David and Elise Delaunay thus found themselves left alone. She
stood a moment irresolutely before her canvas, then sat down again,
and took up her brushes.
'I cannot thank you enough, Mademoiselle,' the young fellow began
shyly, while the hand which held his stick trembled a little. 'We
could never have arranged that affair for ourselves.'
She coloured and bent over her canvas.
'I don't know why I troubled myself,' she said, in a curious
irritable way.' Because you are kind!' he cried, his charming smile
breaking. 'Because you took pity on a pair of strangers, like the
guardian angel that you are!'
The effect of the foreign language on him leading him to a more set
and literary form of expression than he would have naturally used,
was clearly marked in the little outburst.
Elise bit her lip, frowned and fidgeted, and presently looked him
straight in the face.
'Monsieur David, warn your sister that that man with the Cervins
this morning--the man in grey, the sculptor, M. Montjoie--is a
disreputable scoundrel that no decent woman should know.'
David was taken aback.
'And Madame Cervin--'
Elise raised her shoulders.
'I don't offer a solution,' she said; 'but I have warned you.'
'Monsieur Cervin has a somewhat strange appearance,' said David,
hesitating.
And, in fact, while the negotiations had been going on there had
stood beside the talkers a shabby, slouching figure of a man, with
longish grizzled hair and a sleepy eye--a strange, remote creature,
who seemed to take very little notice of what was passing before
him. From various indications, however, in the conversation, David
had gathered that this looker-on must be the former _prix de
Rome_.
Elise explained that Monsieur Carvin was the wreck of a genius. In
his youth he had been the chosen pupil of Ingres and Hippolyte
Flandrin, had won the _prix de Rome_, and after his three
years in the Villa Medicis had come home to take up what was
expected to be a brilliant career. Then for some mysterious reason
he had suddenly gone under, disappeared from sight, and the waves
of Paris had closed over him. When he reappeared he was broken in
health, and married to a retired modiste, upon whose money he was
living. He painted bad pictures intermittently, but spent most of
his time in hanging about his old haunts--the Louvre, the Salon,
the various exhibitions, and the dealers, where he was commonly
regarded by the younger artists who were on speaking terms with him
as a tragic old bore, with a head of his own worth painting,
however if he could be got to sit--for an augur or a chief priest.
'It was _absinthe_ that did it,' said Elise calmly, taking a
fresh charge into her brush, and working away at the black
trimmings of the Infanta's dress. 'Every day, about four, he
disappears into the Boulevard. Generally, Madame Cervin drives him
like a sheep; but when four o'clock comes she daren't interfere
with him. If she did, he would be unmanageable altogether. So he
takes his two hours or so, and when he comes back there is not much
amiss with him. Sometimes he is excited, and talks quite
brilliantly about the past--sometimes he is nervous and depressed,
starts at a sound, and storms about the noises in the street. Then
she hurries him off to bed, and the next morning he is quite meek
again, and tries to paint. But his hand shakes, and he can't see.
So he gives it up, and calls to her to put on her things. Then they
wander about Paris, till four o'clock comes round again, and he
gives her the slip--always with some elaborate pretence of other.
Oh! she takes it quietly. Other vices might give her more trouble.'
The tone conveyed the affectation of a complete knowledge of the
world, which saw no reason whatever to be ashamed of itself. The
girl was just twenty, but she had lived for years, first with a
disreputable father, and then in a perpetual _camaraderie_,
within the field of art, with men of all sorts and kinds. There are
certain feminine blooms which a _milieu_ like this effaces
with deadly rapidity.
For the first time David was jarred. The idealist in him recoiled.
His conscience, too, was roused about Louie. He had handed her
over, it seemed, to the custody of a drunkard and his wife, who had
immediately thrown her into the company of a man no decent woman
ought to know. And Mademoiselle Delaunay had led him into it. The
guardian angel speech of a few moments before rang in his ears
uncomfortably.
