'_Qu'y faire, mon Dieu, qu'y faire?_'
I had wandered into a tangle of slummy streets, and began to think it
time to inquire my way back to the hotel: then, turning a corner, I
came out upon the quays. At one hand there was the open night, with
the dim forms of many ships, and stars hanging in a web of masts and
cordage; at the other, the garish illumination of a row of
public-houses: _Au Bonheur du Matelot_, _Café de la Marine_,
_Brasserie des Quatre Vents_, and so forth; rowdy-looking shops
enough, designed for the entertainment of the forecastle. But they
seemed to promise something in the nature of local colour; and I
entered the _Brasserie des Quatre Vents_.
It proved to be a _brasserie-à-femmes_; you were waited upon by
ladies, lavishly rouged and in regardless toilets, who would sit with
you and chat, and partake of refreshments at your expense. The front
part of the room was filled up with tables, where half a hundred
customers, talking at the top of their voices, raised a horrid
din--sailors, soldiers, a few who might be clerks or tradesmen, and an
occasional workman in his blouse. Beyond, there was a cleared space,
reserved for dancing, occupied by a dozen couples, clumsily toeing it;
and on a platform, at the far end, a man pounded a piano. All this in
an atmosphere hot as a furnace-blast, and poisonous with the fumes of
gas, the smells of bad tobacco, of musk, alcohol, and humanity.
The musician faced away from the company, so that only his shoulders
and the back of his grey head were visible, bent over his keyboard. It
was sad to see a grey head in that situation; and one wondered what
had brought it there, what story of vice or weakness or evil fortune.
Though his instrument was harsh, and he had to bang it violently to be
heard above the roar of conversation, the man played with a kind of
cleverness, and with certain fugitive suggestions of good style. He
had once studied an art, and had hopes and aspirations, who now, in
his age, was come to serve the revels of a set of drunken sailors, in
a disreputable tavern, where they danced with prostitutes. I don't
know why, but from the first he drew my attention; and I left my
handmaid to count her charms neglected, while I sat and watched him,
speculating about him in a melancholy way, with a sort of vicarious
shame.
But presently something happened to make me forget him--something of
his own doing. A dance had ended, and after a breathing spell he began
to play an interlude. It was an instance of how tunes, like perfumes,
have the power to wake sleeping memories. The tune he was playing now,
simple and dreamy like a lullaby, and strangely at variance with the
surroundings, whisked me off in a twinkling, far from the actual--ten,
fifteen years backwards--to my student life in Paris, and set me to
thinking, as I had not thought for many a long day, of my hero,
friend, and comrade, Edmund Pair; for it was a tune of Pair's
composition, a melody he had written to a nursery rhyme, and used to
sing a good deal, half in fun, half in earnest, to his lady-love,
Godelinette:
'Lavender's blue, diddle-diddle,
Lavender's green;
When I am king, diddle-diddle,
You shall be queen.'
It is certain he meant very seriously that if he ever came into his
kingdom, Godelinette should be queen. The song had been printed, but,
so far as I knew, had never had much vogue; and it seemed an odd
chance that this evening, in a French seaport town where I was passing
a single night, I should stray by hazard into a sailors' pothouse and
hear it again.
* * * * *
Edmund Pair lived in the Latin Quarter when I did, but he was no
longer a mere student. He had published a good many songs; articles
had been written about them in the newspapers; and at his rooms you
would meet the men who had 'arrived'--actors, painters, musicians,
authors, and now and then a politician--who thus recognised him as
more or less one of themselves. Everybody liked him; everybody said,
'He is splendidly gifted; he will go far.' A few of us already
addressed him, half-playfully perhaps, as _cher maître_.
He was three or four years older than I--eight- or nine-and-twenty to
my twenty-five--and I was still in the schools; but for all that we
were great chums. Quite apart from his special talent, he was a
remarkable man--amusing in talk, good-looking, generous, affectionate.
