II

Nick Dormer walked away with Biddy, but he had not gone far before he

stopped in front of a clever bust, where his mother, in the distance,

saw him playing in the air with his hand, carrying out by this gesture,

which presumably was applausive, some critical remark he had made to his

sister. Lady Agnes raised her glass to her eyes by the long handle to

which rather a clanking chain was attached, perceiving that the bust

represented an ugly old man with a bald head; at which her ladyship

indefinitely sighed, though it was not apparent in what way such an

object could be detrimental to her daughter. Nick passed on and quickly

paused again; this time, his mother discerned, before the marble image

of a strange grimacing woman. Presently she lost sight of him; he

wandered behind things, looking at them all round.

"I ought to get plenty of ideas for my modelling, oughtn't I, Nick?" his

sister put to him after a moment.

"Ah my poor child, what shall I say?"

"Don't you think I've any capacity for ideas?" the girl continued

ruefully.

"Lots of them, no doubt. But the capacity for applying them, for putting

them into practice--how much of that have you?"

"How can I tell till I try?"

"What do you mean by trying, Biddy dear?"

"Why you know--you've seen me."

"Do you call that trying?" her brother amusedly demanded.

"Ah Nick!" she said with sensibility. But then with more spirit: "And

please what do you call it?"

"Well, this for instance is a good case." And her companion pointed to

another bust--a head of a young man in terra-cotta, at which they had

just arrived; a modern young man to whom, with his thick neck, his

little cap and his wide ring of dense curls, the artist had given the

air of some sturdy Florentine of the time of Lorenzo.

Biddy looked at the image a moment. "Ah that's not trying; that's

succeeding."

"Not altogether; it's only trying seriously."

"Well, why shouldn't I be serious?"

"Mother wouldn't like it. She has inherited the fine old superstition

that art's pardonable only so long as it's bad--so long as it's done at

odd hours, for a little distraction, like a game of tennis or of whist.

The only thing that can justify it, the effort to carry it as far as one

can (which you can't do without time and singleness of purpose), she

regards as just the dangerous, the criminal element. It's the oddest

hind-part-before view, the drollest immorality."

"She doesn't want one to be professional," Biddy returned as if she

could do justice to every system.

"Better leave it alone then. There are always duffers enough."

"I don't want to be a duffer," Biddy said. "But I thought you encouraged

me."

"So I did, my poor child. It was only to encourage myself."

"With your own work--your painting?"

"With my futile, my ill-starred endeavours. Union is strength--so that

we might present a wider front, a larger surface of resistance."

Biddy for a while said nothing and they continued their tour of

observation. She noticed how he passed over some things quickly, his

first glance sufficing to show him if they were worth another, and then

recognised in a moment the figures that made some appeal. His tone

puzzled but his certainty of eye impressed her, and she felt what a

difference there was yet between them--how much longer in every case she

would have taken to discriminate. She was aware of how little she could

judge of the value of a thing till she had looked at it ten minutes;

indeed modest little Biddy was compelled privately to add "And often not

even then." She was mystified, as I say--Nick was often mystifying, it

was his only fault--but one thing was definite: her brother had high

ability. It was the consciousness of this that made her bring out at

last: "I don't so much care whether or no I please mamma, if I please

you."

"Oh don't lean on me. I'm a wretched broken reed--I'm no use _really_!"

he promptly admonished her.

"Do you mean you're a duffer?" Biddy asked in alarm.

"Frightful, frightful!"

"So that you intend to give up your work--to let it alone, as you advise

_me_?"

"It has never been my work, all that business, Biddy. If it had it would

be different. I should stick to it."

"And you _won't_ stick to it?" the girl said, standing before him

open-eyed.

Her brother looked into her eyes a moment, and she had a compunction;

she feared she was indiscreet and was worrying him. "Your questions are

much simpler than the elements out of which my answer should come."

"A great talent--what's simpler than that?"

"One excellent thing, dear Biddy: no talent at all!"

"Well, yours is so real you can't help it."

"We shall see, we shall see," said Nick Dormer. "Let us go look at that

big group."

