As David climbed the garret stairs to his room, the thought of
Louie flashed across his mind for the first time since the morning.
He opened the door and looked round. Yes; all her things were gone.
She had taken up her abode with the Cervins.
A certain anxiety and discomfort seized him; before going out to
the Boulevard to snatch some food in preparation for his evening at
the 'Trois Rats' he descended to the landing below and rang the
Cervins' bell.
A charwoman, dirty and tired with much cleaning, opened to him.
No, Madame was not at home. No one was at home, and the dinner was
spoiling. Had they not been seen all day? Certainly. They had come
in about six o'clock _avec une jeune personne_ and M. Montjoie.
She thought it probable that they were all at that moment down
below, in the studio of M. Montjoie.
David already knew his way thither, and was soon standing outside
the high black door with the pane of glass above it to which Madame
Merichat had originally directed him. While he waited for an answer
to his ring he looked about him. He was in a sort of yard which was
almost entirely filled up by the sculptor's studio, a long
structure lighted at one end as it seemed from the roof, and at the
other by the usual north window. At the end of the yard rose a huge
many-storied building which seemed to be a factory of some sort.
David's Lancashire eye distinguished machinery through the
monotonous windows, and the figures of the operatives; it took note
also of the fact that the rooms were lit up and work still going on
at seven o'clock. All around were the ugly backs of tall houses,
every window flung open to this May heat. The scene was squalid and
_triste_ save for the greenish blue of the evening sky, and
the flight of a few pigeons round the roof of the factory.
A man in a blouse came at last, and led the way in when David asked
for Madame Cervin. They passed through the inner studio full of a
confusion of clay models and casts to which the dust of months gave
the look and relief of bronze.
Then the further door opened, and he saw beyond a larger and
emptier room; sculptor's work of different kinds, and in various
stages on either side; casts, and charcoal studies on the walls,
and some dozen people scattered in groups over the floor, all
looking towards an object on which the fading light from the upper
part of the large window at the end was concentrated.
What was that figure on its pedestal, that white image which lived
and breathed? _Louie?_
The brother stood amazed beside the door, staring while the man in
the blouse retreated, and the persons in the room were too much
occupied with the spectacle before them to notice the new-comer's
arrival.
Louie stood upon a low pedestal, which apparently revolved with the
model, for as David entered, Montjoie, the man in the grey suit,
with the square, massive head, who had joined the party in the
Louvre, ran forward and moved it round slightly. She was in Greek
dress, and some yards away from her was the clay study--a maenad
with vine wreath, tambourine, thyrsus, and floating hair--for which
she was posing.
Even David was dazzled by the image thus thrown out before him.
With her own dress Louie Grieve seemed to have laid aside for the
moment whatever common or provincial elements there might be in her
strange and startling beauty. Clothed in the clinging folds of the
Greek chiton; neck, arms, and feet bare; the rounded forms of the
limbs showing under the soft stuff; the face almost in profile,
leaning to the shoulder, as though the delicate ear were listening
for the steps of the wine god; a wreath of vine leaves round the
black hair which fell in curly masses about her, sharpening and
framing the rosy whiteness of the cheek and neck; one hand lightly
turned back behind her, showing the palm, the other holding a
torch; one foot poised on tiptoe, and the whole body lightly bent
forward, as though for instant motion:--in this dress and this
attitude, worn and sustained with extraordinary intelligence and
audacity, the wild hybrid creature had risen, as it were, for the
first time, to the full capacity of her endowment--had eclipsed and
yet revealed herself.
The brother stood speechless, looking from the half-completed study
to his sister. How had they made her understand?--where had she got
the dress? And such a dress! To the young fellow, who in his
peasant and tradesman experience had never even seen a woman in the
ordinary low dress of society, it seemed incredible, outrageous.
And to put it on for the purpose of posing as a model in a room
full of strange men--Madame Cervin was the only woman present--his
cheek burnt for his sister; and for the moment indignation and
bewilderment held him paralysed.
In front of him a little way, but totally unaware of the stranger's
entrance, were two men whispering and laughing together. One held a
piece of paper on a book, and was making a hurried sketch of Louie.