He had read; he had travelled; he had hob-and-nobbed with all sorts
and conditions of people. He had wit, imagination, humour, and a voice
that made whatever he said a cordial to the ear. For myself, I admired
him, enjoyed him, loved him, with equal fervour; he had all of my
hero-worship, and the lion's share of my friendship; perhaps I was
vain as well as glad to be distinguished by his intimacy. We used to
spend two or three evenings a week together, at his place or at mine,
or over the table of a café, talking till the small hours--Elysian
sessions, at which we smoked more cigarettes and emptied more _bocks_
than I should care to count. On Sundays and holidays we would take
long walks arm-in-arm in the Bois, or, accompanied by Godelinette, go
to Viroflay or Fontainebleau, lunch in the open, bedeck our hats with
wildflowers, and romp like children. He was tall and slender, with
dark waving hair, a delicate aquiline profile, a clear brown skin,
and grey eyes, alert, intelligent, kindly. I fancy the Boulevard St.
Michel, flooded with sunshine, broken here and there by long crisp
shadows; trams and omnibuses toiling up the hill, tooting their horns;
students and _étudiantes_ sauntering gaily backwards and forwards on
the _trottoir_; an odour of asphalte, of caporal tobacco; myself one
of the multitude on the terrace of a café; and Edmund and Godelinette
coming to join me--he with his swinging stride, a gesture of
salutation, a laughing face; she in the freshest of bright-coloured
spring toilets: I fancy this, and it seems an adventure of the golden
age. Then we would drink our _apéritifs_, our Turin bitter, perhaps
our absinthe, and go off to dine together in the garden at Lavenue's.
Godelinette was a child of the people, but Pair had done wonders by
way of civilising her. She had learned English, and prattled it with
an accent so quaint and sprightly as to give point to her otherwise
perhaps somewhat commonplace observations. She was fond of reading;
she could play a little; she was an excellent housewife, and generally
a very good-natured and quite presentable little person. She was
Parisian and adaptable. To meet her, you would never have suspected
her origin; you would have found it hard to believe that she had been
the wife of a drunken tailor, who used to beat her. One January night,
four or five years before, Pair had surprised this gentleman publicly
pummelling her in the Rue Gay-Lussac. He hastened to remonstrate; and
the husband went off, hiccoughing of his outraged rights, and calling
the universe to witness that he would have the law of the meddling
stranger. Pair picked the girl up (she was scarcely eighteen then, and
had only been married a sixmonth), he picked her up from where she had
fallen, half fainting, on the pavement, carried her to his lodgings,
which were at hand, and sent for a doctor. In his manuscript-littered
study, for rather more than nine weeks, she lay on a bed of fever, the
consequence of blows, exhaustion, and exposure. When she got well
there was no talk of her leaving. Pair couldn't let her go back to her
tailor; he couldn't turn her into the streets. Besides, during the
months that he had nursed her, he had somehow conceived a great
tenderness for her; it made his heart burn with grief and anger to
think of what she had suffered in the past, and he yearned to sustain
and protect and comfort her for the future. This perhaps was no more
than natural; but, what rather upset the calculations of his friends,
she, towards whom he had established himself in the relation of a
benefactor, bore him, instead of a grudge therefor, a passionate
gratitude and affection. So, Pair said, they were only waiting till
her tailor should drink himself to death, to get married; and
meanwhile, he exacted for her all the respect that would have been due
to his wife; and everybody called her by his name. She was a pretty
little thing, very daintily formed, with tiny hands and feet, and big
gipsyish brown eyes; and very delicate, very fragile--she looked as if
anything might carry her off. Her name, Godeleine, seeming much too
grand and mediæval for so small and actual a person, Pair had turned
it into Godelinette.