"We shall see if your talent's real?" Biddy went on as she accompanied

him.

"No; we shall see if, as you say, I can't help it. What nonsense Paris

makes one talk!" the young man added as they stopped in front of the

composition. This was true perhaps, but not in a sense he could find

himself tempted to deplore. The present was far from his first visit to

the French capital: he had often quitted England and usually made a

point of "putting in," as he called it, a few days there on the outward

journey to the Continent or on the return; but at present the feelings,

for the most part agreeable, attendant upon a change of air and of scene

had been more punctual and more acute than for a long time before, and

stronger the sense of novelty, refreshment, amusement, of the hundred

appeals from that quarter of thought to which on the whole his attention

was apt most frequently, though not most confessedly, to stray. He was

fonder of Paris than most of his countrymen, though not so fond perhaps

as some other captivated aliens: the place had always had the virtue of

quickening in him sensibly the life of reflexion and observation. It was

a good while since his impressions had been so favourable to the city by

the Seine; a good while at all events since they had ministered so to

excitement, to exhilaration, to ambition, even to a restlessness that

was not prevented from being agreeable by the excess of agitation in it.

Nick could have given the reason of this unwonted glow, but his

preference was very much to keep it to himself. Certainly to persons not

deeply knowing, or at any rate not deeply curious, in relation to the

young man's history the explanation might have seemed to beg the

question, consisting as it did of the simple formula that he had at last

come to a crisis. Why a crisis--what was it and why had he not come to

it before? The reader shall learn these things in time if he cares

enough for them.

Our young man had not in any recent year failed to see the Salon, which

the general voice this season pronounced not particularly good. None the

less it was the present exhibition that, for some cause connected with

his "crisis," made him think fast, produced that effect he had spoken of

to his mother as a sense of artistic life. The precinct of the marbles

and bronzes spoke to him especially to-day; the glazed garden, not

florally rich, with its new productions alternating with perfunctory

plants and its queer, damp smell, partly the odour of plastic clay, of

the studios of sculptors, put forth the voice of old associations, of

other visits, of companionships now ended--an insinuating eloquence

which was at the same time somehow identical with the general sharp

contagion of Paris. There was youth in the air, and a multitudinous

newness, for ever reviving, and the diffusion of a hundred talents,

ingenuities, experiments. The summer clouds made shadows on the roof of

the great building; the white images, hard in their crudity, spotted the

place with provocations; the rattle of plates at the restaurant sounded

sociable in the distance, and our young man congratulated himself more

than ever that he had not missed his chance. He felt how it would help

him to settle something. At the moment he made this reflexion his eye

fell upon a person who appeared--just in the first glimpse--to carry out

the idea of help. He uttered a lively ejaculation, which, however, in

its want of finish, Biddy failed to understand; so pertinent, so

relevant and congruous, was the other party to this encounter.

