matter what mental garb happens to be in fashion at the time. _Grattez
la femme et vous trouvez la folle._ For see here: if I had said to
Mademoiselle Elsie, ‘Well, you were in the wrong; it’s your place to
take the first step towards reconciliation,’ she would have laughed in
my face, or flung out of the shop in a rage. But because I sold her a
little humbugging powder under the guise of a charm, she submitted
herself with the docility of a pet lambkin. No; one need never hope to
prevail through wisdom with a woman, and if I could have realised that
ten years ago, it would have been better for me.”
He fell silent, thinking of his past, which to me, who knew it, seemed
almost an excuse for his cynicism. I sought a change of idea. The
splendour of the pageant outside supplied me with one.
The sun had set; and all the eastern world of sky and water, stretching
before us, was steeped in the glories of the after-glow. The ripples
seemed painted in dabs of metallic gold upon a surface of polished
blue-grey steel. Over the islands opposite hung a far-reaching golden
cloud, with faint-drawn, up-curled edges, as though thinned out upon
the sky by some monster brush; and while I watched it, this cloud
changed from gold to rose-colour, and instantly the steel mirror of
the sea glowed rosy too, and was streaked and shaded with a wonderful
rosy-brown. As the colour grew momentarily more intense in the sky
above, so did the sea appear to pulse to a more vivid copperish-rose,
until at last it was like nothing so much as a sea of flowing fire.
And the cloud flamed fiery too, yet all the while its up-curled edges
rested in exquisite contrast upon a background of most cool cerulean
blue.
The little sailing-boat, which I had noticed an hour previously,
reappeared from behind the Point. The sail was lowered as it entered
the harbour, and the boatman took to his oars. I watched it creep over
the glittering water until it vanished beneath the window-sill. I
got up and went over to the window to hold it still in sight. It was
sculled by a young man in rosy shirt-sleeves, and opposite to him, in
the stern, sat a girl in a rosy gown.
So long as I had observed them, not one word had either spoken. In
silence they had crossed the harbour, in silence the sculler had
brought his craft alongside the landing-stage, and secured her to a
ring in the stones. Still silent, he helped his companion to step out
upon the quay.
“Here,” said I, to Mauger, “is a couple confirming your ‘silent’ theory
with a vengeance. We must suppose that much love has rendered them
absolutely dumb.”
He came, and leaned from the window too.
“It’s not _a_ couple, but _the_ couple,” said he; “and after all,
in spite of cheap jesting, there are some things more eloquent than
speech.” For at this instant, finding themselves alone upon the jetty,
the young man had taken the girl into his arms, and she had lifted a
frank responsive mouth to return his kiss.
Five minutes later the sea had faded into dull greys and sober browns,
starved white clouds moved dispiritedly over a vacant sky, and by
cricking the back of my neck I was able to follow Toumes’ black coat
and the white frock of Miss Elsie until they reached Poidevin’s
wine-vaults, and, turning up the Water-gate, were lost to view.
Fleurs de Feu
By José Maria de Hérédia of the French Academy
BIEN des siècles depuis les siècles du Chaos,
La flamme par torrents jaillit de ce cratère
Et le panache igné du volcan solitaire
Flamba encore plus haut que les Chimborazos.
Nul bruit n’éveille plus la cime sans échos.
Où la cendre pleuvait l’oiseau se désaltère;
Le sol est immobile, et le sang de la Terre
La lave, en se figeant, lui laissa le repos.
Pourtant, suprême effort de l’antique incendie,
A l’orle de la gueule à jamais refroidie,
Éclatant a travers les rocs pulvérisés.
Comme un coup de tonnerre au milieu du silence,
Dans le poudroîement d’or du pollen qu’elle lance,
S’épanouit la fleur des cactus embrasés.
Flowers of Fire
A Translation, by Ellen M. Clerke
FOR ages since the age of Chaos passed,
Flame shot in torrents from this crater pyre,
And the red plume of the volcano’s ire
Higher than Chimborazo’s crown was cast.
No sound awakes the summit, voiceless, vast,
The bird now sips where rained the ashes dire,
The soil is moveless, and Earth’s blood on fire,
The lava--hardening--gives it peace at last.
But, crowning effort of the fires of old,
Close by the gaping jaws, for ever cold,
Gleaming ’mid rocks that crumble in the gloom,
As with a thunderclap in hush profound,
’Mid golden dust of pollen hurled around,
The burning cactus blazes into bloom.
