All that first evening in Paris the vision of his book grew and grew in
French’s mind. Much as he loved the great city, nothing it could give
him was comparable, at that particular hour, to the rapture of his
complete withdrawal from it into the sanctuary of his own thoughts. The
very next day he was to see Horace Fingall’s widow, and perhaps to put
his finger on the clue to the labyrinth: that mysterious tormenting
question of the relation between the creative artist’s personal
experience and its ideal expression. He was to try to guess how much of
Mrs. Fingall, beside her features, had passed into her husband’s
painting; and merely to ponder on that opportunity was to plunge himself
into the heart of his subject. Fingall’s art had at last received
recognition, genuine from the few, but mainly, no doubt, inspired by the
motives to which Jolyesse had sneeringly alluded; and, intolerable as it
was to French to think that snobbishness and cupidity were the chief
elements in the general acclamation of his idol, he could not forget
that he owed to these baser ingredients the chance to utter his own
panegyric. It was because the vulgar herd at last wanted to know what to
say when it heard Fingall mentioned that Willis French was to be allowed
to tell them; such was the base rubble the Temple of Fame was built of!
Yes, but future generations would enrich its face with lasting marbles;
and it was to be French’s privilege to put the first slab in place.
The young man, thus brooding, lost himself in the alluring and
perplexing alternatives of his plan. The particular way of dealing with
a man’s art depended, of course, so much on its relation to his private
life, and on the chance of a real insight into that. Fingall’s life had
been obdurately closed and aloof; would it be his widow’s wish that it
should remain so? Or would she understand that any serious attempt to
analyse so complex and individual an art must be preceded by a reverent
scrutiny of the artist’s personality? Would she, above all, understand
how reverent French’s scrutiny would be, and consent, for the sake of
her husband’s glory, to guide and enlighten it? Her attitude, of course,
as he was nervously aware, would greatly depend on his: on his finding
the right words and the convincing tone. He could almost have prayed for
guidance, for some supernatural light on what to say to her! It was late
that night when, turning from his open window above the throbbing city,
he murmured to himself: “I wonder what on earth we shall begin by saying
to each other?”
Her sitting-room at the Nouveau Luxe was empty when he was shown into it
the next day, though a friendly note had assured him that she would be
in by five. But he was not sorry she was late, for the room had its
secrets to reveal. The most conspicuous of these was a large photograph
of a handsome young man, in a frame which French instantly recognized as
the mate of the one he had noticed on Mrs. Morland’s writing-table.
Well—it was natural, and rather charming, that the happy couple should
choose the same frame for each other’s portraits, and there was nothing
offensive to Fingall’s memory in the fact of Donald Paul’s picture being
the most prominent object in his wife’s drawing-room.
Only—if this were indeed Donald Paul, where had French seen him already?
He was still questioning the lines of the pleasant oft-repeated face
when his answer entered the room in the shape of a splendidly draped and
feathered lady.
“I’m so sorry! The dressmakers are _such_ beasts—they’ve been sticking
pins in me ever since two o’clock.” She held out her hand with a click
of bracelets slipping down to the slim wrist. “Donald! Do come—it’s Mr.
French,” she called back over her shoulder; and the gentleman of the
photograph came in after her.
The three stood looking at each other for an interval deeply momentous
to French, obviously less stirring to his hosts; then Donald Paul said,
in a fresh voice a good deal younger than his ingenuous middle-aged
face: “We’ve met somewhere before, surely. Wasn’t it the other day at
Brighton—at the Metropole?”
His wife looked at him and smiled, wrinkling her perfect brows a little
in the effort to help his memory. “We go to so many hotels! _I_ think it
was at the Regina at Harrogate.” She appealed to their visitor for
corroboration.
“Wasn’t it simply yesterday, on the Channel?” French suggested, the
words buzzing a little in his own ears; and Mrs. Paul instantly
remembered.
“Of course! How stupid of me!” Her random sweetness grew more
concentrated. “You were talking to a dark man with a beard—André
Jolyesse, wasn’t it? I _told_ my husband it was Jolyesse. How awfully
interesting that you should know him! Do sit down and let me give you
some tea while you tell us all about him.”
French, as he took the cup from her hand, remembered that, a few hours
earlier, he had been wondering what he and she would first say to each
other.
It was dark when he walked away from the blazing front of the Nouveau
Luxe. Mrs. Donald Paul had given him two generous hours, and had filled
them with talk of her first husband; yet as French turned from the hotel
he had the feeling that what he brought away with him had hardly added a
grain to his previous knowledge of Horace Fingall. It was perhaps
because he was still too blankly bewildered—or because he had not yet
found the link between what had been and what was—that he had been able
to sift only so infinitesimal a residue out of Mrs. Paul’s abundance.
And his first duty, plainly, if he were ever to thread a way through the
tangle, was to readjust himself and try to see things from a different
point of view.
