could not chant more lugubriously, though perhaps less intelligibly.
The sick youth laments in the same irritable tone the vulgarity of the
_madrileñas_, the exaggerated prowess of the gentlemen of the arena,
exalts the patient and noble bulls, rails at the puny byplay of the
picadors and at the silly enthusiasm of the spectators. He rushes
distractedly from an inexpensive inn, where a band of merry rascals
joined him and over wine sang the praises of the Fair. Praise of the
eternal feminine he cannot stand. Poor wretch! Had he been Adam in
the Garden of Paradise, Eden would have ceased to be Eden upon the
impertinent introduction of Eve. We find him complaining that he
should have left a score of maundering youths in Paris doing dismal
homage to the Sex, to drop upon a sillier band in Madrid hymning the
everlasting subject. He protests the Spanish women, for all their
eyes and arched feet, are untempting and insipid, like the rest. They
are not the dolls of the North; they are the animals of the South. He
confines his curiosity to Spanish literature, and is in pursuit of
its apostle of Pessimism. “I am taking lessons in Spanish,” he writes
from another inn. “I teach Russian to as poor a devil as myself, in
exchange for his help in his own tongue. Between us we are making
creditable progress. He is writing an article on the Russian novelists
for a review that will pay him something like twopence a page. Yet he
preserves his faith in literature! Mighty indeed is man’s capacity for
cherishing illusions. I advised him to break stones for a lucrative
change, but he seems to doubt the value of the advice since I do not
follow it myself. This is one of the things that prove man a rational
being. We read Castrès together. You have doubtless heard of Castrès,
the poet of Spain, and said to be sufficiently sedative as regards
the happy hopes of youth. Such is my Spaniard’s description in reply
to a question of mine upon his tendencies. I have inserted the phrase
as a concession to the perverse taste for local colouring. The phrase
paints the man; he lives upon onions and bread into the bargain, and
dreams with a cigarette between his lips. This morning I went to see
Castrès.... I found the great man writing and smoking at the same time
in a big sparsely furnished bedroom. He is low-sized and heavily built,
with soft black eyes and a forest of hair round and about his sallow
face. He looks as if he dined well and liked women. There is always
something unctuous and fatuous about a man who likes women, which
becomes intolerably accentuated if women should happen to like him too.
The expression suggests a mixture of oil and sugar. We discussed the
_Décadents_ under their new name, and hardly appreciated the advantage
of exchange, symbolism being no whit less empty and vapid; another
demonstration of the worthlessness of novelty, since, however much we
vary things, we end where we start, at the Unchangeable. Castrès agrees
with me that Naturalism is dead; but what the devil, he asked, is
going to take its place? Naturalism under a new name, I replied, which
is only romance upside down. Whether we invent animals or angels, it
matters little. It is romancing all the same, and only proves that one
man likes _eau sucrée_ and another likes _absinthe_. It is a concoction
either way, and about as useful in one form as in the other.... Of
Castrès the man I thought as indifferently as I did of Castrès the
poet. I asked him how Pessimism stood in Spain, and who were its
representatives. He shrugged, spat, and surveyed me dismissingly, and
with his big soft eyes.... ‘_Caramba!_ I can’t say I know much about
it. But I believe it will never flourish here. We have too much sun,
and life is, on the whole, easy enough for us. An hour of sunshine, a
crust of bread, and a bunch of grapes, or the taste of an onion and a
lifted wine-skin upon the roadside, and there you have a Spaniard built
and ready for love-making. What more does he want? And in a land where
women are fair and facile, wherefore should he whine, and see black
where God made blue? I have here a volume of poems just published by a
young girl--Señorita Pilar Villafranca y Nuño. I have glanced through
the volume, and I don’t think you can ask for anything finer in the way
of Pessimism. It is enough to make a sane man cut his throat, if he had
not the good sense to pause beforehand, in distrust of the sincerity of
the writer who could survive the proof-reading of such dismal stuff. It
reminds me of what I have heard of Schopenhauer, who, after wrecking
all our altars, could sit down and enjoy a heavy dinner. He despised
none of the pleasures of life in practice, while decrying them all in
theory. You’ll probably find that this young woman dines heartily, and
employs her evenings over her wedding outfit, if she is not already
married and nursing her first baby. I took the book away and read it
with my poor devil that evening. You will not be surprised to learn
that I found it very much superior to anything of Castrès’ I have read.
