IX.

And, sure enough, she managed very well. She gave music lessons to the

children of the Quarter, and English lessons to clerks and shop girls;

she did a little translating; she would pose now and then for a

painter friend--she was the original, for instance, of Norton's 'Woman

Dancing,' which you know. She even--thanks to the employment by Chalks

of what he called his 'in_floo_ence'--she even contributed a weekly

column of Paris gossip to the _Palladium_, a newspaper published at

Battle Creek, Michigan, U.S.A., Chalks's native town. 'Put in lots

about me, and talk as if there were only two important centres of

civilisation on earth, Battle Crick and Parus, and it'll be a boom,'

Chalks said. We used to have great fun, concocting those columns of

Paris gossip. Nina, indeed, held the pen and cast a deciding vote; but

we all collaborated. And we put in lots about Chalks--perhaps rather

more than he had bargained for. With an irony (we trusted) too subtle

to be suspected by the good people of Battle Creek, we would introduce

their illustrious fellow-citizen, casually, between the Pope and the

President of the Republic; we would sketch him as he strolled in the

Boulevard arm-in-arm with Monsieur Meissonier, as he dined with the

Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy, or drank his bock in the

afternoon with the Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour; we would

compose solemn descriptive criticisms of his works, which almost made

us die of laughing; we would interview him--at length--about any

subject; we would give elaborate bulletins of his health, and

brilliant pen-pictures of his toilets. Sometimes we would betroth him,

marry him, divorce him; sometimes, when our muse impelled us to a

particularly daring flight, we would insinuate, darkly, sorrowfully,

that perhaps the great man's morals ... but no! We were persuaded that

rumour accused him falsely. The story that he had been seen dancing at

Bullier's with the notorious Duchesse de Z---- was a baseless

fabrication. Unprincipled? Oh, we were nothing if not unprincipled.

And our pleasure was so exquisite, and it worried our victim so. 'I

suppose you think it's funny, don't you?' he used to ask, with a feint

of superior scorn which put its fine flower to our hilarity. 'Look

out, or you'll bust,' he would warn us, the only unconvulsed member

present. 'By gum, you're easily amused.' We always wrote of him

respectfully as Mr. Charles K. Smith; we never faintly hinted at his

sobriquet. We would have rewarded liberally, at that time, any one who

could have told us what the K. stood for. We yearned to unite the

cryptic word to his surname by a hyphen; the mere abstract notion of

doing so filled us with fearful joy. Chalks was right, I dare say; we

were easily amused. And Nina, at these moments of literary frenzy--I

can see her now: her head bent over the manuscript, her hair in some

disarray, a spiral of cigarette-smoke winding ceilingward from between

the fingers of her idle hand, her lips parted, her eyes gleaming with

mischievous inspirations, her face pale with the intensity of her

glee. I can see her as she would look up, eagerly, to listen to

somebody's suggestion, or as she would motion to us to be silent,

crying, 'Attendez--I've got an idea.' Then her pen would dash swiftly,

noisily, over her paper for a little, whilst we all waited

expectantly; and at last she would lean back, drawing a long breath,

and tossing the pen aside, to read her paragraph out to us.

In a word, she managed very well, and by no means died of hunger. She

could scarcely afford Madame Chanve's three-franc table d'hôte, it is

true; but we could dine modestly at Léon's, over the way, and return

to the Bleu for coffee,--though, it must be added, that establishment

no longer enjoyed a monopoly of our custom. We patronised it and the

Vachette, the Source, the Ecoles, the Souris, indifferently. Or we

would sometimes spend our evenings in Nina's rooms. She lived in a

tremendously swagger house in the Avenue de l'Observatoire,--on the

sixth floor, to be sure, but 'there was a carpet all the way up.' She

had a charming little salon, with her own furniture and piano (the

same that had formerly embellished our café), and no end of books,

pictures, draperies, and pretty things, inherited from her father or

presented by her friends.

By this time the inevitable had happened, and we were all in love with

her,--hopelessly, resignedly so, and without internecine rancour, for

she treated us, indiscriminately, with a serene, impartial, tolerant,

derision; but we were savagely, luridly, jealous and suspicious of

all new-comers and of all outsiders. If _we_ could not win her, no one

else should; and we formed ourselves round her in a ring of fire. Oh,

the maddening, mock-sentimental, mock-sympathetic face she would pull,

when one of us ventured to sigh to her of his passion! The way she

would lift her eyebrows, and gaze at you with a travesty of pity,

shaking her head pensively, and murmuring, 'Mon pauvre ami! Only

fancy!' And then how the imp, lurking in the corners of her eyes, with

only the barest pretence of trying to conceal himself, would suddenly

leap forth in a peal of laughter! She had lately read Mr. Howells's

'Undiscovered Country,' and had adopted the Shakers' paraphrase for

love: 'Feeling foolish.'--'Feeling pretty foolish to-day, air ye,

gentlemen?' she inquired, mimicking the dialect of Chalks. 'Well, I

guess you just ain't feeling any more foolish than you look.'--If she

would but have taken us seriously! And the worst of it was that we

knew she was anything but temperamentally cold. Chalks formulated the

potentialities we divined in her, when he remarked, regretfully,

wistfully, as he often did, 'She could love like Hell.' Once, in a

reckless moment, he even went so far as to tell her this pointblank.