When I am King
By Henry Harland
“_Qu’y faire, mon Dieu, qu’y faire?_”
I HAD wandered into a tangle of slummy streets, and began to think
it time to inquire my way back to the hotel; then, turning a corner,
I came out upon the quays. At one hand there was the open night,
with the dim forms of many ships, and stars hanging in a web of
masts and cordage; at the other, the garish illumination of a row of
public-houses: _Au Bonheur du Matelot_, _Café de la Marine_, _Brasserie
des Quatre Vents_, and so forth; rowdy-looking shops enough, designed
for the entertainment of the forecastle. But they seemed to promise
something in the nature of local colour; and I entered the _Brasserie
des Quatre Vents_.
It proved to be a _brasserie-à-femmes_; you were waited upon by ladies,
lavishly rouged and in regardless toilets, who would sit with you and
chat, and partake of refreshments at your expense. The front part of
the room was filled up with tables, where half a hundred customers,
talking at the top of their voices, raised a horrid din--sailors,
soldiers, a few who might be clerks or tradesmen, and an occasional
workman in his blouse. Beyond, there was a cleared space, reserved
for dancing, occupied by a dozen couples, clumsily toeing it; and
on a platform, at the far end, a man pounded a piano. All this in an
atmosphere hot as a furnace-blast, and poisonous with the fumes of gas,
the smells of bad tobacco, of musk, alcohol, and humanity.
The musician faced away from the company, so that only his shoulders
and the back of his grey head were visible, bent over his keyboard. It
was sad to see a grey head in that situation; and one wondered what
had brought it there, what story of vice or weakness or evil fortune.
Though his instrument was harsh, and he had to bang it violently to be
heard above the roar of conversation, the man played with a kind of
cleverness, and with certain fugitive suggestions of good style. He had
once studied an art, and had hopes and aspirations, who now, in his
age, was come to serve the revels of a set of drunken sailors, in a
disreputable tavern, where they danced with prostitutes. I don’t know
why, but from the first he drew my attention; and I left my handmaid to
count her charms neglected, while I sat and watched him, speculating
about him in a melancholy way, with a sort of vicarious shame.
But presently something happened to make me forget him--something of
his own doing. A dance had ended, and after a breathing spell he began
to play an interlude. It was an instance of how tunes, like perfumes,
have the power to wake sleeping memories. The tune he was playing now,
simple and dreamy like a lullaby, and strangely at variance with the
surroundings, whisked me off in a twinkling, far from the actual--ten,
fifteen years backwards--to my student life in Paris, and set me to
thinking, as I had not thought for many a long day, of my hero, friend,
and comrade, Edmund Pair; for it was a tune of Pair’s composition, a
melody he had written to a nursery rhyme, and used to sing a good deal,
half in fun, half in earnest, to his lady-love, Godelinette:
“Lavender’s blue, diddle-diddle,
Lavender’s green;
When I am king, diddle-diddle,
You shall be queen.”
It is certain he meant very seriously that if he ever came into his
kingdom Godelinette should be queen. The song had been printed, but, so
far as I knew, had never had much vogue; and it seemed an odd chance
that this evening, in a French seaport town where I was passing a
single night, I should stray by hazard into a sailors’ pothouse and
hear it again.
Edmund Pair lived in the Latin Quarter when I did, but he was no
longer a mere student. He had published a good many songs; articles
had been written about them in the newspapers; and at his rooms you
would meet the men who had “arrived”--actors, painters, musicians,
authors, and now and then a politician--who thus recognised him as more
or less one of themselves. Everybody liked him; everybody said, “He is
splendidly gifted; he will go far.” A few of us already addressed him,
half-playfully perhaps, as _cher maître_.
He was three or four years older than I--eight or nine and twenty
to my twenty-five--and I was still in the schools; but for all that
we were great chums. Quite apart from his special talent, he was a
remarkable man--amusing in talk, good-looking, generous, affectionate.