Moreover, whatever rebellions his young imagination might harbour,
whatever license in his eyes the great passions might claim, he had
maintained for months and years past a practical asceticism, which
had left its mark. The young man who had starved so gaily on
sixpence a day that he might read and learn, had nothing but
impatience and disgust for the glutton and the drunkard. It was a
kind of physical repulsion. And the woman's light indulgent tone
seemed for a moment to divide them.
Elise looked round. Why this silence in her companion?
In an instant she divined him. Perhaps her own conscience was not
easy. Why had she meddled in the young Englishman's affairs at all?
For a whim? Out of a mere good-natured wish to rid him of his
troublesome sister; or because his handsome looks, his _naivete_,
and his eager admiration of herself amused and excited her, and
she did not care to be baulked of them so soon? At any rate,
she found refuge in an outburst of temper.
'Ah!' she said, after a moment's pause and scrutiny. 'I see! You
think I might have done better for your sister than send her to
lodge with a drunkard--that I need not have taken so much trouble
to give you good advice for that! You repent your little remarks
about guardian angels! You are disappointed in me!--you distrust
me!'
She turned back to her easel and began to paint with headlong
speed, the small hand flashing to and fro, the quick breath rising
and falling tempestuously.
He was dismayed--afraid, and he began to make excuses both for
himself and her. It would be all right; he should be close by, and
if there were trouble he could take his sister away.
She let her brushes fall into her lap with an exclamation.
'Listen!' she said to him, her eyes blazing--why, he could not for
the life of him understand. 'There will be no trouble. What I told
you means nothing open--or disgusting. Your sister will notice
nothing unless you tell her. But I was candid with you--I always
am. I told you last night that I had no scruples. You thought it
was a woman's exaggeration; it was the literal truth! If a man
drinks, or is vicious, so long as he doesn't hurl the furniture at
my head, or behave himself offensively to me, what does it matter
to me! If he drinks so that he can't paint, and he wants to paint,
well!--then he seems to me another instance of the charming way in
which a kind Providence has arranged this world. I am sorry for
him, _tout bonnement_! If I could give the poor devil a hand
out of the mud, I would; if not, well, then, no sermons! I take him
as I find him; if he annoys me, I call in the police. But as to
hiding my face and canting, not at all! That is your English
way--it is the way of our _bourgeoisie._ It is not mine. I
don't belong to the respectables--I would sooner kill myself a
dozen times over. I can't breathe in their company. I know how to
protect myself; none of the men I meet dare to insult me; that is
my idiosyncrasy--everyone has his own. But I have my ideas, and
nobody else matters a fig to me.--So now, Monsieur, if you regret
our forced introduction of last night, let me wish you a good
morning. It will be perfectly easy for your sister to find some
excuse to leave the Cervins. I can give you the addresses of
several cheap hotels where you and she will be extremely
comfortable, and where neither I nor Monsieur Cervin will annoy
you!'
David stared at her. He had grown very pale. She, too, was white to
the lips. The violence and passion of her speech had exhausted her;
her hands trembled in her lap. A wave of emotion swept through him.
Her words were insolently bitter. Why, then, this impression of
something wounded and young and struggling--at war with itself and
the world, proclaiming loneliness and _Sehnsucht_, while it
flung anger and reproach?
He dropped on one knee, hardly knowing what he did. Most of the
students about had left their work for a while; no one was in sight
but a _gardien_, whose back was turned to them, and a young
man in the remote distance. He picked up a brush she had let fall,
pressed it into her reluctant hand, and laid his forehead against
the hand for an instant.
'You misunderstand me,' he said, with a broken, breathless
utterance. 'You are quite wrong--quite mistaken. There are not such
thoughts in me as you think. The world matters nothing to me,
either. I am alone, too; I have always been alone. You meant
everything that was heavenly and kind--you must have meant it. I am
a stupid idiot! But I could be your friend--if you would permit it.'