Every now and then he drew the attention of his companion to some
of the points of the model. David caught a careless phrase or two,
and understood just enough of their student's slang to suspect a
good deal worse than was actually said.
Meanwhile Montjoie was standing against an iron pillar, studying
intently every detail of Louie's pose, both hands arched over his
eyes.
'_Peste!_ did one ever see so many points combined?' he threw back to
a couple of men behind him. 'Too thin--the arms might be better--and
the hands a _little_ common. But for the _ensemble--mon Dieu!_ we
should make Carpeaux's _atelier_ look alive--_hein?_'
'Take care!' laughed a man who was leaning against a cast a few
feet away, and smoking vigorously. 'She likes it, she has never done
it before, but she likes it. Suppose Carpeaux gets hold of her. You
may repent showing her, if you want to keep her to yourself.'
'Ah, that right knee wants throwing forward a trifle,' said
Montjoie in a preoccupied tone, and going up to Louie, he spoke a
few words of bad English.
'Allow me, mademoiselle--put your hand on me--_ainsi_--vile I
change dis pretty foot.'
Louie looked down bewildered, then at the other men about her, with
her great eyes, half exultant, half inquiring. She understood
hardly anything of their French. One of them laughed, and, running
to the clay Maenad, stooped down and touched the knee and ankle, to
show her what was meant. Louie instinctively put her hand on
Montjoie's shoulder to steady herself, and he proceeded to move the
bare sandalled foot.
One of the men near him made a remark which David caught. He
suddenly strode forward.
'Sir! Have the goodness to tell me how you wish my sister to stand,
and I will explain to her. She is not your model!'
The sculptor looked up startled. Everybody stared at the intruder,
at the dark English boy, standing with a threatening eye, and
trembling with anger, beside his sister. Then Madame Cervin,
clasping her little fat hands with an exclamation of dismay, rushed
up to the group, while Louie leapt down from her pedestal and went
to David.
'What are you interfering for?' she said, pushing Madame Cervin
aside and looking him full in the eyes, her own blazing, her chest
heaving.
'You are disgracing yourself,' he said to her with the same
intensity, fast and low, under his breath, so as to be heard only
by her. 'How can you expose yourself as a model to these men whom
you never saw before? Let them find their own models; they are a
pack of brutes!'
But even as he spoke he shrank before the concentrated wrath of her
face.
'I will make you pay for it!' she said. 'I will teach you to
domineer.'
Then she turned to Madame Cervin.
'Come and take it off, please!' she said imperiously. 'It's no good
while he is here.'
As she crossed the room with her free wild step, her white
draperies floating, Montjoie, who had been standing pulling at his
moustaches, and studying the brother from under his heavy brows,
joined her, and, stooping, said two or three smiling words in her
ear. She looked up, tossed her head and laughed--a laugh half
reckless, half _farouche;_ two or three of the other men
hurried after them, and presently they made a knot in the further
room, Louie calmly waiting for Madame Cervin, and sitting on the
pedestal of a bronze group, her beautiful head and white shoulders
thrown out against the metal. Montjoie's artist friends--of the
kind which haunt a man whose _moeurs_ are gradually bringing
his talent to ruin--stood round her, smoking and talking and
staring at the English girl between whiles. The arrogance with
which she bore their notice excited them, but they could not talk
to her, for she did not understand them. Only Montjoie had a few
words of English. Occasionally Louie bent forward and looked
disdainfully through the door. When would David be done prating?
For he, in fact, was grappling with Madame Cervin, who was showing
great adroitness. This was what had happened according to her.
Monsieur Montjoie--a man of astonishing talent, an artist
altogether superior--was in trouble about his statue--could not
find a model to suit him--was in despair. It seemed that he had
heard of mademoiselle's beauty from England, in some way, before
she arrived. Then in the studio he had shown her the Greek dress.
'--There were some words between them--some compliments,
Monsieur, I suppose--and your sister said she would pose for
him. I opposed myself. I knew well that mademoiselle was a
young person _tout-à-fait comme il faut_, that monsieur her
brother might object to her making herself a model for M.
Montjoie. _Mais, mon Dieu!_' and the ex-modiste shrugged her
round shoulders--'mademoiselle has a will of her own.'