We all said, 'He is splendidly gifted; he will do great things.' He
had studied at Cambridge and at Leipsic before coming to Paris. He was
learned, enlightened, and extremely modern; he was a hard worker. We
said he would do great things; but I thought in those days, and indeed
I still think--and, what is more to the purpose, men who were
themselves musicians and composers, men whose names are known, were
before me in thinking--that he had already done great things, that the
songs he had already published were achievements. They seemed to us
original in conception, accomplished and felicitous in treatment; they
were full of melody and movement, full of harmonic surprises; they had
style and they had 'go.' One would have imagined they must please at
once the cultivated and the general public. I could never understand
why they weren't popular. They would be printed; they would be praised
at length, and under distinguished signatures, in the reviews; they
would enjoy an unusual success of approbation; but--they wouldn't
_sell_, and they wouldn't get themselves sung at concerts. If they had
been too good, if they had been over the heads of people--but they
weren't. Plenty of work quite as good, quite as modern, yet no whit
more tuneful or interesting, was making its authors rich. We couldn't
understand it, we had to conclude it was a fluke, a question of
chance, of accident. Pair was still a very young man; he must go on
knocking, and some day--to-morrow, next week, next year, but some day
certainly--the door of public favour would be opened to him. Meanwhile
his position was by no means an unenviable one, goodness knows. To
have your orbit in the art world of Paris, and to be recognised there
as a star; to be written about in the _Revue des Deux-Mondes_; to
possess the friendship of the masters, to know that they believe in
you, to hear them prophesy, 'He will do great things'--all that is
something, even if your wares don't 'take on' in the market-place.
'It's a good job, though, that I haven't got to live by them,' Pair
said; and there indeed he touched a salient point. His people were
dead; his father had been a younger son; he had no money of his own.
But his father's elder brother, a squire in Hampshire, made him rather
a liberal allowance,--something like six hundred a year, I believe,
which was opulence in the Latin Quarter. Now, the squire had been
aware of Pair's relation with Godelinette from its inception, and had
not disapproved. On his visits to Paris he had dined with them, given
them dinners, and treated her with the utmost complaisance. But when,
one fine morning, her tailor died, and my quixotic friend announced
his intention of marrying her, _dans les délais légaux_, the squire
protested. I think I read the whole correspondence, and I remember
that in the beginning the elder man took the tone of paradox and
banter. 'Behave dishonourably, my dear fellow. I have winked at your
mistress heretofore, because boys will be boys; but it is the _man_
who marries. And, anyhow, a woman is so much more interesting in a
false position.' But he soon became serious, presently furious, and,
when the marriage was an accomplished fact, cut off the funds.
'Never mind, my dear,' said Pair. 'We will go to London and seek our
fortune. We will write the songs of the people, and let who will make
the laws. We will grow rich and famous, and
"When I am king, diddle-diddle,
You shall be queen!"'
* * * * *
So they went to London to seek their fortune, and--that was the last
I ever saw of them, nearly the last I heard. I had two letters from
Pair, written within a month of their hegira--gossipy, light-hearted
letters, describing the people they were meeting, reporting
Godelinette's quaint observations upon England and English things,
explaining his hopes, his intentions, all very confidently--and then I
had no more. I wrote again, and still again, till, getting no answer,
of course I ceased to write. I was hurt and puzzled; but in the spring
we should meet in London, and could have it out. When the spring came,
however, my plans were altered: I had to go to America. I went by way
of Havre, expecting to stay six weeks, and was gone six years.
On my return to England I said to people, 'You have a brilliant young
composer named Pair. Can you put me in the way of procuring his
address?' The fortune he had come to seek he would surely have found;
he would be a known man. But people looked blank, and declared they
had never heard of him. I applied to music-publishers--with the same
result. I wrote to his uncle in Hampshire; the squire did not reply.
When I reached Paris I inquired of our friends there; they were as
ignorant as I. 'He must be dead,' I concluded. 'If he had lived, it is
impossible we should not have heard of him.' And I wondered what had
become of Godelinette.
Then another eight or ten years passed, and now, in a waterside public
at Bordeaux, an obscure old pianist was playing Pair's setting of
'Lavender's blue,' and stirring a hundred bitter-sweet far-away
memories of my friend. It was as if fifteen years were erased from my
life. The face of Godelinette was palpable before me--pale, with its
sad little smile, its bright appealing eyes. Edmund might have been
smoking across the table--I could hear his voice, I could have put out
my hand and touched him. And all round me were the streets, the
lights, the smells, the busy youthful _va-et-vient_ of the Latin
Quarter; and in my heart the yearning, half joy and all despair and
anguish, with which we think of the old days when we were young, of
how real and dear they were, of how irrecoverable they are.