He spoke with an extraordinary timidity and slowness. He forgot all
his scruples, all pride--everything. As he knelt there, so close to
her delicate slimness, to the curls on her white neck, to the
quivering lips and great, defiant eyes, she seemed to him once more
a being of another clay from himself--beyond any criticism his
audacity could form. He dared hardly touch her, and in his heart
there swelled the first irrevocable wave of young passion. She
raised her hand impetuously and began to paint again. But suddenly
a tear dropped on to her knee. She brushed it away, and her wild
smile broke.
'Bah!' she said, 'what a scene, what a pair of children! What was it
all about? I vow I haven't an idea. You are an excellent
_farceur._ Monsieur David! One can see well that you have read
George Sand.'
He sat down on a little three-legged stool she had brought with
her, and held her box open on his knee. In a minute or two they
were talking as though nothing had happened. She was giving him a
fresh lecture on Velazquez, and he had resumed his role of pupil
and listener. But their eyes avoided each other, and once when, in
taking a tube from the box he held, her fingers brushed against his
hand, she flushed involuntarily and moved her chair a foot further
away.
'Who is that?' she asked, suddenly looking round the corner of her
canvas. '_Mon Dieu!_ M. Regnault! How does he come here? They
told me he was at Granada.'
She sat transfixed, a joyous excitement illuminating every feature.
And there, a few yards from them, examining the Rembrandt 'Supper
at Emmaus' with a minute and absorbed attention, was the young man
he had noticed in the distance a few minutes before. As Elise
spoke, the new-comer apparently heard his name, and turned. He put
up his eyeglass, smiled, and took off his hat.
'Mademoiselle Delaunay! I find you where I left you, at the feet of
the master! Always at work! You are indefatigable. Taranne tells me
great things of you. "Ah," he says, "if the men would work like the
women!" I assure you, he makes us smart for it. May I look?
Good--very good! a great improvement on last year--stronger, more
knowledge in it. That hand wants study--but you will soon put it
right. Ah, Velazquez! That a man should be great, one can bear
that, but so great! It is an offence to the rest of us mortals. But
one cannot realise him out of Madrid. I often sigh for the months I
spent copying in the Museo. There is a repose of soul in copying a
great master--don't you find it? One rests from one's own efforts
awhile--the spirit of the master descends into yours, gently,
profoundly.'
He stood beside her, smiling kindly, his hat and gloves in his
hands, perfectly dressed, an air of the great world about his look
and bearing which differentiated him wholly from all other persons
whom David had yet seen in Paris. In physique, too, he was totally
unlike the ordinary Parisian type. He was a young athlete,
vigorous, robust, broad-shouldered, tanned by sun and wind. Only
his blue eye--so subtle, melancholy, passionate--revealed the
artist and the thinker.
Elise was evidently transported by his notice of her. She talked to
him eagerly of his pictures in the Salon, especially of a certain
'Salome,' which, as David presently gathered, was the sensation of
the year. She raved about the qualities of it--the words colour,
poignancy, force recurring in the quick phrases.
'No one talks of your _success_ now, Monsieur. It is another
word. _C'est la gloire elle-même qui vous parle à l'oreille!_'
As she let fall the most characteristic of all French nouns, a
slight tremor passed across the young man's face. But the look
which succeeded it was one of melancholy; the blue eyes took a
steely hardness.
'Perhaps a lying spirit, Mademoiselle. And what matter, so long as
everything one does disappoints oneself? What a tyrant is
art!--insatiable, adorable! You know it. We serve our king on our knees,
and he deals us the most miserly gifts.'
'It is the service itself repays,' she said, eagerly, her chest
heaving.
'True!--most true! But what a struggle always!--no rest--no
content. And there is no other way. One must seek, grope,
toil--then produce rapidly--in a flash--throw what you have done
behind you--and so on to the next problem, and the next. There is
no end to it--there never can be. But you hardly came here this
morning, I imagine, Mademoiselle, to hear me prate! I wish you good
day and good-bye. I came over for a look at the Salon, but
to-morrow I go back to Spain. I can't breathe now for long away
from my sun and my South! Adieu, Mademoiselle. I am told your
prospects, when the voting comes on, are excellent. May the gods
inspire the jury!'