He might well sneer at her in self-preservation, that being the weapon
the strong have ever preferred to use against the weak. It is bad
enough to find real talent in a young woman, but absolute unbelief, the
doctrine of complete negation! To find in this land of To-morrow, a
feminine apostle of the _Nirvana_....”’
‘Ah,’ interrupted Gaston, ‘I was wondering what had become of the word.’
‘“A feminine apostle of the _Nirvana_,”’ continued Rameau, with an
expressive smile. ‘“Judge if masculine opinion in Spain would be
indulgent. Even my poor devil, though no less struck than I with the
poetry, found it much too strong for a woman. ‘But she is doubtless
old, and then it matters less. The discontents and disappointments of
old maidenhood have drifted her into deep learning and irreligion,’
he added, by way of consolation. ‘Old or young,’ I exclaimed, ‘it is
all one to me. For me she is a thinker, not a woman. And I am going
straight off to her publisher, from whom I’ll wrest her address, if
need be, by reason of a thick stick.’
‘“The services of a stick were not required. My request was immediately
complied with. I carried the lady’s book in my hand, and was no doubt
mistaken for a recent purchaser. My poet lives on the fourth floor
in a very shabby house, in a very shabby street at the other end of
Madrid. I deemed it wise to defer my visit until after dinner. It
was half-past eight when I climbed the four flights, and stood on
the landing, anxiously asking myself if I had made up my mind to
ring. Had it not the air of an invasion? While I was yet debating the
door opened, and an untidy-looking maid shot out into the passage. I
captured her before the twilight of the stairs had swallowed her, and
demanded to see the Señorita Pilar Villafranca y Nuño. I understood
that it would not serve me in her eyes to give evidence of uncertainty
or bashfulness. ‘She is inside; knock at the middle door and you’ll
find her,’ screamed the untidy maid, and in another moment she was
whirling down the stairs, and I was left to shut the hall door and
announce myself.
‘“The house was tidier than the maid. I crossed a scrupulously clean
hall and knocked at the middle door, as I had been directed. A low,
deep voice shouted, _Come in!_ While turning the handle gingerly, I
thought to myself, the poor devil was right; only a woman of massive
proportions and very advanced years could bellow that order. The
scene that met my eyes was prettier than absolute conformity to my
ideas demanded. In a neat little sitting-room, lit by a shaded
lamp, were seated three persons; a stout Spanish woman engaged with
a basket of stockings, a pale, thin young girl with melancholy eyes
of an unusual intensity of gaze, and a small lad sitting at her feet,
and reading aloud from a book they held together. The child had the
girl’s eyes, but while curiosity, belonging to his years, brightened
their sombreness with the promise of surprise and laughter, hers held
an expression of permanent sadness and soft untroubled gloom. It
was superfluous information on the mother’s part, in response to my
mention of the poet’s name, to indicate her daughter majestically,
as if she wished it to be understood that she herself had no part in
the production of matter so suspicious in a woman as poetry. I was on
the brink of assuring her that nobody would ever deem her capable of
such folly, and begging her to return to her stockings as occupation
more appropriate than the entertainment of an admirer of the Muse she
despised, when Pilar quietly said, ‘Be seated, sir.’ From that moment
I took no further heed of the Señora Villafranca than if she had been
the accommodating _dueña_ of Spanish comedy and I the unvirtuous, or
noble but thwarted, lover who had bribed her. In ten minutes Pilar
and I were talking as freely as if we had known one another from
infancy; far more freely, possibly, for in the latter case we should
long ago have talked ourselves to silence. How do these young girls
manage to get hold of books, Rameau, when all the forces of domestic
law are exercised to keep them apart? There is not a living Spanish
or French writer with whom this child, barely out of her teens, is
not acquainted. Her judgment may often be at fault,--whose is not,
if backed by anything like originality? But to hear her discuss
Naturalism! Castrès, puffing his eternal cigarette, walks you through
_les lieux communs_, but this girl takes flights that fairly dazzle
you. And then her Pessimism! The queer thing is that she has found
it for herself, and Schopenhauer has nothing to do with it. For that
matter, nobody living or dead seems to have had anything to do with
the forming of her. She is essentially _primesautière_. You French
do manage to hit upon excellent words; _primesautière_ perfectly
describes this Spanish maid. She is all herself, first of the mould,
fresh, though so burdened with the century’s malady. So young, and she
believes in nothing--but nothing, Rameau! She hopes for nothing, for
nothing! She plays with no emotions, feigns no poetic despairs, utters
no paradoxes, and is simplicity itself in her gestures, expressions,
and ideas. She calmly rejects all the pretty illusions of her sex,
without a pang or regret, because, for her, truth is above personal
happiness.