The girl's attention followed her brother's, resting with it on a young

man who faced them without seeing them, engaged as he was in imparting

to two companions his ideas about one of the works exposed to view. What

Biddy remarked was that this young man was fair and fat and of the

middle stature; he had a round face and a short beard and on his crown a

mere reminiscence of hair, as the fact that he carried his hat in his

hand permitted to be observed. Bridget Dormer, who was quick, placed him

immediately as a gentleman, but as a gentleman unlike any other

gentleman she had ever seen. She would have taken him for very foreign

but that the words proceeding from his mouth reached her ear and imposed

themselves as a rare variety of English. It was not that a foreigner

might not have spoken smoothly enough, nor yet that the speech of this

young man was not smooth. It had in truth a conspicuous and aggressive

perfection, and Biddy was sure no mere learner would have ventured to

play such tricks with the tongue. He seemed to draw rich effects and

wandering airs from it--to modulate and manipulate it as he would have

done a musical instrument. Her view of the gentleman's companions was

less operative, save for her soon making the reflexion that they were

people whom in any country, from China to Peru, you would immediately

have taken for natives. One of them was an old lady with a shawl; that

was the most salient way in which she presented herself. The shawl was

an ancient much-used fabric of embroidered cashmere, such as many ladies

wore forty years ago in their walks abroad and such as no lady wears

to-day. It had fallen half off the back of the wearer, but at the moment

Biddy permitted herself to consider her she gave it a violent jerk and

brought it up to her shoulders again, where she continued to arrange and

settle it, with a good deal of jauntiness and elegance, while she

listened to the talk of the gentleman. Biddy guessed that this little

transaction took place very frequently, and was not unaware of its

giving the old lady a droll, factitious, faded appearance, as if she

were singularly out of step with the age. The other person was very much

younger--she might have been a daughter--and had a pale face, a low

forehead, and thick dark hair. What she chiefly had, however, Biddy

rapidly discovered, was a pair of largely-gazing eyes. Our young friend

was helped to the discovery by the accident of their resting at this

moment for a time--it struck Biddy as very long--on her own. Both these

ladies were clad in light, thin, scant gowns, giving an impression of

flowered figures and odd transparencies, and in low shoes which showed a

great deal of stocking and were ornamented with large rosettes. Biddy's

slightly agitated perception travelled directly to their shoes: they

suggested to her vaguely that the wearers were dancers--connected

possibly with the old-fashioned exhibition of the shawl-dance. By the

time she had taken in so much as this the mellifluous young man had

perceived and addressed himself to her brother. He came on with an

offered hand. Nick greeted him and said it was a happy chance--he was

uncommonly glad to see him.

"I never come across you--I don't know why," Nick added while the two,

smiling, looked each other up and down like men reunited after a long

interval.

"Oh it seems to me there's reason enough: our paths in life are so

different." Nick's friend had a great deal of manner, as was evinced by

his fashion of saluting Biddy without knowing her.

"Different, yes, but not so different as that. Don't we both live in

London, after all, and in the nineteenth century?"

"Ah my dear Dormer, excuse me: I don't live in the nineteenth century.

_Jamais de la vie_!" the gentleman declared.

"Nor in London either?"

"Yes--when I'm not at Samarcand! But surely we've diverged since the old

days. I adore what you burn, you burn what I adore." While the stranger

spoke he looked cheerfully, hospitably, at Biddy; not because it was

she, she easily guessed, but because it was in his nature to desire a

second auditor--a kind of sympathetic gallery. Her life was somehow

filled with shy people, and she immediately knew she had never

encountered any one who seemed so to know his part and recognise his

cues.

"How do you know what I adore?" Nicholas Dormer asked.

"I know well enough what you used to."

"That's more than I do myself. There were so many things."

"Yes, there are many things--many, many: that's what makes life so

amusing."

"Do you find it amusing?"

"My dear fellow, _c'est a se tordre_. Don't you think so? Ah it was high

time I should meet you--I see. I've an idea you need me."

"Upon my word I think I do!" Nick said in a tone which struck his sister

and made her wonder still more why, if the gentleman was so important as

that, he didn't introduce him.

"There are many gods and this is one of their temples," the mysterious

personage went on. "It's a house of strange idols--isn't it?--and of

some strange and unnatural sacrifices."

To Biddy as much as to her brother this remark might have been offered;

but the girl's eyes turned back to the ladies who for the moment had

lost their companion. She felt irresponsive and feared she should pass

with this easy cosmopolite for a stiff, scared, English girl, which was

not the type she aimed at; but wasn't even ocular commerce overbold so

long as she hadn't a sign from Nick? The elder of the strange women had

turned her back and was looking at some bronze figure, losing her shawl

again as she did so; but the other stood where their escort had quitted

her, giving all her attention to his sudden sociability with others. Her

arms hung at her sides, her head was bent, her face lowered, so that she

had an odd appearance of raising her eyes from under her brows; and in

this attitude she was striking, though her air was so unconciliatory as

almost to seem dangerous. Did it express resentment at having been

abandoned for another girl? Biddy, who began to be frightened--there was

a moment when the neglected creature resembled a tigress about to

spring--was tempted to cry out that she had no wish whatever to

appropriate the gentleman. Then she made the discovery that the young

lady too had a manner, almost as much as her clever guide, and the rapid

induction that it perhaps meant no more than his. She only looked at

Biddy from beneath her eyebrows, which were wonderfully arched, but

there was ever so much of a manner in the way she did it. Biddy had a

momentary sense of being a figure in a ballet, a dramatic ballet--a

subordinate motionless figure, to be dashed at to music or strangely

capered up to. It would be a very dramatic ballet indeed if this young

person were the heroine. She had magnificent hair, the girl reflected;