His one definite impression was that Mrs. Paul was very much pleased
that he should have come to Paris to see her, and acutely, though
artlessly, aware of the importance of his mission. Artlessness, in fact,
seemed her salient quality: there looked out of her great Sphinx-eyes a
consciousness as cloudless as a child’s. But one thing he speedily
discovered: she was keenly alive to her first husband’s greatness. On
that point French saw that she needed no enlightenment. He was even
surprised, sitting opposite to her in all the blatancy of hotel mirrors
and gilding, to catch on her lips the echoes of so different a setting.
But he gradually perceived that the words she used had no meaning for
her save, as it were, a symbolic one: they were like the mysterious
price-marks with which dealers label their treasures. She knew that her
husband had been proud and isolated, that he had “painted only for
himself” and had “simply despised popularity”; but she rejoiced that he
was now at last receiving “the kind of recognition even _he_ would have
cared for”; and when French, at this point, interposed, with an impulse
of self-vindication: “I didn’t know that, as yet, much had been written
about him that he would have liked,” she opened her fathomless eyes a
little wider, and answered: “Oh, but the dealers are simply fighting for
his things.”
The shock was severe; but presently French rallied enough to understand
that she was not moved by a spirit of cupidity, but was simply applying
the only measure of greatness she knew. In Fingall’s lifetime she had
learned her lesson, and no doubt repeated it correctly—her conscientious
desire for correctness was disarming—but now that he was gone his
teaching had got mixed with other formulas, and she was serenely
persuaded that, in any art, the proof and corollary of greatness was to
become a best seller. “Of course he was his own worst enemy,” she
sighed. “Even when people _came_ to buy he managed to send them away
discouraged. Whereas now—!”
In the first chill of his disillusionment French thought for a moment of
flight. Mrs. Paul had promised him all the documentation he required:
she had met him more than halfway in her lavish fixing of hours and
offering of material. But everything in him shrank from repeating the
experience he had just been subjected to. What was the use of seeing her
again, even though her plans included a visit to Fingall’s former
studio? She had told him nothing whatever about Fingall, and she had
told him only too much about herself. To do that, she had not even had
to open her beautiful lips. On his way to her hotel he had stopped in at
the Luxembourg, and filled his eyes again with her famous image.
Everything she was said to have done for Fingall’s genius seemed to burn
in the depths of that quiet face. It was like an inexhaustible reservoir
of beauty, a still pool into which the imagination could perpetually dip
and draw up new treasure. And now, side by side with the painter’s
vision of her, hung French’s own: the vision of the too-smiling beauty
set in glasses and glitter, preoccupied with dressmakers and
theatre-stalls, and affirming her husband’s genius in terms of the
auction room and the stock exchange!
“Oh, hang it—what can she give me? I’ll go straight back to New York,”
the young man suddenly resolved. The resolve even carried him
precipitately back to his hotel; but on its threshold another thought
arrested him. Horace Fingall had not been the only object of his
pilgrimage: he had come to Paris to learn what he could of Emily Morland
too. That purpose he had naturally not avowed at the Nouveau Luxe: it
was hardly the moment to confess his double quest. But the manifest
friendliness of Donald Paul convinced him that there would be no
difficulty in obtaining whatever enlightenment it was in the young man’s
power to give. Donald Paul, at first sight, seemed hardly more
expressive than his wife; but though his last avatar was one so remote
from literature, at least he had once touched its borders and even worn
its livery. His great romance had originated in the accident of his
having written an article about its heroine; and transient and
unproductive as that phase of his experience had probably been, it must
have given him a sense of values more applicable than Mrs. Paul’s to
French’s purpose.
Luck continued to favour him; for the next morning, as he went down the
stairs of his hotel, he met Donald Paul coming up.
His visitor, fresh and handsome as his photograph, and dressed in
exactly the right clothes for the hour and the occasion, held out an
eager hand.
“I’m so glad—I hoped I’d catch you,” he smiled up at the descending
French; and then, as if to tone down what might seem an excess of
warmth, or at least make it appear the mere overflow of his natural
spirits, he added: “My wife rushed me off to say how sorry she is that
she can’t take you to the studio this morning. She’d quite forgotten an
appointment with her dressmaker—_one_ of her dressmakers!” Donald Paul
stressed it with a frank laugh; his desire, evidently, was to forestall
French’s surprise. “You see,” he explained, perhaps guessing that a
sense of values was expected of him, “it’s rather more of a business for
her than for—well, the average woman. These people—the big ones—are
really artists themselves nowadays, aren’t they? And they all regard her
as a sort of Inspiration; she really tries out the coming fashions for
them—lots of things succeed or fail as they happen to look on _her_.”
Here he seemed to think another laugh necessary. “She’s always been an
Inspiration; it’s come to be a sort of obligation to her. You see, I’m
sure?”