He had read; he had travelled; he had hob-and-nobbed with all sorts
and conditions of people. He had wit, imagination, humour, and a
voice that made whatever he said a cordial to the ear. For myself I
admired him, enjoyed him, loved him, with equal fervour; he had all of
my hero-worship and the lion’s share of my friendship; perhaps I was
vain as well as glad to be distinguished by his intimacy. We used to
spend two or three evenings a week together, at his place or at mine,
or over the table of a café, talking till the small hours--Elysian
sessions, at which we smoked more cigarettes and emptied more _bocks_
than I should care to count. On Sundays and holidays we would take
long walks arm-in-arm in the Bois, or, accompanied by Godelinette, go
to Viroflay or Fontainebleau, lunch in the open, bedeck our hats with
wildflowers, and romp like children. He was tall and slender, with dark
waving hair, a delicate aquiline profile, a clear brown skin, and grey
eyes, alert, intelligent, kindly. I fancy the Boulevard St. Michel,
flooded with sunshine, broken here and there by long crisp shadows;
trams and omnibuses toiling up the hill, tooting their horns; students
and _étudiantes_ sauntering gaily backwards and forwards on the
_trottoir_; an odour of asphalte, of caporal tobacco; myself one of the
multitude on the terrace of a café; and Edmund and Godelinette coming
to join me--he with his swinging stride, a gesture of salutation, a
laughing face; she in the freshest of bright-coloured spring toilets: I
fancy this, and it seems an adventure of the golden age. Then we would
drink our _apéritifs_, our Turin bitter, perhaps our absinthe, and go
off to dine together in the garden at Lavenue’s.
Godelinette was a child of the people, but Pair had done wonders by
way of civilising her. She had learned English, and prattled it with
an accent so quaint and sprightly as to give point to her otherwise
perhaps somewhat commonplace observations. She was fond of reading; she
could play a little; she was an excellent housewife, and generally a
very good-natured and quite presentable little person. She was Parisian
and adaptable. To meet her, you would never have suspected her origin;
you would have found it hard to believe that she had been the wife of a
drunken tailor, who used to beat her. One January night, four or five
years before, Pair had surprised this gentleman publicly pummelling
her in the Rue Gay-Lussac. He hastened to remonstrate; and the husband
went off, hiccoughing of his outraged rights, and calling the universe
to witness that he would have the law of the meddling stranger. Pair
picked the girl up (she was scarcely eighteen then, and had only been
married a sixmonth), he picked her up from where she had fallen, half
fainting, on the pavement, carried her to his lodgings, which were
at hand, and sent for a doctor. In his manuscript-littered study for
rather more than nine weeks she lay on a bed of fever, the consequence
of blows, exhaustion, and exposure. When she got well there was no
talk of her leaving. Pair couldn’t let her go back to her tailor; he
couldn’t turn her into the streets. Besides, during the months that he
had nursed her, he had somehow conceived a great tenderness for her;
it made his heart burn with grief and anger to think of what she had
suffered in the past, and he yearned to sustain and protect and comfort
her for the future. This perhaps was no more than natural; but, what
rather upset the calculations of his friends, she, towards whom he had
established himself in the relation of a benefactor, bore him, instead
of a grudge therefor, a passionate gratitude and affection. So, Pair
said, they were only waiting till her tailor should drink himself
to death, to get married; and meanwhile, he exacted for her all the
respect that would have been due to his wife; and everybody called her
by his name. She was a pretty little thing, very daintily formed, with
tiny hands and feet, and big gipsyish brown eyes; and very delicate,
very fragile--she looked as if anything might carry her off. Her name,
Godeleine, seeming much too grand and mediæval for so small and actual
a person, Pair had turned it into Godelinette.
We all said, “He is splendidly gifted; he will do great things.” He
had studied at Cambridge and at Leipsic before coming to Paris. He was
learned, enlightened, and extremely modern; he was a hard worker.
We said he would do great things; but I thought in those days, and
indeed I still think--and, what is more to the purpose, men who were
themselves musicians and composers, men whose names are known, were
before me in thinking--that he had already done great things, that the
songs he had already published were achievements. They seemed to us
original in conception, accomplished and felicitous in treatment; they
were full of melody and movement, full of harmonic surprises; they had
style and they had “go.” One would have imagined they must please at
once the cultivated and the general public. I could never understand
why they weren’t popular. They would be printed; they would be praised
at length, and under distinguished signatures, in the reviews; they
would enjoy an unusual success of approbation; but--they wouldn’t
_sell_, and they wouldn’t get themselves sung at concerts. If they
had been too good, if they had been over the heads of people--but
they weren’t. Plenty of work quite as good, quite as modern, yet no
whit more tuneful or interesting, was making its authors rich. We
couldn’t understand it, we had to conclude it was a fluke, a question
of chance, of accident. Pair was still a very young man; he must go on
knocking, and some day--to-morrow, next week, next year, but some day
certainly--the door of public favour would be opened to him. Meanwhile
his position was by no means an unenviable one, goodness knows. To have
your orbit in the art world of Paris, and to be recognised there as a
star; to be written about in the _Revue des Deux-Mondes_; to possess
the friendship of the masters, to know that they believe in you, to
hear them prophesy, “He will do great things”--all that is something,
even if your wares don’t “take on” in the market-place.