And then the music stopped, the Brasserie des Quatre Vents became a
glaring reality, and the painted female sipping _eau-de-vie_ at my
elbow remarked plaintively, 'Tu n'es pas rigolo, toi. Veux-tu faire
une valse?'
'I must speak to your musician,' I said. 'Excuse me.'
He had played a bit of Pair's music. It was one chance in a thousand,
but I wanted to ask him whether he could tell me anything about the
composer. So I penetrated to the bottom of the shop, and approached
his platform. He was bending over some sheets of music--making his
next selection, doubtless.
'I beg your pardon--,' I began.
He turned towards me. You will not be surprised--I was looking into
Pair's own face.
* * * * *
You will not be surprised, but you will imagine what it was for me.
Oh, yes, I recognised him instantly; there could be no mistake. And he
recognised me, for he flushed, and winced, and started back.
I suppose for a little while we were both of us speechless, speechless
and motionless, while our hearts stopped beating. By-and-by I think I
said--something had to be said to break the situation--I think I said,
'It's you, Edmund?' I remember he fumbled with a sheet of music, and
kept his eyes bent on it, and muttered something inarticulate. Then
there was another speechless, helpless suspension. He continued to
fumble his music without looking up. At last I remember saying,
through a sort of sickness and giddiness, 'Let us get out of
here--where we can talk.'
'I can't leave yet. I've got another dance,' he answered.
'Well, I'll wait,' said I.
I sat down near him and waited, trying to create some kind of order
out of the chaos in my mind, and half automatically watching and
considering him as he played his dance--Edmund Pair playing a dance
for prostitutes and drunken sailors. He was not greatly changed. There
were the same grey eyes, deep-set and wide apart, under the same broad
forehead; the same fine nose and chin, the same sensitive mouth. The
whole face was pretty much the same, only thinner perhaps, and with a
look of apathy, of inanimation, that was foreign to my recollection of
it. His hair had turned quite white, but otherwise he appeared no
older than his years. His figure, tall, slender, well-knit, retained
its vigour and its distinction. Though he wore a shabby brown Norfolk
jacket, and his beard was two days old, you could in no circumstances
have taken him for anything but a gentleman. I waited anxiously for
the time when we should be alone--anxiously, yet with a sort of
terror. I was burning to understand, and yet I shrunk from doing so.
If to conjecture even vaguely what experiences could have brought him
to this, what dark things suffered or done, had been melancholy when
he was a nameless old musician, now it was appalling, and I dreaded
the explanation that I longed to hear.
At last he struck his final chord, and rose from the piano. Then he
turned to me and said, composedly enough, 'Well, I'm ready.' He,
apparently, had in some measure pulled himself together. In the street
he took my arm. 'Let's walk in this direction,' he said, leading off,
'towards the Christian quarter of the town.' And in a moment he went
on: 'This has been an odd meeting. What brings you to Bordeaux?'
I explained that I was on my way to Biarritz, stopping for the night
between two trains.
'Then it's all the more surprising that you should have stumbled into
the Brasserie des Quatre Vents. You've altered very slightly. The
world wags well with you? You look prosperous.'
I cried out some incoherent protest. Afterwards I said, 'You know what
I want to hear. What does this mean?'
He laughed nervously. 'Oh, the meaning's clear enough. It speaks for
itself.'
'I don't understand,' said I.
'I'm pianist to the Brasserie des Quatre Vents. You saw me in the
discharge of my duties.'
'I don't understand,' I repeated helplessly.
'And yet the inference is plain. What could have brought a man to such
a pass save drink or evil courses?'
'Oh, don't trifle,' I implored him.
'I'm not trifling. That's the worst of it. For I don't drink, and I'm
not conscious of having pursued any especially evil courses.'
'Well?' I questioned. 'Well?'
'The fact of the matter simply is that I'm what they call a failure. I
never came off.'
'I don't understand,' I repeated for a third time.