He bowed, smiled, and passed on, carrying his lion-head and kingly
presence down the gallery, which had now filled up again, and
where, so David noticed, person after person turned as he came near
with the same flash of recognition and pleasure he had seen upon
Elise's face. A wild jealousy of the young conqueror invaded the
English lad.
'Who is he?' he asked.
Elise, womanlike, divined him in a moment. She gave him a sidelong
glance and went back to her painting.
'That,' she said quietly, 'is Henri Regnault. Ah, you know nothing
of our painters. I can't make you understand. For me he is a young
god--there is a halo round his head. He has grasped his fame--the
fame we poor creatures are all thirsting for. It began last year
with the Prim--General Prim on horseback--oh, magnificent!--a
passion!--an energy! This year it is the "Salome." About--
Gautier--all the world--have lost their heads over it. If
you go to see it at the Salon, you will have to wait your turn.
Crowds go every day for nothing else. Of course there are murmurs.
They say the study of Fortuny has done him harm. Nonsense! People
discuss him because he is becoming a master--no one discusses the
nonentities. _They_ have no enemies. Then he is sculptor,
musician, athlete--well-born besides--all the world is his friend.
But with it all so simple--_bon camarade_ even for poor
scrawlers like me. _Je l'adore!_'
'So it seems,' said David.
The girl smiled over her painting. But after a bit she looked up
with a seriousness, nay, a bitterness, in her siren's face, which
astonished him.
'It is not amusing to take you in--you are too ignorant. What do
you suppose Henri Regnault matters to me? His world is as far above
mine as Velazquez' art is above my art. But how can a foreigner
understand our shades and grades? Nothing but _success_, but
_la gloire_, could ever lift me into his world. Then indeed I
should be everybody's equal, and it would matter to nobody that I
had been a Bohemian and a _declassee_.
She gave a little sigh of excitement, and threw her head back to
look at her picture, David watched her.
'I thought,' he said ironically, 'that a few minutes ago you were
all for Bohemia. I did not suspect these social ambitions.'
'All women have them--all artists deny them,' she said, recklessly.
'There, explain me as you like, Monsieur David. But don't read my
riddle too soon, or I shall bore you. Allow me to ask you a
question.'
She laid down her brushes and looked at him with the utmost
gravity. His heart beat--he bent forward.
'Are you ever hungry, Monsieur David?'
He sprang up, half enraged, half ashamed.
'Where can we get some food?'
'That is my affair,' she said, putting up her brushes. 'Be humble,
Monsieur, and take a lesson in Paris.'
And out they went together, he beside himself with the delight of
accompanying her, and proudly carrying her box and satchel. How her
little feet slipped in and out of her pretty dress--how, as they
stood on the top of the great flight of stairs leading down into
the court of the Louvre, the wind from outside blew back the curls
from her brow, and ruffled the violets in her hat, the black lace
about her tiny throat. It was an enchantment to follow and to serve
her. She led him through the Tuileries Gardens and the Place de la
Concorde to the Champs-Elysées. The fountains leapt in the sun; the
river blazed between the great white buildings of its banks; to the
left was the gilded dome of the Invalides, and the mass of the
Corps Législatif, while in front of them rose the long ascent to
the Arc de l'Etoile set in vivid green on either hand. Everywhere
was space, glitter, magnificence. The gaiety of Paris entered into
the Englishman, and took possession.
Presently, as they wandered up the Champs-Elysées, they passed a
great building to the left. Elise stopped and clasped her hands in
front of her with a little nervous, spasmodic gesture.
'That,' she said, 'is the Salon. My fate lies there. When we have
had some food, I will take you in to see.'