‘“We talked, we talked--talked till far into the night, while the
fat mother slumbered noisily in her chair, and the little boy slept
curled up at his sister’s feet. Can you guess what first put it into
my head to go? The smell of the lamp as the wick flickeringly lowered.
‘_Dios mio!_’ cried Pilar, ‘it is close on two o’clock, and we have
been chattering while my mother sleeps comfortlessly in her chair,
and my little brother is dreaming on the carpet instead of in his
bed. Good-night, sir; I must leave you and carry my baby to bed.’ She
stooped and lifted the sleeping boy with her arms. Such bodily strength
in one so frail much astonished me. I would have offered her help,
but the little lad had already found a comfortable spot in the hollow
of her neck, and with a cordial nod to me she disappeared into the
inner room. I had not expected this evidence of womanly tenderness from
her, and the picture haunted me on my way down the dark staircase and
through the dim starlit streets.”
‘The extracts from the next letters are singularly characteristic,’
said Rameau, well pleased by our profound attention. ‘Krowtosky, upon
his return to Paris, has taken a third-class ticket from Madrid to
Bayonne. To the poet he has said his last farewell, and probably wears
upon his heart her precious autograph. Not that Krowtosky is ostensibly
sentimental. He rejects the notion of such folly, and if by chance he
dropped into pretty fooling, be sure he would find a philosophical
way out of the disgrace deservedly attached to such weakness. “I am
travelling to Bayonne,” he writes, “and I will reach it to-morrow
afternoon, but I am convinced that once there I shall straightway take
the train back to Madrid. Odd, is it not? Yet I feel that I shall be
compelled to return to that young girl. And this is not love, mark you,
Rameau; not in the least. I know all about that. Did I not study it in
the case of that young girl I met at Toulouse? Well, nothing I feel
for Pilar in any way resembles the foolish sentiment her gestures and
looks expressed. I am quite master of myself, and do not hang on any
one’s lips or glances; but I must see Pilar again. Do you know why I
hesitated outside her door that first evening I called upon her? I had
a presentiment, as I climbed up those stairs, that I should marry her.
We may reject a faith in presentiments, but they shake us nevertheless.
How slowly this train goes! The landscape, across which we speed in the
leisurely movement of Spanish steam, is flat and ugly, an interminable
view of cornfields. There is a wide-hatted priest in front of me with
an open breviary in his hand. Perhaps I shall find myself craving
service of one of his brothers some day. What an odd fellow I am, to be
sure! I intend, oh certainly I intend to take the Paris train to-morrow
night from Bayonne, and as certainly I know I shall find myself on my
way back to Madrid! And it cannot be for the pleasure of passing a
couple of days and nights in a beastly third-class carriage, which is
nothing better here than a cattle-pen....”
‘Of his reception by the poet, of his sentiments and wooing, he
writes very sparingly. His great terror is that I should detect the
lover where he insists there is only a philosopher. Philosophy took
him from Madrid, and Philosophy brought him back within forty-eight
hours. Philosophy sued, wooed, and won the Muse, and led him to his
wedding-morn. While engaged in its service, he writes in this jocose
strain the very evening of his marriage: “This morning in a dark
little church, in a dark little street of Madrid, we were married.
Though neither of us believes in anything, we agreed to make the usual
concession to conventional feeling and social law, and were married in
the most legal and Christianlike fashion. Nothing was lacking,--neither
rings nor signatures, nor church-bells nor church-fees, nor yet the
excellent and venerable fat priest, a degree uglier than myself, who
obligingly made us one. While this ceremony was being performed, I
could not forget the inconvenient fact that neither of us brought the
other much in the shape of promise of future subsistence, not even
hope, of which there is not a spark between us. This preoccupation
distracted me while the priest mumbled and sermonised, and a wicked
little French couplet kept running through my head:
Un et un font deux, nombre heureux en galanterie,
Mais quand un et un font trois,--c’est diablerie!