“It’s a good job, though, that I haven’t got to live by them,” Pair
said; and there indeed he touched a salient point. His people were
dead; his father had been a younger son; he had no money of his own.
But his father’s elder brother, a squire in Hampshire, made him rather
a liberal allowance, something like six hundred a year, I believe,
which was opulence in the Latin Quarter. Now, the squire had been
aware of Pair’s relation with Godelinette from its inception, and had
not disapproved. On his visits to Paris he had dined with them, given
them dinners, and treated her with the utmost complaisance. But when,
one fine morning, her tailor died, and my quixotic friend announced
his intention of marrying her, _dans les délais légaux_, the squire
protested. I think I read the whole correspondence, and I remember that
in the beginning the elder man took the tone of paradox and banter.
“Behave dishonourably, my dear fellow. I have winked at your mistress
heretofore, because boys will be boys; but it is the _man_ who marries.
And, anyhow, a woman is so much more interesting in a false position.”
But he soon became serious, presently furious, and, when the marriage
was an accomplished fact, cut off the funds.
“Never mind, my dear,” said Pair. “We will go to London and seek our
fortune. We will write the songs of the people, and let who will make
the laws. We will grow rich and famous, and
‘When I am king, diddle-diddle,
You shall be queen!’”
So they went to London to seek their fortune, and--that was the last I
ever saw of them, nearly the last I heard. I had two letters from Pair,
written within a month of their hegira--gossipy, light-hearted letters,
describing the people they were meeting, reporting Godelinette’s quaint
observations upon England and English things, explaining his hopes,
his intentions, all very confidently--and then I had no more. I wrote
again, and still again, till, getting no answer, of course I ceased
to write. I was hurt and puzzled; but in the spring we should meet in
London, and could have it out. When the spring came, however, my plans
were altered: I had to go to America. I went by way of Havre, expecting
to stay six weeks, and was gone six years.
On my return to England I said to people, “You have a brilliant young
composer named Pair. Can you put me in the way of procuring his
address?” The fortune he had come to seek he would surely have found;
he would be a known man. But people looked blank, and declared they
had never heard of him. I applied to music-publishers--with the same
result. I wrote to his uncle in Hampshire; the squire did not reply.
When I reached Paris I inquired of our friends there; they were as
ignorant as I. “He must be dead,” I concluded. “If he had lived, it is
impossible we should not have heard of him.” And I wondered what had
become of Godelinette.
Then another eight or ten years passed, and now, in a water-side
public at Bordeaux, an obscure old pianist was playing Pair’s setting
of “Lavender’s blue,” and stirring a hundred bitter-sweet far-away
memories of my friend. It was as if fifteen years were erased from my
life. The face of Godelinette was palpable before me--pale, with its
sad little smile, its bright appealing eyes. Edmund might have been
smoking across the table--I could hear his voice, I could have put out
my hand and touched him. And all round me were the streets, the lights,
the smells, the busy youthful _va-et-vient_ of the Latin Quarter; and
in my heart the yearning, half joy and all despair and anguish, with
which we think of the old days when we were young, of how real and dear
they were, of how irrecoverable they are.
And then the music stopped, the Brasserie des Quatre Vents became a
glaring reality, and the painted female sipping _eau-de-vie_ at my
elbow remarked plaintively, “Tu n’es pas rigolo, toi. Vieux-tu faire
une valse?”
“I must speak to your musician,” I said. “Excuse me.”
He had played a bit of Pair’s music. It was one chance in a thousand,
but I wanted to ask him whether he could tell me anything about the
composer. So I penetrated to the bottom of the shop, and approached his
platform. He was bending over some sheets of music--making his next
selection, doubtless.
“I beg your pardon----” I began.
He turned towards me. You will not be surprised--I was looking into
Pair’s own face.
* * * * *
You will not be surprised, but you will imagine what it was for me.