and at the same moment heard Nick say to his interlocutor: "You're not

in London--one can't meet you there?"

"I rove, drift, float," was the answer; "my feelings direct me--if such

a life as mine may be said to have a direction. Where there's anything

to feel I try to be there!" the young man continued with his confiding

laugh.

"I should like to get hold of you," Nick returned.

"Well, in that case there would be no doubt the intellectual adventure.

Those are the currents--any sort of personal relation--that govern my

career."

"I don't want to lose you this time," Nick continued in a tone that

excited Biddy's surprise. A moment before, when his friend had said that

he tried to be where there was anything to feel, she had wondered how he

could endure him.

"Don't lose me, don't lose me!" cried the stranger after a fashion which

affected the girl as the highest expression of irresponsibility she had

ever seen. "After all why should you? Let us remain together unless I

interfere"--and he looked, smiling and interrogative, at Biddy, who

still remained blank, only noting again that Nick forbore to make them

acquainted. This was an anomaly, since he prized the gentleman so.

Still, there could be no anomaly of Nick's that wouldn't impose itself

on his younger sister.

"Certainly, I keep you," he said, "unless on my side I deprive those

ladies--!"

"Charming women, but it's not an indissoluble union. We meet, we

communicate, we part! They're going--I'm seeing them to the door. I

shall come back." With this Nick's friend rejoined his companions, who

moved away with him, the strange fine eyes of the girl lingering on

Biddy's brother as well as on Biddy herself as they receded.

"Who _is_ he--who _are_ they?" Biddy instantly asked.

"He's a gentleman," Nick made answer--insufficiently, she thought, and

even with a shade of hesitation. He spoke as if she might have supposed

he was not one, and if he was really one why didn't he introduce him?

But Biddy wouldn't for the world have put this question, and he now

moved to the nearest bench and dropped upon it as to await the other's

return. No sooner, however, had his sister seated herself than he said:

"See here, my dear, do you think you had better stay?"

"Do you want me to go back to mother?" the girl asked with a lengthening

visage.

"Well, what do you think?" He asked it indeed gaily enough.

"Is your conversation to be about--about private affairs?"

"No, I can't say that. But I doubt if mother would think it the sort of

thing that's 'necessary to your development.'"

This assertion appeared to inspire her with the eagerness with which she

again broke out: "But who are they--who are they?"

"I know nothing of the ladies. I never saw them before. The man's a

fellow I knew very well at Oxford. He was thought immense fun there.

We've diverged, as he says, and I had almost lost sight of him, but not

so much as he thinks, because I've read him--read him with interest. He

has written a very clever book."

"What kind of a book?"

"A sort of novel."

"What sort of novel?"

"Well, I don't know--with a lot of good writing." Biddy listened to this

so receptively that she thought it perverse her brother should add: "I

daresay Peter will have come if you return to mother."

"I don't care if he has. Peter's nothing to me. But I'll go if you wish

it."

Nick smiled upon her again and then said: "It doesn't signify. We'll all

go."

"All?" she echoed.

"He won't hurt us. On the contrary he'll do us good."

This was possible, the girl reflected in silence, but none the less the

idea struck her as courageous, of their taking the odd young man back to

breakfast with them and with the others, especially if Peter should be

there. If Peter was nothing to her it was singular she should have

attached such importance to this contingency. The odd young man

reappeared, and now that she saw him without his queer female appendages

he seemed personally less weird. He struck her moreover, as generally a

good deal accounted for by the literary character, especially if it were

responsible for a lot of good writing. As he took his place on the bench

Nick said to him, indicating her, "My sister Bridget," and then

mentioned his name, "Mr. Gabriel Nash."

