her blanched face shed a rapturous light upon his. His eyes held hers
in willing bondage. Though this was her farewell I could divine the
supreme effort that kept her from his arms, by the fingers fluttering
like the wings of a bird against her dress, while it were hard to say
which her half-lifted, gently averted face, with the eyes straining
back to his, most eloquently expressed: surrender or renouncement.
Trueberry sprang to her and caught her to him, and their lips met in a
kiss that had the solemnity of a sacrament. I staggered back, clapping
my hand over my mouth to prevent a shout of white-hot anguish, and
could see the darkness sweep down upon me like a big comforting wing.
I hoped it was death come to gather me like a suffering, inarticulate
child, into its soft mother’s arms.
But I struggled back into life, and had again to front the road of care
and blind endeavour. How long later I cannot say, but I saw Brases
standing over me, looking at me in pitying wonder. She took my hand
in both of hers, and bending, softly kissed my cheek. This was the
mother’s kiss I hoped death had given me. I stared at her, too broken
for wonder or emotion, and sitting down beside me, with my hand still
in hers, she said--
‘We were very much frightened, you were so long unconscious. Mr.
Trueberry told me you have not slept of late, and that you are very
unhappy. I, too, am unhappy, and that is why I kissed you. But you are
better now, and you will try to forget your pain, or, at least, to
bear it well. It is the best any of us can do. They will drive you to
Kilstern, and you will return to France alone, carrying my best wishes
for your welfare. Mr. Trueberry has gone already.’
I struggled to my feet, swallowed the wine she poured out for me, and
then, in a dull, uneager voice, asked, ‘Did Trueberry leave no message
for me, Madame?’
‘He was very much concerned, and full of sympathy, but he has his own
trouble to bear, and thinks he will bear it best alone. He will write
to you to Paris in a few days.’
A trap was at the door, and she came out with me, and when we had
shaken hands in silence, stood looking after me, as I was indeed
forcibly carried away. She was dim to my sight, a mere blurred grey
figure, with light about her head, and the landscape looked watery and
broken, as if seen through bits of bobbing glass.
A PAGE OF PHILOSOPHY
_À M. Gaston, Paris
de l’Institut de France_
A PAGE OF PHILOSOPHY
THERE was a break in the soft stream of Rameau’s eloquence when
somebody spoke of Krowtosky. The interruption came from Louis Gaston, a
brilliant young journalist, whose air of sanctified rake and residence
in the Rue du Bac, in front of a well-known shop, earned him the
nickname of _Le Petit Saint Thomas_.
Krowtosky’s name diverted the channel of the murmurous, half-abstracted
discourse to which we had lent an attentive ear, physically lulled,
and though charmed, not boisterously amused by Rameau’s sly anecdotal
humour and complaisant lightness of tone. Rameau always talked
delightfully, without any apparent consciousness of the fact;
above all, without any apparent effort. He never raised his voice,
gesticulated slightly, accentuated no point, and left much to his
listener’s discretion; and his calm drollery was all the more delicious
because of the sedate and equable expression of his handsome face.
‘Krowtosky,’ he repeated, as he turned his picturesque grey head in
Gaston’s direction; with a deliberate air he removed his glasses,
slowly polished them, and interjected, ‘Ah!’
‘You must remember that queer Russian who used to hold forth here some
years ago,’ Louis Gaston continued, in an explanatory tone; ‘a heavy,
unemotional fellow, with desperate views. He began by amusing us, and
ended by nearly driving us mad with his eternal _Nirvana_.’
‘Oh, yes,’ somebody else cried, suddenly spurred to furnish further
reminiscences. ‘His trousers were preternaturally wide, and his
coat-sleeves preternaturally short. You always imagined that he
carried dynamite in his pockets, and apprehended an explosion if you
accidentally threw a lighted match or a half-smoked cigarette in his
neighbourhood.’
‘He had small eyes, and a big nose, the head of an early Gaul, and a
hollow voice,’ I remarked.
‘A monster to convince the Tartars themselves of their superior
ugliness, if they entertained any doubt of it,’ half lisped a
Frenchman recently crowned by the Academy, and as unconscious of his
own ill-looks as only a man, and above all a Frenchman, can be.