'No more do I, if you come to that. It's the will of Heaven, I
suppose. Anyhow, it can't puzzle you more than it puzzles me. It seems
contrary to the whole logic of circumstances, but it's the fact'
Thus far he had spoken listlessly, with a sort of bitter levity, an
affectation of indifference; but after a little silence his mood
appeared to change. His hand upon my arm tightened its grasp, and he
began to speak rapidly, feelingly.
'Do you realise that it is nearly fifteen years since we have seen
each other? The history of those fifteen years, so far as I am
concerned, has been the history of a single uninterrupted
_déveine_--one continuous run of ill-luck, against every probability
of the game, against every effort I could make to play my cards
effectively. When I started out, one might have thought, I had the
best of chances. I had studied hard; I worked hard. I surely had as
much general intelligence, as much special knowledge, as much apparent
talent, as my competitors. And the stuff I produced seemed good to
you, to my friends, and not wholly bad to me. It was musicianly, it
was melodious, it was sincere; the critics all praised it; but--it
never took on! The public wouldn't have it. What did it lack? I don't
know. At last I couldn't even get it published--invisible ink! And I
had a wife to support.'
He paused for a minute; then: 'You see,' he said, 'we made the
mistake, when we were young, of believing, against wise authority,
that it _was_ in mortals to command success, that he could command it
who deserved it. We believed that the race would be to the swift, the
battle to the strong; that a man was responsible for his own destiny,
that he'd get what he merited. We believed that honest labour couldn't
go unrewarded. An immense mistake. Success is an affair of
temperament, like faith, like love, like the colour of your hair. Oh,
the old story about industry, resolution, and no vices! I was
industrious, I was resolute, and I had no more than the common share
of vices. But I had the unsuccessful temperament; and here I am. If my
motives had been ignoble--but I can't see that they were. I wanted to
earn a decent living; I wanted to justify my existence by doing
something worthy of the world's acceptance. But the stars in their
courses fought against me. I have tried hard to convince myself that
the music I wrote was rubbish. It had its faults, no doubt. It wasn't
great, it wasn't epoch-making. But, as music goes nowadays, it was
jolly good. It was a jolly sight better than the average.'
'Oh, that is certain, that is certain,' I exclaimed, as he paused
again.
'Well, anyhow, it didn't sell, and at last I couldn't even get it
published. So then I tried to find other work. I tried everything. I
tried to teach--harmony and the theory of composition. I couldn't get
pupils. So few people want to study that sort of thing, and there were
good masters already in the place. If I had known how to play, indeed!
But I was never better than a fifth-rate executant; I had never gone
in for that; my "lay" was composition. I couldn't give piano lessons,
I couldn't play in public--unless in a _gargotte_ like the hole we
have just left. Oh, I tried everything. I tried to get musical
criticism to do for the newspapers. Surely I was competent to do
musical criticism. But no--they wouldn't employ me. I had ill luck,
ill luck, ill luck--nothing but ill luck, defeat, disappointment. Was
it the will of Heaven? I wondered what unforgiveable sin I had
committed to be punished so. Do you know what it is like to work and
pray and wait, day after day, and watch day after day come and go and
bring you nothing? Oh, I tasted the whole heart-sickness of hope
deferred; Giant Despair was my constant bed-fellow.'
'But--with your connections--' I began.
'Oh, my connections!' he cried. 'There was the rub. London is the
cruellest town in Europe. For sheer cold blood and heartlessness give
Londoners the palm. I had connections enough for the first month or
so, and then people found out things that didn't concern them. They
found out some things that were true, and they imagined other things
that were false. They wouldn't have my wife; they told the most
infamous lies about her; and I wouldn't have _them_. Could I be civil
to people who insulted and slandered _her_? I had no connections in
London, except with the underworld. I got down to copying parts for
theatrical orchestras; and working twelve hours a day, earned about
thirty shillings a week.'
'You might have come back to Paris.'
'And fared worse. I couldn't have earned thirty pence in Paris. Mind
you, the only trade I had learned was that of a musical composer; and
I couldn't compose music that people would buy. I should have starved
as a copyist in Paris, where copyists are more numerous and worse
paid. Teach there? But to one competent master of harmony in London
there are ten in Paris. No; it was a hopeless case.'