"You enjoy Paris--you're happy here?" Mr. Nash inquired, leaning over

his friend to speak to the girl.

Though his words belonged to the situation it struck her that his tone

didn't, and this made her answer him more dryly than she usually spoke.

"Oh yes, it's very nice."

"And French art interests you? You find things here that please?"

"Oh yes, I like some of them."

Mr. Nash considered her kindly. "I hoped you'd say you like the Academy

better."

"She would if she didn't think you expected it," said Nicholas Dormer.

"Oh Nick!" Biddy protested.

"Miss Dormer's herself an English picture," their visitor pronounced in

the tone of a man whose urbanity was a general solvent.

"That's a compliment if you don't like them!" Biddy exclaimed.

"Ah some of them, some of them; there's a certain sort of thing!" Mr.

Nash continued. "We must feel everything, everything that we can. We're

here for that."

"You do like English art then?" Nick demanded with a slight accent of

surprise.

Mr. Nash indulged his wonder. "My dear Dormer, do you remember the old

complaint I used to make of you? You had formulas that were like walking

in one's hat. One may see something in a case and one may not."

"Upon my word," said Nick, "I don't know any one who was fonder of a

generalisation than you. You turned them off as the man at the

street-corner distributes hand-bills."

"They were my wild oats. I've sown them all."

"We shall see that!"

"Oh there's nothing of them now: a tame, scanty, homely growth. My only

good generalisations are my actions."

"We shall see _them_ then."

"Ah pardon me. You can't see them with the naked eye. Moreover, mine are

principally negative. People's actions, I know, are for the most part

the things they do--but mine are all the things I _don't_ do. There are

so many of those, so many, but they don't produce any effect. And then

all the rest are shades--extremely fine shades."

"Shades of behaviour?" Nick inquired with an interest which surprised

his sister, Mr. Nash's discourse striking her mainly as the twaddle of

the under-world.

"Shades of impression, of appreciation," said the young man with his

explanatory smile. "All my behaviour consists of my feelings."

"Well, don't you show your feelings? You used to!"

"Wasn't it mainly those of disgust?" Nash asked. "Those operate no

longer. I've closed that window."

"Do you mean you like everything?"

"Dear me, no! But I look only at what I do like."

"Do you mean that you've lost the noble faculty of disgust?"

"I haven't the least idea. I never try it. My dear fellow," said Gabriel

Nash, "we've only one life that we know anything about: fancy taking it

up with disagreeable impressions! When then shall we go in for the

agreeable?"

"What do you mean by the agreeable?" Nick demanded.

"Oh the happy moments of our consciousness--the multiplication of those

moments. We must save as many as possible from the dark gulf."

Nick had excited surprise on the part of his sister, but it was now

Biddy's turn to make him open his eyes a little. She raised her sweet

voice in appeal to the stranger.

"Don't you think there are any wrongs in the world--any abuses and

sufferings?"

"Oh so many, so many! That's why one must choose."

"Choose to stop them, to reform them--isn't that the choice?" Biddy

asked. "That's Nick's," she added, blushing and looking at this

personage.

"Ah our divergence--yes!" Mr. Nash sighed. "There are all kinds of

machinery for that--very complicated and ingenious. Your formulas, my

dear Dormer, your formulas!"

"Hang 'em, I haven't got any!" Nick now bravely declared.

"To me personally the simplest ways are those that appeal most," Mr.

Nash went on. "We pay too much attention to the ugly; we notice it, we

magnify it. The great thing is to leave it alone and encourage the

beautiful."

"You must be very sure you get hold of the beautiful," said Nick.

"Ah precisely, and that's just the importance of the faculty of

appreciation. We must train our special sense. It's capable of

extraordinary extension. Life's none too long for that."

"But what's the good of the extraordinary extension if there is no

affirmation of it, if it all goes to the negative, as you say? Where are

the fine consequences?" Dormer asked.