‘The good-nature of your remarks and your keen remembrance of Krowtosky
prove that he must be a personage in his way,’ said Rameau mockingly.
‘What became of him?’ asked Le Petit Saint Thomas, between slow puffs
of his cigarette.
‘Poor fellow! He has fallen upon grief.’
‘Naturally; it is the great result of birth. A love affair?’
‘Worse.’
‘Blasphemy, Professor! ’Tis the sole sorrow of life. The rest are but
the trifling ills of humanity.’ Gaston spoke with all the authority of
a young man who is perpetually in and out of love, is backed upon the
thorny path of literature by rich and devoted relatives, and has never
known a day’s illness upon his road.
‘It can’t be marriage, for that violent resource would merely drift
him into deeper depths of Pessimism, which would be a gratifying
confirmation of his theories.’
‘It can’t be love either,’ I suggested. ‘Pessimism and love don’t
mate. Marriage it might be; for even a pessimist may be conceded the
weakness of objecting to a demonstration of the nothingness of marriage
in the person of his own wife.’
‘It might be debt, if that were not a modified trouble since the
inhuman law of imprisonment was abolished.’
‘Behold the force of imagination, Professor,’ exclaimed Gaston,
pointing to a visionary perspective with his cigarette, in answer to
Rameau’s glance of contemplative irony. ‘I see our monster married to
an unvirtuous _grisette_, or an amiable young laundress, who discovers
the superior attractiveness of an optimist poet on the opposite side
of the way. She can hardly be blamed for the discovery; for though we
may applaud the courage of a woman who marries a monster, it would be
both rash and cruel to expect her to add fidelity to her courage. Where
women are concerned, it is a wise precaution to count upon a single
virtue.’
‘Your wit, the outcome of natural perversity, flies beyond the mark,’
said Rameau, shrugging his shoulders. ‘The real sorrows of life are
very simple, and command respect by their simplicity. The others are
the complications, the depravities of civilisation at which we cavil
and laugh. Krowtosky has not stumbled in double life, but he has just
lost a baby girl.’
There was dead silence. A perceptible start of emotion found expression
in an interjectionary arch of brow, a sigh blown on the puff of a
cigarette, and an uneasy shifting of attitudes. A baby girl! What a
slight thing in the hurry of life, what a simple thing in its crowding
perplexities! The tragic end of men and women whom the years have worn
and fretted; the sudden death of happy youth in the midst of its bright
promises; the peaceful sadness that accompanies the departure of the
old, who have honourably lived their lives and accomplished all natural
laws:--but the closed eyes of a little baby girl! What is it more than
tumble of a new-born bird from its nest, leaving no empty space? Upon a
boy paternal pride might have feasted, and the sting might remain that
new avenues to fame and fortune were closed by his sharp withdrawal.
Yet despite the insignificance of the loss, none of the faces round
Rameau wore a look of indifference or surprise. For a moment each
man was serious, touched, and uninclined for wit at poor Krowtosky’s
expense. Upon dropped lids I seemed to see the big grotesque head, so
full of honesty and strife, bent in grief over an empty cradle; and I
was wrung by a smart of anger when Gaston lightly asked, ‘Is there then
a legitimate Madame Krowtosky?’
‘All that is most legitimate,’ replied Rameau gravely.
‘You have followed the story?’
‘Since I played the part of confidential friend--why, I know as little
as you.’
‘And the lady?’
‘Ah, the lady! Her I only know on report that cannot exactly be
described as impartial.’
‘Is it a story worth telling?’
‘In its way it is curious enough, especially unfolded in the
illumination of Krowtosky’s jumble of crude philosophy and speculative
theories, and, above all, told in his queer French. He has honoured
me with a correspondence in the form of a journal. It is extremely
interesting, and I have preserved it. Some day I will publish
it,--when the philosopher is dead, of course.’
‘Then begin now, my dear Professor,’ I urged. ‘Try its effect _en
petit comité_.’ We read assent in the Professor’s way of crossing
his legs, while he drew one hand slowly round the back of his head.
When he had carefully polished and adjusted his glasses, each of us
chose a commodious attitude, and looked expectantly at him. After a
pause, Rameau began in his soft conversational tone, subdued like the
indefinite shade of the lamp-screen that cast its glimmer over heads
and profiles, showing vaguely upon a background of dull tapestries.
