
his proper level of the third-rate and abruptly dismissed. One o’clock!
A quarter past one! The _café_ was now nearly empty. But these men
had no regard for time. Time did not exist for them, any more than the
structure of society. They were not bored, nor tired. They conversed
with ease, and with mild pleasure in their own irony and in the
disillusioned surety of their judgments. Then I noticed that the waiters
had dwindled to two, and that only one cashier was left enthroned behind
the bar; somewhat later, she too had actually gone! Both had at length
rejoined their families, if any. The idea was startling that these
prim and neat and mechanically smiling women were human, had private
relations, a private life, a bed, a wardrobe. All over Paris, all day,
every day, they sit and estimate the contents of trays, which waiters
present to their practised gaze for an instant only, and receive the
value of the drinks in bone discs, and write down columns of figures in
long ledgers. They never take exercise, nor see the sun; they even eat
in the _café_. Mystic careers!... A quarter to two. Now the chairs had
been brought in from the terrace, and there was only one waiter, and no
other customer that I could see. The waiter, his face nearly as pale
as his apron, eyed us with patient and bland resignation, sure from his
deep knowledge of human habits that sooner or later we should in fact
depart, and well inured to the great Parisian principle that a _café_
exists for the convenience of its _habitués_. I was uneasy: I was even
aware of guiltiness; but not my friends.
Then a face looked in at the doorway, as if reconnoitring, and
hesitated.
“By Jove!” said the violoncellist. “There’s the Mahatma back again! Oh!
He’s seen us!”
The peering face preceded a sloping body into the _café_, and I was
introduced to a man whose excellent poems I had read in a limited
edition. He was wearing a heavily jewelled red waistcoat, and the
largest ring I ever saw on a human hand. He sat down. The waiter took
his order and intoned it in front of the service-bar, proving that
another fellow-creature was hidden there awaiting our pleasure. When the
Mahatma’s glass was brought, the Scotchman suddenly demanded from the
waiter the total of our modest consumption, and paid it. The Mahatma
said that he had arrived that evening direct from the Himalayas, and
that he had been made or ordained a “khan” in the East. Without
any preface he began to talk supernaturally. As he had known Aubrey
Beardsley, I referred to the rumour that Beardsley had several times
been seen abroad in London after his alleged death.
“That’s nothing,” he said quickly. “I know a man who saw and spoke to
Oscar Wilde in the Pyrenees at the very time when Oscar was in prison in
England.”
“Who was the man?” I inquired.
He paused. “Myself,” he said, in a low tone.
“Shall we go?” The Scotchman, faintly smiling, embraced his friend and
me in the question.
We went, leaving the Mahatma bent in solitude over his glass. The waiter
was obviously saying to himself: “It was inevitable that they should
ultimately go, and they have gone.” We had sat for four hours.
Outside, cabs were still rolling to and fro. After cheerful casual
good-nights, we got indolently into three separate cabs, and went our
easy ways. I saw in my imagination the vista of the thousands of similar
nights which my friends had spent, and the vista of the thousands of
similar nights which they would yet spend. And the sight was majestic,
tremendous.