She led him a little further up the Avenue, then took him aside
through cunningly devised labyrinths of green till they came upon a
little cafe restaurant among the trees, where people sat under an
awning, and the wind drove the spray of a little fountain hither
and thither among the bushes. It was gay, foreign, romantic, unlike
anything David had ever seen in his northern world. He sat down,
with Barbier's stories running in his head. Mademoiselle Delaunay
was George Sand--independent, gifted, on the road to fame like that
great _declassee_ of old; and he was her friend and comrade, a
humble soldier, a camp follower, in the great army of letters.
Their meal was of the lightest. This descent on the Champs-Elysées
had been a freak on Elise's part, who wished to do nothing so
_banal_ as take her companion to the Palais Royal. But the
restaurant she had chosen, though of a much humbler kind than those
which the rich tourist commonly associates with this part of Paris,
was still a good deal more expensive than she had rashly supposed.
She opened her eyes gravely at the charges; abused herself
extravagantly for a lack of _savoir vivre_; and both with one
accord declared it was too hot to eat. But upon such eggs and such
green peas as they did allow themselves--a _portion_ of each,
scrupulously shared--David at any rate, in his traveller's ardour,
was prepared to live to the end of the chapter.
Afterwards, over the coffee and the cigarettes, Elise taking her
part in both, they lingered for one of those hours which make the
glamour of youth. Confidences flowed fast between them. His French
grew suppler and more docile, answered more truly to the
individuality behind it. He told her of his bringing up, of his
wandering with the sheep on the mountains, of his reading among the
heather, of 'Lias and his visions, of Hannah's cruelties and
Louie's tempers--that same idyll of peasant life to which Dora had
listened months before. But how differently told! Each different
listener changes the tale, readjusts the tone. But here also the
tale pleased. Elise, for all her leanings towards new schools in
art, had the Romantic's imagination and the Romantic's relish for
things foreign and unaccustomed. The English boy and his story
seemed to her both charming and original. Her artist's eye followed
the lines of the ruffled black head and noted the red-brown of the
skin. She felt a wish to draw him--a wish which had entirely
vanished in the case of Louie.
'Your sister has taken a dislike to me,' she said to him once,
coolly. 'And as for me, I am afraid of her. Ah! and she broke my
glass!'
She shivered, and a look of anxiety and depression invaded her
small face. He guessed that she was thinking of her pictures, and
began timidly to speak to her about them. When they returned to the
world of art, his fluency left him; he felt crushed beneath the
weight of his own ignorance and her accomplishment.
'Come and see them!' she said, springing up. 'I am tired of my
Infanta. Let her be awhile. Come to the Salon, and I will show you
"Salome." Or are you sick of pictures? What do you want to see?
_Ça m'est égal_. I can always go back to my work.'
She spoke with a cavalier lightness which teased and piqued him.
'I wish to go where you go,' he said flushing, 'to see what you see.'
She shook her little head.
'No compliments, Monsieur David. We are serious persons, you and I.
Well, then, for a couple of hours, _soyons camarades!_'
Of those hours, which prolonged themselves indefinitely, David's
after remembrance was somewhat crowded and indistinct. He could
never indeed think of Regnault's picture without a shudder, so
poignant was the impression it made upon him under the stimulus of
Elise's nervous and passionate comments. It represented the
daughter of Herodias resting after the dance, with the dish upon
her knee which was to receive the head of the saint. Her mass of
black hair--the first strong impression of the picture--stood out
against the pale background, and framed the smiling sensual face,
broadly and powerfully made, like the rest of the body, and knowing
neither thought nor qualm. The colour was a bewilderment of
scarlets and purples, of yellow and rose-colour, of turtle-greys
and dazzling flesh-tints--bathed the whole of it in the searching
light of the East. The strangeness, the science of it, its
extraordinary brilliance and energy, combined with its total lack
of all emotion, all pity, took indelible hold of the English lad's
untrained provincial sense. He dreamt of it for nights afterwards.