‘Krowtosky looked much older than his age. He was, in fact, very young,
Pessimism being one of the most pronounced symptoms of the malady of
youth. He is still young, and the malady has yet some years to run. He
came here with a letter to me from an old friend in Moscow, and a very
big bundle of hopes.
‘I hardly know what he expected to make of Paris, but Paris, I imagine,
made nothing of him. I did what I could for him, which was not much,
and from the first I had no illusions whatever upon the nature of his
probable success. I found a lady ambitious to read Turgenieff and
Tolstoï in Russian. I sent Krowtosky to her; but after the second
lesson she dismissed him on the plea of his unearthly ugliness; his
heavy Calmuck face diverted her attention from Turgenieff’s charming
women and Tolstoï’s philosophy, and gave her nightmares. I encouraged
the poor fellow to come here, which he did, and most of you met
him frequently. He was interesting in his way, very, but crude and
boundlessly innocent. He had the queerest notions upon all things,
and having sounded the _Décadents_, he professed to find them hollow.
I think he suspected those gentlemen of an unreasonable sanity and
an underhand enjoyment of life. The French Realists he dismissed as
caricaturists; he said they were reading for the devil when he was
drunk and in a merry mood. I daresay he meant the Czar.
‘He railed at the mock decay of modern civilised life, and imagined
that a glimpse of Pessimism beyond the Pyrenees would prove
instructive. He was convinced that he would find it there of less
noxious quality, exhibiting the sombre melancholy and dignity of a
great race fallen into poetic decay and unvexed by the wearisome
febrile conditions of its development here. “You understand nothing of
the spirit of calm fatality,” he would say, apostrophising the nation
in my humble person for lack of a more enlightened audience. “You are
everlastingly in strife with your own emotions and despairs; and these
you decorate, as you idly decorate your persons, with persistent vanity
and with wasteful care.” I deprecated the charge upon my own account,
and assured him that it took me exactly four minutes to decorate my
person each morning. Four minutes, I claimed, cannot be described
as an exorbitant charge upon Time for the placing and adjusting of
eighteen articles, and as he seemed to doubt the number, I told them
off, including my hat and _pince-nez_. I mentioned a few Frenchmen who
I thought accepted the luxury of unemotional despair calmly enough, and
were as incapable of strife as a tortoise. He shook his head; he was
not easily to be convinced. His Pessimism was so black that our sombre
Maupassant was a captivating Optimist beside him. And provided with
this meagre intellectual baggage, he set out for half-forgotten and
ruined lands, beginning with Spain.’
‘He fell in for a fortune, I suppose,’ Gaston interrupted.
‘He had not a sou, which is the best explanation of an expensive
voyage. Remark, my friends, that a man only becomes really extravagant
and reckless upon an empty purse. An empty purse and an empty stomach
are equally effectual in producing light-headedness, and vest us in the
cloak of illusion. Illusion I opine to be one of the things that look
best in rags. Krowtosky travelled third class, and was prodigiously
uncomfortable, which, after all, is another method of enjoying life
upon his theory. He ate Bologna sausages, and refreshed himself with
grapes upon the wayside.
‘His first letter was dated from Bayonne. It was a long and a curious
letter, and so interested me that I resolved to follow up the
correspondence with vigorous encouragement, for it was not an occasion
to be missed by a student of mankind. I will read you some extracts
from these letters, which I have here in a drawer of my writing-table.’
The packet of letters found, Rameau went on reading, with the
perfect and polished irony and charm of enunciation that could cast
an intellectual glamour over an auctioneer’s inventory. ‘“I have
chosen you as the recipient of the impressions and incidents of my
voyage,--why, I hardly know; I am not inspired by any strong sympathy
for you. My esteem and my liking are very moderate indeed; you have
a face that rather repels than invites confidence, and I ought to be
discouraged by the fact that I have no faith in your sympathy for
me, and have every conviction that you are the last person likely to
understand me. The friend who would understand me, and for whom I
should enjoy writing these impressions and the adventures that may
lie ahead, is at present voyaging in far-off waters; I think he is
somewhere about the Black Sea, but I don’t know his address, or when
or where communication might chance to reach him. So, having cast
about me for a confidant, choice alighted upon you; but you need not
read my letters if they bore you. They are written rather for my
own gratification than for yours. If I possessed literary talent,
the public would be my natural victim....”