Then she hinted that in an hour's acquaintance mademoiselle had
already shown herself extremely difficult to manage--monsieur would
probably understand that. As for her, she had done everything
possible. She had taken mademoiselle upstairs and dressed her with
her own hands--she had been her maid and companion throughout. She
could do no more. Mademoiselle would go her own way.
'Who were all these men?' David inquired, still hot and frowning.
Madame Cervin rose on tiptoe and poured a series of voluble
biographies into his ear. According to her everybody present was a
person of distinction; was at any rate an artist, and a man of
talent. But let monsieur decide. If he was dissatisfied, let him
take his sister away. She had been distressed, insulted, by his
behaviour. Mademoiselle's box had been not yet unpacked. Let him
say the word and it should be taken upstairs again.
And she drew away from him, bridling, striking an attitude of
outraged dignity beside her husband, who had stood behind her in a
slouching abstracted silence during the whole scene--so far as her
dwarf stature and vulgar little moon-face permitted.
'We are strangers here, Madame,' cried David. 'I asked you to take
care of my sister, and I find her like this, before a crowd of men
neither she nor I have ever seen before!'
Madame Cervin swept her hand grandiloquently round.
'Monsieur has his remedy! Let him take his sister.'
He stood silent in a helpless and obvious perplexity. What, saddle
himself afresh after these intoxicating hours of liberty and
happiness? Fetter and embarrass every moment? Shut himself out from
freedom--from _her_?
Besides, already his first instinctive rage was disappearing. In
the confusion of this new world he could no longer tell whether he
was right or ridiculous. Had he been playing the Philistine,
mistaking a mere artistic convention for an outrage? And Louie was
so likely to submit to his admonitions!
Madame Cervin watched him with a triumphant eye. When he began to
stammer out what was in effect an apology, she improved the
opportunity, threw off her suave manners, and let him understand
with a certain plain brutality that she had taken Louie's measure.
She would do her best to keep the girl in order--it was lucky for
him that he had fallen upon anybody so entirely respectable as
herself and her husband--but she would use her own judgment; and if
monsieur made scenes, she would just turn out her boarder, and
leave him to manage as he could.
She had the whip-hand, and she knew it. He tried to appease her,
then discovered that he must go, and went with a hanging head.
Louie took no notice of him nor he of her, as he passed through the
inner studio, but Montjoie came forward to meet the English lad,
bending his great head and shoulders with a half-ironic politeness.
Monsieur Grieve he feared had mistaken the homage rendered by
himself and his friends to his sister's beauty for an act of
disrespect--let him be reassured! Such beauty was its own defence.
No doubt monsieur did not understand artistic usage. He, Montjoie,
made allowance for the fact, otherwise the young man's behaviour
towards himself and his friends would have required explanation.
The two stood together at the door--David proudly crimson, seeking
in vain for phrases that would not come--Montjoie cool and
malicious, his battered weather-beaten face traversed by little
smiles. Louie was looking on with scornful amusement, and the group
of artists round her could hardly control their mirth.
He shut the door behind him with the feeling of one who has cut a
ridiculous figure and beaten a mean retreat. Then, as he neared the
bottom of the stairs, he gave himself a great shake, with the
gesture of one violently throwing off a weight. Let those who
thought that he ought to control Louie, and could control her, come
and see for themselves! He had done what he thought was for the
best--his quick inner sense carefully refrained from attaching any
blame whatever to Mademoiselle Delaunay--and now Louie must go her
own gait, and he would go his. He had said his say--and she should
not spoil this hoarded, this long-looked-for pleasure. As he passed
into the street, on his way to the Boulevard for some food, his
walk and bearing had in them a stern and passionate energy.
He had to hurry back for his appointment with Mademoiselle
Delaunay's friends of the morning. As he turned into the Rue
Chantal he passed a flower-stall aglow with roses from the south
and sweet with narcissus and mignonette. An idea struck him, and he
stopped, a happy smile softening away the still lingering tension
of the face. For a few sous he bought a bunch of yellow-eyed
narcissus and stepped gaily home with them. He had hardly time to
put them in water and to notice that Madame Merichat had made
Dubois' squalid abode look much more habitable than before, when
there was a knock at the door and his two guides stood outside.