For the rest--what whirl and confusion! He followed Elise through
suffocating rooms, filled with the liveliest crowd he had ever
seen. She was constantly greeted, surrounded, carried off to look
at this and that. Her friends and acquaintances, indeed, whether
men or women, seemed all to treat her in much the same way. There
was complete, and often noisy, freedom of address and discussion
between them. She called all the men by their surnames, and she was
on half mocking, half caressing terms with the women, who seemed to
David to be generally art students, of all ages and aspects. But
nobody took any liberties with her. She had her place, and that one
of some predominance. Clearly she had already the privileges of an
eccentric, and a certain cool ascendency of temperament. Her little
figure fluttered hither and thither, gathering a train, then
shaking it off again. Sometimes and her friends, finding the heat
intolerable, and wanting space for talk, would overflow into the
great central hall, with its cool palms and statues; and there David
would listen to torrents of French artistic theory, anecdote, and
_blague_, till his head whirled, and French cleverness--conveyed
to him in what, to the foreigner, is the most exquisite and the
most tantalising of all tongues--seemed to him superhuman.
As to what he saw, after 'Salome,' he remembered vividly only three
pictures--Elise Delaunay's two--a portrait and a workshop
interior--before which he stood, lost in naive wonder at her
talent; and the head of a woman, with a thin pale face,
reddish-brown hair, and a look of pantherish grace and force, which
he was told was the portrait of an actress at the Odeon who was
making the world stare--Mademoiselle Bernhardt. For the rest he had
the vague, distracting impression of a new world--of nude horrors
and barbarities of all sorts--of things licentious or cruel, which
yet, apparently, were all of as much value in the artist's eye, and
to be discussed with as much calm or eagerness, as their
neighbours. One moment he loathed what he saw, and threw himself
upon his companion, with the half-coherent protests of an English
idealism, of which she scarcely understood a word; the next he lost
himself in some landscape which had torn the very heart out of an
exquisite mood of nature, or in some scene of peasant life--so true
and living that the scents of the fields and the cries of the
animals were once more about him, and he lived his childhood over
again.
Perhaps the main idea which the experience left with him was one of
a goading and intoxicating _freedom_. His country lay in the
background of his mind as the symbol of all dull convention and
respectability. He was in the land of intelligence, where nothing
is prejudged, and all experiments are open.
When they came out, it was to get an ice in the shade, and then to
wander to and fro, watching the passers-by--the young men playing a
strange game with disks under the trees--the nurses and
children--the ladies in the carriages--and talking, with a quick,
perpetual advance towards intimacy, towards emotion. More and more
there grew upon her the charm of a certain rich poetic intelligence
there was in him, stirring beneath his rawness and ignorance,
struggling through the fetters of language; and in response, as the
evening wore on, she threw off her professional airs, and sank the
egotist out of sight. She became simpler, more childish; her
variable, fanciful youth answered to the magnetism of his.
At last he said to her, as they stood by the Arc de l'Etoile,
looking down towards Paris:
'The sun is just going down--this day has been the happiest of my
life!'
The low intensity of the tone startled her. Then she had a movement
of caprice, of superstition.
'_Alors--assez_! Monsieur David, stay where you are. Not
another step!--_Adieu!_'
Astonished and dismayed, he turned involuntarily. But, in the crowd
of people passing through the Arch, she had slipped from him, and
he had lost her beyond recovery. Moreover, her tone was
peremptory--he dared not pursue and anger her.
Minutes passed while he stood, spell--and trance-bound, in the
shadow of the Arch. Then, with the long and labouring breath, the
sudden fatigue of one who has leapt in a day from one plane of life
to another--in whom a passionate and continuous heat of feeling has
for the time burnt up the nervous power--he moved on eastwards,
down the Champs-Elysées. The sunset was behind him, and the trees
threw long shadows across his path. Shade and sun spaces alike
seemed to him full of happy crowds. The beautiful city laughed and
murmured round him. Nature and man alike bore witness with his own
rash heart that all is divinely well with the world--let the
cynics and the mourners say what they will. His hour had come,
and without a hesitation or a dread he rushed upon it. Passion
and youth--ignorance and desire--have never met in madder or
more reckless dreams than those which filled the mind of David
Grieve as he wandered blindly home.