'It is incomprehensible--incomprehensible,' said I.
'But wait--wait till you've heard the end. One would think I had had
enough--not so? One would think my cup of bitterness was full. No
fear! There was a stronger cup still a-brewing for me. When Fortune
takes a grudge against a man, she never lets up. She exacts the
uttermost farthing. I was pretty badly off, but I had one treasure
left--I had Godelinette. I used to think that she was my compensation.
I would say to myself, "A man can't have all blessings. How can you
expect others, when you've got her?" And I would accuse myself of
ingratitude for complaining of my unsuccess. Then she fell ill. My
God, how I watched over, prayed over her! It seemed impossible--I
could not believe--that she would be taken from me. Yet, Harry, do you
know what that poor child was thinking? Do you know what her dying
thoughts were--her wishes? Throughout her long painful illness she was
thinking that she was an obstacle in my way, a weight upon me; that if
it weren't for her, I should get on, have friends, a position; that it
would be a good thing for me if she should die; and she was hoping in
her poor little heart that she wouldn't get well! Oh, I know it, I
knew it--and you see me here alive. She let herself die for my
sake--as if I could care for anything without her. That's what brought
us here, to France, to Bordeaux--her illness. The doctors said she
must pass the spring out of England, away from the March winds, in the
South; and I begged and borrowed money enough to take her. And we were
on our way to Arcachon; but when we reached Bordeaux she was too ill
to continue the journey, and--she died here.'
We walked on for some distance in silence, then he added: 'That was
four years ago. You wonder why I live to tell you of it, why I
haven't cut my throat. I don't know whether it's cowardice or
conscientious scruples. It seems rather inconsequent to say that I
believe in a God, doesn't it?--that I believe one's life is not one's
own to make an end of? Anyhow, here I am, keeping body and soul
together as musician to a _brasserie-à-femmes_. I can't go back
to England, I can't leave Bordeaux--she's buried here. I've
hunted high and low for work, and found it nowhere save in the
_brasserie-à-femmes_. With that, and a little copying now and then, I
manage to pay my way.'
'But your uncle?' I asked.
'Do you think I would touch a penny of his money?' Pair retorted,
almost fiercely. 'It was he who began it. My wife let herself die. It
was virtual suicide. It was he who created the situation that drove
her to it.'
'You are his heir, though, aren't you?'
'No, the estates are not entailed.'
We had arrived at the door of my hotel. 'Well, good-night and _bon
voyage_,' he said.
'You needn't wish me _bon voyage_,' I answered. 'Of course I'm not
leaving Bordeaux for the present.'
'Oh, yes, you are. You're going on to Biarritz to-morrow morning, as
you intended.'
And herewith began a long and most painful struggle. I could persuade
him to accept no help of any sort from me. 'What I can't do for
myself,' he declared, 'I'll do without. My dear fellow, all that you
propose is contrary to the laws of Nature. One man can't keep
another--it's an impossible relation. And I won't be kept; I won't be
a burden. Besides, to tell you the truth, I've got past caring. The
situation you find me in seems terrible to you; to me it's no worse
than another. You see, I'm hardened; I've got past caring.'
'At any rate,' I insisted, 'I shan't go on to Biarritz. I'll spend my
holiday here, and we can see each other every day. What time shall we
meet to-morrow?'
'No, no, I can't meet you again. Don't ask me to; you mean it kindly,
I know, but you're mistaken. It's done me good to talk it all out to
you, but I can't meet you again. I've got no heart for friendship,
and--you remind me too keenly of many things.'
'But if I come to the _brasserie_ to-morrow night?'
'Oh, if you do that, you'll oblige me to throw up my employment
there, and hide from you. You must promise not to come again--you must
respect my wishes.'
'You're cruel, you know.'
'Perhaps, perhaps. But I think I'm only reasonable. Anyhow, good-bye.'
He shook my hand hurriedly, and moved off. What could I do? I stood
looking after him till he had vanished in the night, with a miserable
baffled recognition of my helplessness to help him.