They carried him off at once. David found more of a tongue than he
had been master of in the morning, and the three talked incessantly
as they wound in and out of the streets which cover the face of the
hill of Montmartre, ascending gradually towards the place they were
in search of. David had heard something of the history of the two
from Elise Delaunay. Alphonse was a lad of nineteen brimming over
with wild fun and mischief, and perpetually in disgrace with all
possible authorities; the possessor nevertheless of a certain
delicate and subtle fancy which came out in the impressionist
landscapes--many of them touched with a wild melancholy as
inexplicable probably to himself as to other people--which he
painted in all his spare moments. The tall black-bearded Lenain was
older, had been for years in Taranne's _atelier_, was an
excellent draughtsman, and was now just beginning seriously upon
the painting of large pictures for exhibition. In his thin long
face there was a pinched and anxious look, as though in the
artist's inmost mind there lay hidden the presentiment of failure.
They talked freely enough of Elise Delaunay, David alternately
wincing and craving for more. What a clever little devil it was!
She was burning herself away with ambition and work; Taranne
flattered her a good deal; it was absolutely necessary, otherwise
she would be for killing herself two or three times a week. Oh! she
might get her _mention_ at the Salon. The young Solons sitting
in judgment on her thought on the whole she deserved it; two of her
exhibits were not bad; but there was another girl in the
_atelier_, Mademoiselle Breal, who had more interest in high
places. However, Taranne would do what he could; he had always made
a favourite of the little Elise; and only he could manage her when
she was in one of her impracticable fits.
Then Alphonse put the Englishman through a catechism, and at the
end of it they both advised him not to trouble his head about
George Sand. That was all dead and done with, and Balzac not much
less. He might be great, Balzac, but who could be at the trouble
of reading him nowadays? Lenain, who was literary, named to him
with enthusiasm Flaubert's 'Madame Bovary' and the brothers
Goncourt. As for Alphonse, who was capable, however, of occasional
excursions into poetry, and could quote Musset and Hugo, the
_feuilletons_ in the 'Gaulois' or the 'Figaro' seemed, on the
whole, to provide him with as much fiction as he desired. He was
emphatically of opinion that the artist wants no books; a little
poetry, perhaps, did no harm; but literature in painting was the
very devil. Then perceiving that between them they had puzzled
their man, Alphonse would have proceeded to 'cram' him in the most
approved style, but that Lenain interposed, and a certain cooling
of the Englishman's bright eye made success look unpromising.
Finally the wild fellow clapped David on the back and assured him
that 'Les Trois Rats' would astonish him. 'Ah! here we are.'
As he spoke they turned a corner, and a blaze of light burst upon
them, coming from what seemed to be a gap in the street face, a
house whereof the two lower stories were wall--and windowless,
though not in the manner of the ordinary cafe, seeing that the open
parts were raised somewhat above the pavement.
'The patron saint!' said Alphonse, stopping with a grin and
pointing. Following the finger with his eye David caught a
fantastic sign swinging above him: a thin iron crescent, and
sitting up between its two tips a lean black rat, its sharp nose in
the air, its tail curled round its iron perch, while two other
creatures of the same kind crept about him, the one clinging to the
lower tip of the crescent, the other peering down from the top on
the king-rat in the middle. Below the sign, and heavily framed by
the dark overhanging eave, the room within was clearly visible from
the street. From the background of its black oak walls and
furniture emerged figures, lights, pictures, above all an imposing
_cheminee_ advancing far into the floor, a high, fantastic
structure also of black oak like the panelling of the room, but
overrun with chains of black rats, carved and combined with a wild
_diablerie_, and lit by numerous lights in branching ironwork.
The dim grotesque shapes of the pictures, the gesticulating,
shouting crowd in front of them, the mediaevalism of the room and
of that strange sign dangling outside: these things took the
English lad's excited fancy and he pressed his way in behind his
companions. He forgot what they had been telling him; his pulse
beat to the old romantic tune; poets, artists, talkers--here he was
to find them.
David's two companions exchanged greetings on all sides, laughing
and shouting like the rest. With difficulty they found a table in a
remote corner, and, sitting down, ordered coffee.