"In one's own spirit. One is one's self a fine consequence. That's the

most important one we have to do with. _I_ am a fine consequence," said

Gabriel Nash.

Biddy rose from the bench at this and stepped away a little as to look

at a piece of statuary. But she had not gone far before, pausing and

turning, she bent her eyes on the speaker with a heightened colour, an

air of desperation and the question, after a moment: "Are you then an

aesthete?"

"Ah there's one of the formulas! That's walking in one's hat! I've _no_

profession, my dear young lady. I've no _etat civil_. These things are a

part of the complicated ingenious machinery. As I say, I keep to the

simplest way. I find that gives one enough to do. Merely to be is such a

_metier_; to live such an art; to feel such a career!"

Bridget Dormer turned her back and examined her statue, and her brother

said to his old friend: "And to write?"

"To write? Oh I shall never do it again!"

"You've done it almost well enough to be inconsistent. That book of

yours is anything but negative; it's complicated and ingenious."

"My dear fellow, I'm extremely ashamed of that book," said Gabriel Nash.

"Ah call yourself a bloated Buddhist and have done with it!" his

companion exclaimed.

"Have done with it? I haven't the least desire to have done with it. And

why should one call one's self anything? One only deprives other people

of their dearest occupation. Let me add that you don't _begin_ to have

an insight into the art of life till it ceases to be of the smallest

consequence to you what you may be called. That's rudimentary."

"But if you go in for shades you must also go in for names. You must

distinguish," Nick objected. "The observer's nothing without his

categories, his types and varieties."

"Ah trust him to distinguish!" said Gabriel Nash sweetly. "That's for

his own convenience; he has, privately, a terminology to meet it. That's

one's style. But from the moment it's for the convenience of others the

signs have to be grosser, the shades begin to go. That's a deplorable

hour! Literature, you see, is for the convenience of others. It requires

the most abject concessions. It plays such mischief with one's style

that really I've had to give it up."

"And politics?" Nick asked.

"Well, what about them?" was Mr. Nash's reply with a special cadence as

he watched his friend's sister, who was still examining her statue.

Biddy was divided between irritation and curiosity. She had interposed

space, but she had not gone beyond ear-shot. Nick's question made her

curiosity throb as a rejoinder to his friend's words.

"That, no doubt you'll say, is still far more for the convenience of

others--is still worse for one's style."

Biddy turned round in time to hear Mr. Nash answer: "It has simply

nothing in life to do with shades! I can't say worse for it than that."

Biddy stepped nearer at this and drew still further on her courage.

"Won't mamma be waiting? Oughtn't we to go to luncheon?"

Both the young men looked up at her and Mr. Nash broke out: "You ought

to protest! You ought to save him!"

"To save him?" Biddy echoed.

"He had a style, upon my word he had! But I've seen it go. I've read his

speeches."

"You were capable of that?" Nick laughed.

"For you, yes. But it was like listening to a nightingale in a brass

band."

"I think they were beautiful," Biddy declared.

Her brother got up at this tribute, and Mr. Nash, rising too, said with

his bright colloquial air: "But, Miss Dormer, he had eyes. He was made

to see--to see all over, to see everything. There are so few like that."

"I think he still sees," Biddy returned, wondering a little why Nick

didn't defend himself.

"He sees his 'side,' his dreadful 'side,' dear young lady. Poor man,

fancy your having a 'side'--you, you--and spending your days and your

nights looking at it! I'd as soon pass my life looking at an

advertisement on a hoarding."

"You don't see me some day a great statesman?" said Nick.

"My dear fellow, it's exactly what I've a terror of."

"Mercy! don't you admire them?" Biddy cried.

"It's a trade like another and a method of making one's way which

society certainly condones. But when one can be something better--!"

"Why what in the world is better?" Biddy asked.

The young man gasped and Nick, replying for him, said: "Gabriel Nash is

better! You must come and lunch with us. I must keep you--I must!" he

added.

"We shall save him yet," Mr. Nash kept on easily to Biddy while they

went and the girl wondered still more what her mother would make of

him.