Meanwhile the fat priest discoursed to my wife, most excellently, upon
the duties and virtues of the true Christian spouse, to which discourse
my wife lent an inattentive ear. Perhaps she also was thinking of the
future,--somewhat tardily. My dear Rameau, have you ever reflected
upon the amazing one-sidedness of religion on these occasions? Wives
are eloquently exhorted to practise all the virtues, and not a word
is flung at the husbands. It is something of course for us to learn,
by the aid of the Church, that all the duty is on the other side,
and that we have nothing to do but command, be worshipped, and fall
foul of infidelity. The beautiful logic of man, and the profound
Pessimism of woman! She never rebels, but accepts all without hope
of remedy. The real Pessimists are women. They admit the fact that
everything is unalterable, evil without amelioration; everything is,
and everything will remain to the end. Man occasionally rises up, and
takes his oppressor by the throat, but woman never. There is a point
at which his patience vanishes, but hers is inexhaustible. She is the
soul and spirit and body of the malady only diagnosed this century.
Conviction that suffering is her only heritage is hers before birth,
and she placidly bends to the law of fate often without a murmur,
always without the faintest instinct of revolt. Is she an idiot or an
angel? The latter rebelled in paradise; then she must be an idiot. Man
is activity, she is inertia; that is why she yields so readily to his
ruling. These are thoughts suitable to the marriage of two Pessimists.
There will be on neither side revolt or stupid demands upon destiny. I
am simply interested in the development of this strange union of the
barbarous North and the barbarous South, and watch this unfamiliar
person, my wife, placed in an enervating proximity by a queer social
institution. I wonder if she will eventually prove explosive; meantime
it is my privilege to kiss her. I have not mentioned it, but she has
very sweet lips.”
‘After this there is a long lapse of silence. I fear the delights of
poor Krowtosky’s honeymoon were soon enough disturbed by the grim
question of ways and means. As I was only a fair-weather friend in
default of the sympathetic confidant voyaging in distant waters, I
imagine at this period the traveller must have returned, and received
the rest of the journal so wantonly intrusted to me, or Krowtosky must
have confided his troubles to his wife. When next I hear from him,
it is many months later, and he has just obtained a professorship in
a dreary snow-bound place called Thorpfeld. From his description, it
is evidently the very last place God Almighty bethought himself of
making, and by that time all the materials of comfort, pleasure, and
beauty had been exhausted. “As Thorpfeld is not my birthplace,” writes
Krowtosky, “I may befoul it to my liking. It contains about seven
thousand inhabitants, one poorer and more ignorant than another. What
they can want with professors and what the authorities are pleased to
call a college, the wicked government under which we sweat and suffer
and groan alone can tell. Six out of a hundred cannot read, and three
of these can barely write. The less reason have they for a vestige
of belief in man, the more fervent is their faith in their Creator.
Nothing but anticipation of the long-delayed joys of paradise can
keep them from cutting their own and their neighbours’ throats. They
ought to begin with the professors and the rascally magistrates.
As if snow and broken weather were not enough to harass these poor
wretches in pursuit of a precarious livelihood, what little money the
magistrates or the professors leave them is wrung from them by the
popes. Even Pilar is demoralised by her surroundings. She has left
off writing pessimistic poetry, and has betaken herself to Christian
charity. ’Tisn’t much we can do, for we have barely enough to live upon
ourselves, but that little she manages to do somehow or other. These
hearts of foolish women will ever make them traitor to their heads. I
naturally growl when I find our sack of corn diminished in favour of a
neighbour’s hungry children, or return frost-bitten from the college
to find no fire, and learn that my wife has carried a basket of fuel
to a peasant dying up among snow-hills. She does not understand these
people, and they do not understand her, but they divine her wish to
share their wretchedness, her own being hardly less; and then she is a
pretty young woman! Timon himself could hardly have spurned her. But
where’s her Pessimism? Has it vanished with the sun and vines of her
own bright land, or has it found a grave in the half-frozen breast
of a strange Sister of Charity unknown to me and born of the sight of
snow-clad misery such as in Spain is never dreamed of? You see, I am on
the road to poetry instead of my poor changed young wife.