'Alphonse! _mon cher!_'
A young man sitting at the next table turned round upon them,
slapped Alphonse on the shoulder, and stared hard at David. He had
fine black eyes in a bronzed face, a silky black beard, and long
hair _à la lion_, that is to say, thrown to one side of the
head in a loose mane-like mass.
'I have just come from the Salon. Not bad--Regnault? _Hein?_'
'_Non--il arrivera, celui-là_,' said the other calmly.
'As for the other things from the Villa Medici fellows,' said the
first speaker, throwing his arm round the back of his chair, and
twisting it round so as to front them, 'they make me sick. I should
hardly do my fire the injustice of lighting it with some of them.'
'All the same,' replied Alphonse stoutly, 'that Campagna scene of D.
's is well done.'
'Literature, _mon cher_! literature!' cried the unknown, 'and
what the deuce do we want with literature in painting?'
He brought his fist down violently on the table.
'_Connu_,' said Alphonse scornfully. 'Don't excite yourself.
But the story in D. 's picture doesn't matter a halfpenny. Who cares
what the figures are doing? It's the brush work and the values I
look to. How did he get all that relief--that brilliance? No
sunshine--no local colour--and the thing glows like a Rembrandt!'
The boy's mad blue eyes took a curious light, as though some inner
enthusiasm had stirred.
'_Peuh_! we all know you, Alphonse. Say what you like, you
want something else in a picture than painting. That'll damn you,
and make your fortune some day, I warn you. Now _I_ have got a
picture on the easel that will make the _bourgeois_ skip.'
And the speaker passed a large tremulous hand through his waves of
hair, his lip also quivering with the nervousness of a man
overworked and overdone.
'You'll not send it to the Salon, I imagine,' said another man
beside him, dryly. He was fair, small and clean-shaven, wore
spectacles, and had the look of a clerk or man of business.
'Yes, I shall,' cried the other violently--his name was
Dumesnil--'I'll fling it at their heads. That's all our school can
do--make a scandal.'
'Well, that has even been known to make money,' said the other,
fingering his watch-chain with a disagreeable little smile.
'Money!' shouted Dumesnil, and swinging round to his own table
again he poured out hot denunciations of the money-grabbing
reptiles of to-day who shelter themselves behind the sacred name of
art. Meanwhile the man at whom it was all levelled sipped his
coffee quietly and took no notice.
'Ah, a song!' cried Alphonse. 'Lenain, _vois-tu_? It's that
little devil Perinot. He's been painting churches down near
Toulouse, his own country. Saints by the dozen, like this,' and
Alphonse drooped his eyes and crossed his limp hands, taking off
the frescoed mediaeval saint for an instant, as only the Parisian
_gamin_ can do such things. 'You should see him with a _cure_.
However, the _cures_ don't follow him here, more's the pity.
Ah! _très bien--très bien_!'
These plaudits were called out by some passages on the guitar with
which the singer was prefacing his song. His chair had been mounted
on to a table, so that all the world could see and hear. A hush of
delighted attention penetrated the room; and outside, in the street,
David could see dark forms gathering on the pavement.
The singer was a young man, undersized and slightly deformed, with
close-cut hair, and a large face, droll, pliant and ugly as a
gutta-percha mask. Before he opened his lips the audience laughed.
David listened with all his ears, feeling through every fibre the
piquant strangeness of the scene--alive with the foreigner's
curiosity, and with youth's pleasure in mere novelty. And what
clever fellows, what dash, what _camaraderie!_ That old
imaginative drawing towards France and the French was becoming
something eagerly personal, combative almost,--and in the
background of his mind throughout was the vibrating memory of the
day just past--the passionate sense of a new life.
The song was tumultuously successful. The whole crowded
_salle_, while it was going on, was one sea of upturned faces,
and it was accompanied at intervals by thunders of applause, given
out by means of sticks, spoons, fists, or anything else that might
come handy. It recounted the adventures of an artist and his model.