Oh, yes, I recognised him instantly; there could be no mistake. And he
recognised me, for he flushed, and winced, and started back.
I suppose for a little while we were both of us speechless, speechless
and motionless, while our hearts stopped beating. By-and-by I think
I said--something had to be said to break the situation--I think I
said, “It’s you, Edmund?” I remember he fumbled with a sheet of music,
and kept his eyes bent on it, and muttered something inarticulate.
Then there was another speechless, helpless suspension. He continued
to fumble his music, without looking up. At last I remember saying,
through a sort of sickness and giddiness, “Let us get out of
here--where we can talk.”
“I can’t leave yet. I’ve got another dance,” he answered.
“Well, I’ll wait,” said I.
I sat down near him and waited, trying to create some kind of order
out of the chaos in my mind, and half automatically watching and
considering him as he played his dance--Edmund Pair playing a dance
for prostitutes and drunken sailors. He was not greatly changed. There
were the same grey eyes, deep-set and wide apart, under the same broad
forehead; the same fine nose and chin, the same sensitive mouth. The
whole face was pretty much the same, only thinner perhaps, and with a
look of apathy, of inanimation, that was foreign to my recollection
of it. His hair had turned quite white, but otherwise he appeared no
older than his years. His figure, tall, slender, well-knit, retained
its vigour and its distinction. Though he wore a shabby brown Norfolk
jacket, and his beard was two days old, you could in no circumstances
have taken him for anything but a gentleman. I waited anxiously for the
time when we should be alone--anxiously, yet with a sort of terror.
I was burning to understand, and yet I shrunk from doing so. If to
conjecture even vaguely what experiences could have brought him to
this, what dark things suffered or done, had been melancholy when he
was a nameless old musician, now it was appalling, and I dreaded the
explanation that I longed to hear.
At last he struck his final chord, and rose from the piano. Then he
turned to me and said, composedly enough, “Well, I’m ready.” He,
apparently, had in some measure pulled himself together. In the street
he took my arm. “Let’s walk in this direction,” he said, leading off,
“towards the Christian quarter of the town.” And in a moment he went
on: “This has been an odd meeting. What brings you to Bordeaux?”
I explained that I was on my way to Biarritz, stopping for the night
between two trains.
“Then it’s all the more surprising that you should have stumbled into
the Brasserie des Quatre Vents. You’ve altered very slightly. The
world wags well with you? You look prosperous.”
I cried out some incoherent protest. Afterwards I said, “You know what
I want to hear. What does this mean?”
He laughed nervously. “Oh, the meaning’s clear enough. It speaks for
itself.”
“I don’t understand,” said I.
“I’m pianist to the Brasserie des Quatre Vents. You saw me in the
discharge of my duties.”
“I don’t understand,” I repeated helplessly.
“And yet the inference is plain. What could have brought a man to such
a pass save drink or evil courses?”
“Oh, don’t trifle,” I implored him.
“I’m not trifling. That’s the worst of it. For I don’t drink, and I’m
not conscious of having pursued any especially evil courses.”
“Well?” I questioned. “Well?”
“The fact of the matter simply is that I’m what they call a failure. I
never came off.”
“I don’t understand,” I repeated for a third time.
“No more do I, if you come to that. It’s the will of Heaven, I suppose.
Anyhow, it can’t puzzle you more than it puzzles me. It seems contrary
to the whole logic of circumstances, but it’s the fact.”
Thus far he had spoken listlessly, with a sort of bitter levity, an
affectation of indifference; but after a little silence his mood
appeared to change. His hand upon my arm tightened its grasp, and he
began to speak rapidly, feelingly.
“Do you realise that it is nearly fifteen years since we have seen each
other? The history of those fifteen years, so far as I am concerned,
has been the history of a single uninterrupted _déveine_--one
continuous run of ill-luck, against every probability of the game,
against every effort I could make to play my cards effectively. When I
started out, one might have thought, I had the best of chances. I had
studied hard; I worked hard. I surely had as much general intelligence,
as much special knowledge, as much apparent talent, as my competitors.
And the stuff I produced seemed good to you, to my friends, and not
wholly bad to me. It was musicianly, it was melodious, it was sincere;
the critics all praised it; but--it never took on! The public wouldn’t
have it. What did it lack? I don’t know. At last I couldn’t even get it
published--invisible ink! And I had a wife to support.”