‘“Last evening when I came home from a farmer’s house, where I had
stopped to warm myself with a couple of glasses of _vodka_, I found her
shivering over the remaining sparks of a miserable fire. She looked so
white and unhappy and alone, so completely the image of a stranger in a
foreign land, to whom I, too, her husband, am a foreigner, that I asked
myself, in serious apprehension, if I might not be destined to lose
her in the coming crisis. ‘Pilar,’ I cried, ‘what ails thee?’ And when
she turned her head I saw that she was crying silently. ‘I want my own
land; I want the sun and vines of Spain, where at least the peasants
have wine and sunshine in abundance whatever else they may lack!’ I
should think so, I grimly muttered, remembering that over there the
mortar that built up the walls of a town was wet with wine instead of
water, and that fields are sometimes moistened with last year’s wine
when the new is ready. Pilar is right, my friend. There is no poverty
so sordid and awful as that of the cold North. But what could I do? I
could not offer her the prospect of change. She was sobbing bitterly
now, and I had no words of comfort for her. If only she had not
forsaken her principles and her poetry! But the baby may rouse her when
it comes. She has not smiled since we left Spain, poor girl. We must
wait meanwhile; but Rameau, it is very cold.”’
‘Poor little woman!’ murmured Gaston. ‘I hardly know which is the
worst fortune for her, her transplantation or her marriage with that
maundering owl Krowtosky. Krowtosky married to a pretty Spanish poet!
Ye gods, it is a cruel jest! There would have been some appropriateness
in the laundress or the _grisette_, but a Spanish girl with arched feet
and melancholy eyes! I vow the jade Destiny ought to have her neck
wrung for it. Is there a Perseus among us to free this modern unhappy
Andromeda?’
‘Poor Krowtosky! he deserves a word too,’ I modestly ventured to
suggest, touched by that little stroke, _It is very cold_, and his fear
of losing his wife. ‘He is more human than he himself is aware, and we
may be sorry for him too.’
‘Ah, yes,’ assented Rameau, and he dropped an easy sigh. ‘If he is a
bear, he is an honest bear. His next letter was just a note to announce
the birth of a little girl and the well-being of the mother, which was
followed by a more philosophical communication later, as soon as the
gracious content of motherhood had fallen upon the young Spaniard.
Relieved of his fears, he plunges once again into high speculation,
and throws out queer suggestions as to the result of such conflicting
elements in parentage as those contributed by Spain and Russia. He
has found an occupation of vivid interest,--that of watching the
development of his child, which he is convinced will turn out something
very curious. Pilar, he adds, has so far recovered her old self as to
have written a delicious little poem, which has just appeared in the
_Revista_. It is over there, if any of you can read Spanish.’
‘And the baby is now dead,’ said Gaston.
‘Dead, yes, poor mite! It had not time to show what the mingling of
Spanish and Russian blood might mean. Krowtosky’s letter was most
pitiful. That I will not read to you; it affected me too deeply. It
was the father there who wrote. Unconsciously the little creature had
forced a way into his heart, and discovered it a very big and human
heart despite his Pessimism and Philosophy. What hurt him most was the
cruel hammering of nails into the baby’s coffin, and the sound keeps
haunting him through the long wakeful nights. Of the bereaved mother he
says little. His mind is fixed on the empty cradle and the small fresh
mound in the churchyard, whither he goes every day. I believe myself
that it is the first time his heart has ever been stirred by passionate
love, and now he speaks of never leaving Thorpfeld,--a place he has
been moving heaven and earth to get away from the past six years.’
‘I promise you, Professor, that I’ll never laugh at him again,’ said
Gaston, very gravely. ‘There can be nothing absurd about a man who
mourns a little child like that. Give me his address, and I’ll write to
him at once.’
‘It may be a distraction for him, and at any rate it will serve to
show him that he is remembered in Paris,’ said Rameau, eager to comply
with the request. We thanked the Professor for his story, with
some surprise at the lateness of the hour. The door-bell rang, and
the appearance of the servant with the evening letters arrested our
departure. With a hand extended to the sobered St. Thomas, Rameau took
the letters and glanced as he spoke at the top envelope, deeply edged
with black. ‘_Tiens!_ a letter from poor Krowtosky,’ he exclaimed. He
broke the seal and read aloud: ‘My dear friend, I thank you for your
kind words in my bereavement. But I am past consolation; I am alone
now; my wife is dead, and my heart is broken.’
