It was a queer life for a girl to live, that happy-go-lucky life of
the Latin Quarter, lawless and unpremeditated, with a café for her
school-room, and none but men for comrades; but Nina liked it; and her
father had a theory in his madness. He was a Bohemian, not in practice
only, but in principle; he preached Bohemianism as the most rational
manner of existence, maintaining that it developed what was intrinsic
and authentic in one's character, saved one from the artificial, and
brought one into immediate contact with the realities of the world;
and he protested he could see no reason why a human being should be
'cloistered and contracted' because of her sex. 'What would not hurt
my son, if I had one, will not hurt my daughter. It will make a man of
her--without making her the less a woman.' So he took her with him to
the Café Bleu, and talked in her presence quite as freely as he might
have talked had she been absent. As, in the greater number of his
theological, political, and social convictions, he was exceedingly
unorthodox, she heard a good deal, no doubt, that most of us would
scarcely consider edifying for our daughters' ears; but he had his
system, he knew what he was about. 'The question whether you can touch
pitch and remain undefiled,' he said, 'depends altogether upon the
spirit in which you approach it. The realities of the world, the
realities of life, the real things of God's universe--what have we
eyes for, if not to envisage them? Do so fearlessly, honestly, with a
clean heart, and, man or woman, you can only be the better for it.'
Perhaps his system was a shade too simple, a shade too obvious, for
this complicated planet; but he held to it in all sincerity. It was in
pursuance of the same system, I daresay, that he taught Nina to fence,
and to read Latin and Greek, as well as to play the piano, and turn an
omelette. She could ply a foil against the best of us.
And then, quite suddenly, he died.
I think it was in March, or April; anyhow it was a premature
spring-like day, and he had left off his overcoat. That evening he
went to the Odéon, and when, after the play he joined us for supper at
the Bleu, he said he thought he had caught a cold, and ordered hot
grog. The next day he did not turn up at all; so several of us, after
dinner, presented ourselves at his lodgings in Montparnasse. We found
him in bed, with Nina reading to him. He was feverish, and Nina had
insisted that he should stop at home. He would be all right to-morrow.
He scoffed at our suggestion that he should see a doctor; he was one
of those men who affect to despise the medical profession. But early
on the following morning a commissionnaire brought me a note from
Nina. 'My father is very much worse. Can you come at once?' He was
delirious. Poor Nina, white, with frightened eyes, moved about like
one distracted. We sent off for Dr. Rénoult, we had in a Sister of
Charity. Everything that could be done was done. Till the very end,
none of us for a moment doubted that he would recover. It was
impossible to conceive that that strong, affirmative life could be
extinguished. And even after the end had come, the end with its ugly
suite of material circumstances, I don't think any of us realised what
it meant. It was as if we had been told that one of the forces of
Nature had become inoperative. And Nina, through it all, was like some
pale thing in marble, that breathed and moved: white, dazed, helpless,
with aching, incredulous eyes, suffering everything, understanding
nothing.
When it came to the worst of the dreadful necessary businesses that
followed, some of us somehow, managed to draw her from the
death-chamber into another room, and to keep her there, while others
of us got it over. It was snowing that afternoon, I remember, a
melancholy, hesitating snowstorm, with large moist flakes that
fluttered down irresolutely, and presently disintegrated into rain;
but we had not far to go. Then we returned to Nina, and for many days
and nights we never dared to leave her. You will guess whether the
question of her future, especially of her immediate future, weighed
heavily upon our minds. In the end, however, it appeared to have
solved itself--though I can't pretend that the solution was exactly
all we could have wished.
Her father had a half-brother (we learned this from his papers),
incumbent of rather an important living in the north of England. We
also learned that the brothers had scarcely seen each other twice in a
score of years, and had kept up only the most fitful correspondence.
Nevertheless, we wrote to the clergyman, describing the sad case of
his niece, and in reply we got a letter, addressed to Nina herself,
saying that of course she must come at once to Yorkshire, and consider
the rectory her home. I don't need to recount the difficulties we had
in explaining to her, in persuading her. I have known few more painful
moments than that when, at the Gare du Nord, half a dozen of us
established the poor, benumbed, bewildered child in her compartment,
and sent her, with our godspeed, alone upon her long journey--to her
strange kindred, and the strange conditions of life she would have to
encounter among them. From the Café Bleu to a Yorkshire parsonage! And
Nina's was not by any means a neutral personality, nor her mind a
blank sheet of paper. She had a will of her own; she had convictions,
aspirations, traditions, prejudices, which she would hold to with
enthusiasm because they had been her father's, because her father had
taught them to her; and she had manners, habits, tastes. She would be
sure to horrify the people she was going to; she would be sure to
resent their criticism, their slightest attempt at interference. Oh,
my heart was full of misgivings; yet--she had no money, she was
eighteen years old--what else could we advise her to do? All the same,
her face, as it looked down upon us from the window of her railway
carriage, white, with big terrified eyes fixed in a gaze of blank
uncomprehending anguish, kept rising up to reproach me for weeks
afterwards. I had her on my conscience as if I had personally wronged
her.