'Oh, naughty Chalks!' she remonstrated, shaking her finger at him. 'Do

you think that's a pretty word? But--I dare say I could.'

'All the same, Lord help the man you marry,' Chalks continued

gloomily.

'Oh, I shall never marry,' Nina cried. 'Because, first, I don't

approve of matrimony as an institution. And then--as you say--Lord

help my husband. I should be such an uncomfortable wife. So

capricious, and flighty, and tantalising, and unsettling, and

disobedient, and exacting, and everything. Oh, but a horrid wife! No,

I shall never marry. Marriage is quite too out-of-date. I shan't

marry; but, if I ever meet a man and love him--ah!' She placed two

fingers upon her lips, and kissed them, and waved the kiss to the

skies.

This fragment of conversation passed in the Luxembourg Garden; and the

three or four of us by whom she was accompanied glared threateningly

at our mental image of that not-impossible upstart whom she might some

day meet and love. We were sure, of course, that he would be a beast;

we hated him not merely because he would have cut us out with her, but

because he would be so distinctly our inferior, so hopelessly unworthy

of her, so helplessly incapable of appreciating her. I think we

conceived of him as tall, with drooping fair moustaches, and

contemptibly meticulous in his dress. He would probably not be of the

Quarter; he would sneer at _us_.

'He'll not understand her, he'll not respect her. Take her peculiar

views. We know where she gets them. But he--he'll despise her for

them, at the very time he's profiting by 'em,' some one said.

Her peculiar views of the institution of matrimony, the speaker meant.

She had got them from her father. 'The relations of the sexes should

be as free as friendship,' he had taught. 'If a man and a woman love

each other, it is nobody's business but their own. Neither the Law nor

Society can, with any show of justice, interfere. That they do

interfere, is a survival of feudalism, a survival of the system under

which the individual, the subject, had no liberty, no rights. If a man

and a woman love each other, they should be as free to determine for

themselves the character, extent, and duration of their intercourse,

as two friends should be. If they wish to live together under the same

roof, let them. If they wish to retain their separate domiciles, let

them. If they wish to cleave to each other till death severs them--if

they wish to part on the morrow of their union--let them, by heaven.

But the couple who go before a priest or a magistrate, and bind

themselves in ceremonial marriage, are serving to perpetuate tyranny,

are insulting the dignity of human nature.' Such was the gospel which

Nina had absorbed (don't, for goodness' sake, imagine that I approve

of it because I cite it), and which she professed in entire good

faith. We felt that the coming man would misapprehend both it and

her--though he would not hesitate to make a convenience of it. Ugh,

the cynic!

We formed ourselves round her in a ring of fire, hoping to frighten

the beast away. But we were miserably, fiercely, anxious, suspicious,

jealous. We were jealous of everything in the shape of a man that came

into any sort of contact with her: of the men who passed her in the

street or rode with her in the omnibus; of the little _employés de

commerce_ to whom she gave English lessons; of everybody. I fancy we

were always more or less uneasy in our minds when she was out of our

sight. Who could tell what might be happening? With those lips of

hers, those eyes of hers--oh, we knew how she could love: Chalks had

said it. Who could tell what might already have happened? Who could

tell that the coming man had not already come? She was entirely

capable of concealing him from us. Sometimes, in the evening, she

would seem absent, preoccupied. How could we be sure that she wasn't

thinking of him? Savouring anew the hours she had passed with him that

very day? Or dreaming of those she had promised him for to-morrow? If

she took leave of us--might he not be waiting to join her round the

corner? If she spent an evening away from us....

And she--she only laughed; laughed at our jealousy, our fears, our

precautions, as she laughed at our hankering flame. Not a laugh that

reassured us, though; an inscrutable, enigmatic laugh, that might have

covered a multitude of sins. She had taken to calling us collectively

_Loulou_. 'Ah, le pauv' Loulou--so now he has the pretension to be

jealous.' Then she would be interrupted by a paroxysm of laughter;

after which, 'Oh, qu'il est drôle,' she would gasp. 'Pourvu qu'il ne

devienne pas gênant!'

It was all very well to laugh; but some of us, our personal equation

quite apart, could not help feeling that the joke was of a precarious

quality, that the situation held tragic possibilities. A young and

attractive girl, by no means constitutionally insusceptible, and

imbued with heterodox ideas of marriage--alone in the Latin Quarter.