ARMAND’S MISTAKE
_To Demetrius Bikélas_
ARMAND’S MISTAKE
I
UNTIL the age of twenty-one, Armand Ulrich submitted to the controlling
influences around him,--somewhat gracelessly, be it admitted. He sat
out his uncle’s long dinners, and solaced himself by sketching on
the cloth between the courses. He showed a discontented face at his
mother’s weekly receptions in a big Parisian hotel, and all the while
his heart was out upon the country roads and among the pleasant fields,
where the children played under poplars and dabbled on the brim of
reedy streams. At twenty-one, however, he regarded himself as a free
man, and threw up a situation worth £50,000 a year or thereabouts.
From this we may infer that he was a lad full of bright hopes and fair
dreams.
He was the only son of a Frenchwoman of noble birth and of the junior
partner of a wealthy Alsatian banking-house. His taste for strolling
and camping out of doors, sketch-book in hand and pipe in mouth, was
partly an inherited taste, with the difference that transmission had
strengthened instead of having weakened the heritage. In earlier
days Ulrich junior had not shown an undivided spirit of devotion to
commercial interests; he had, on the contrary, permitted himself the
treasonable luxury of gazing abroad upon many objects not connected
with the business of the firm. Amateur theatricals had engaged his
affections in youth; five-act tragedies, in alexandrines as long as the
acts, had proved him fickle, and operatic music had sent him fairly
distraught. He aspired to excel in all the arts, and as a fact was
successful in none.
When congratulated upon his brother’s versatility, Ulrich senior would
contemptuously retort that the fellow was able to do everything except
attend to his business. As a result, he was held in light esteem at
the bank, and the meanest client would have regarded himself insulted
if passed for consultation to this accomplished but incompetent
representative of the firm. However agreeable his tastes may have
rendered him in society, it cannot be denied that they were of a nature
to diminish his commercial authority. Humanity wisely draws the line
at a sonneteering banker, and looks upon the ill-assorted marriage of
account and sketch-book with a natural distrust.
This state of things broke the banker’s heart. He had a reverence for
the firm of Ulrich Brothers, and if he considered himself specially
gifted for anything, it was for the judicious management of its
affairs. Thus he lived and died a misappreciated and misunderstood
person. To him it was a grievous injustice that he should be treated as
a man of no account, because of a few irregular and purely decorative
accomplishments. His heart might be led astray, he argued, but his head
was untampered with, and that, after all, is the sole organ essential
to the matter of bonds and shares. A man may be a wise head of a family
and an honest husband, and not for that unacquainted with lighter
loves. Such trifles are but gossiping pauses in the serious commotions
and preoccupations of life. But no amount of argument, however logical,
could blind him or others to the fact that commercially he was a dead
failure, because a few ill-regulated impulses had occasionally led
him into idle converse with two or three of the disreputable Nine;
and mindful of this, he solemnly exhorted his son Armand to fix his
thoughts upon the bank, and not let himself be led astray like his
misguided father by illusive talents and disastrous tastes.
Armand Ulrich was a merry young fellow, who cared not a button for
all the privileges of wealth, and looked upon an office stool with
loathing. He only wanted the free air, his pencil, and a comfortable
pipe of tobacco,--and there he was, as he described himself, the
happiest animal in France. Before his easel he could be serious enough,
but in his uncle’s office he felt an irresistible inclination to burst
into profane song, and make rash mention of such places of perdition
as the Red Mill and the Shepherd Follies,--follies perfectly the
reverse of pastoral. He was not in the least depraved, but he took
his pleasure where he found it, and made the most of it. A handsome
youngster, whom the traditional felt hat and velvet jacket of art
became a trifle too well. At least he wore this raiment somewhat
ostentatiously, and winked a conscious eye at the maids of earth. With
such solid advantages as a bright audacious glance, a winning smile,
and a well-turned figure, he was not backward in his demands upon their
admiration, and it must be confessed, that men in all times have proved
destructive with less material.