‘This was a flattering beginning, you will admit, but it sharpened my
curiosity. After that I began to look forward to Krowtosky’s post-day,
as some people look forward to the _feuilleton_ of the morning paper.
His queer minute handwriting never found me indifferent or unexpectant
of diversion.
‘At Toulouse he wrote again: “A young girl got into the carriage with
me. We were alone, and she soon gave me a visible demonstration of
the strange eccentricities oddly explained by the single word _love_.
Why _love_? It is simply a malady more or less innocuous and only
sometimes deadly; but love, no! I was not flattered; I am above that
weakness, because nothing pleases me. I was interested, however, and
investigated the case with scientific calm. So might any physician have
diagnosed a disease. It struck me for the first time as a form of mild
insanity. I asked myself why the poets and romancers amuse themselves
in writing of it rather than of the other fevers and bodily illnesses
that overcome us. For everything about this young girl convinced me
that love is but a sickness. I studied her gestures, her expression,
her tones of voice and her attitudes; all served to prove my theory.
One minute I offered to open the window, and the next I suggested that
perhaps it would be better to close it. She assented. Though curious,
it was rather monotonous, but she assented to everything I proposed.
If I looked at her, she looked at me; if I looked away, she continued
to look at me. After a couple of hours’ study, I felt that I quite
understood love and all its phases. I found it in the main a silly
game, and an excitement only fit for brainless boys and girls in their
first youth. But the most remarkable feature of humanity is its crass
stupidity; it is a monstrously shabby and feeble institution, male and
female. This young girl, now; I daresay you and others would call her
pretty. Bah! I can see but the ugliness of women. Behind their forehead
thought does not work; their eyes only express the meanest and most
personal sentiments. Big black empty eyes and sensual red lips; a round
lazy figure and nerveless hands! I protest there is more intelligence
and matter for study in a dog than in these insipid creatures, all
curves and no muscles. Men, say they, don’t understand them. Are
dolls worth understanding? They are actuated solely by impulse and
personal claims. What is there in this worth understanding? I escaped
from my conquest, now grown irksome, upon the frontier, and I am
resolved never to give evidence of a similar weakness. It is degrading
folly. What, for instance, can women see in us to inspire this most
infelicitously-called tender passion, and, in the name of all that is
eternal, what are we supposed to see in them to justify it?...”’
‘A sympathetic dog, to go snarling in that cantankerous way through
life because the Almighty has seen fit to cast a flower or two across
his path,’ growled the indignant Petit Saint Thomas, to whom love was
the main object of existence.
‘Scenery does not interest him much,’ Rameau went on, with an
acquiescent nod; ‘but he has a good deal to say upon his impressions
of the Spanish race in particular, and of all other races in general.
The subject is not a new one, and Krowtosky is only really entertaining
when he is talking of himself, or of his next-door neighbour in
connection with himself.
‘“I am on the whole much disappointed in Madrid,” he continues further
on, “not because it is a duller town than I had imagined, but because
local colour and national individuality are almost extinct. It proves
the disastrous tendencies of all races to amalgamation and imitation.
Yet, after all, Rameau, what is the real value of local colour? It
is more often than not a mere matter of imagination, and one of the
illusions we fancy we enjoy. Any one with a lively imagination can
invent a more vivid local colour for all the countries he has never
visited than he is likely to find in any of them. Witness Merimée
and his band. They duped their public like the vulgarest literary
conjurors, and showed us that a trick will serve us instead of what we
are pleased to call Nature. And the deception was but the result of
our stupid hunger for the unusual. As if anything under the monotonous
stars of an unchanging heaven can be unusual; and as if everything in
this old and ugly world is not hideously familiar! The more varied our
travels the more similar our experience. For, Rameau, our real ills
are monotony and stupidity. Man resembles man, as rats resemble rats,
only he is a good deal less interesting and more noxious. You have a
fine head, and I have a misshapen one. Well, the same perplexities,
needs, instincts, appetites, passions, and impulses agitate us, and
explain our different actions, which, _au fond_, have no variety in
them whatever. We change the symbols of our faiths, while these remain
fundamentally the same, and we give our countries different names to
represent the unchangeable miseries of humanity....”