As it proceeded, a slow crimson rose into the English lad's cheek,
overspread his forehead and neck. He sat staring at the singer, or
looking round at the absorbed attention and delight of his
companions. By the end of it David, his face propped on his hands,
was trying nervously to decipher the names and devices cut in the
wood of the table on which he leant. His whole being was in a surge
of physical loathing--the revulsion of feeling was bewildering and
complete. So this was what Frenchmen thought of women, what they
could say of them, when the mask was off, and they were at their
ease. The witty brutality, the naked coarseness of the thing
scourged the boy's shrinking sense. Freedom, passion--yes! but
_this!_ In his wild recoil he stood again under the Arc de
Triomphe watching her figure disappear. Ah! pardon! That he should
be listening at all seemed to a conscience, an imagination
quickened by first love, to be an outrage to women, to love, to
her!
_Yet_--how amusing it was! how irresistible, as the first
shock subsided, was the impression of sparkling verse, of an
astonishing mimetic gift in the singer! Towards the end he had just
made up his mind to go on the first pretext, when he found himself,
to his own disgust, shaking with laughter.
He recovered himself after a while, resolved to stay it out, and
betrayed nothing. The comments made by his two companions on the
song--consisting mainly of illustrative anecdote--were worthy of
the occasion. David sat, however, without flinching, his black eyes
hardening, laughing at intervals.
Presently the room rose _en bloc_, and there was a move
towards the staircase.
'The manager, M. Edmond, has come,' explained Alphonse; 'they are
going upstairs to the concert-room. They will have a recitation
perhaps,--_ombres chinoises,_--music. Come and look at the
drawings before we go.'
And he took his charge round the walls, which were papered with
drawings and sketches, laughing and explaining. The drawings were
done, in the main, according to him, by the artists on the staffs
of two illustrated papers which had their headquarters at the
'Trois Rats.' David was especially seized by the innumerable sheets
of animal sketches--series in which some episode of animal life was
carried through from its beginning to a close, sometimes humorous,
but more often tragic. In a certain number of them there was a free
imagination, an irony, a pity, which linked them together, marked
them as the conceptions of one brain. Alphonse pointed to them as
the work of a clever fellow, lately dead, who had been launched and
supported by the 'Trois Rats' and its frequenters. One series in
particular, representing a robin overcome by the seduction of a
glass of absinthe and passing through all the stages of delirium
tremens, had a grim inventiveness, a fecundity of half humorous,
half pathetic fancy, which held David's eye riveted.
As for the ballet-girl, she was everywhere, with her sisters, the
model and the _grisette_. And the artistic ability shown in
the treatment of her had nowhere been hampered by any Philistine
scruple in behalf of decency.
Upstairs there was the same mixed experience. David found himself
in a corner with his two acquaintances, and four or five others, a
couple of journalists, a musician and a sculptor. The conversation
ranged from art to religion, from religion to style, from style to
women, and all with a perpetual recurrence either to the pictures
and successes of the Salon, or to the _liaisons_ of well-known
artists.
'Why do none of us fellows in the press pluck up courage and tell
H. what we really think about those Homeric _machines_ of his
which he turns out year after year?' said a journalist, who was
smoking beside him, an older man than the rest of them. 'I have a
hundred things I want to say--but H. is popular--I like him
himself--and I haven't the nerve. But what the devil do we want
with the Greeks--they painted their world--let us paint ours!
Besides, it is an absurdity. I thought as I was looking at H. 's
things this morning of what Preault used to say of Pradier: "_Il
partait tous les matins pour la Grèce et arrivait tous les soirs
Rue de Breda._" "Pose your goddesses as you please--they are
_grisettes_ all the same."'
'All very well for you critics,' growled a man smoking a long pipe
beside him; 'but the artist must live, and the _bourgeois_ will
have subjects. He won't have anything to do with your "notes"--and
"impressions"--and "arrangements." When you present him with the
view, served hot, from your four-pair back--he buttons up his
pockets and abuses you. He wants his stories and his sentiment. And
where the deuce is the sentiment to be got? I should be greatly
obliged to anyone who would point me to a little of the commodity.
The Greeks are already ridiculous,--and as for religion--'
The speaker threw back his head and laughed silently.
'Ah! I agree with you,' said the other emphatically; 'the religious
pictures this year are really too bad. Christianity is going too
fast--for the artist.'
'And the sceptics are becoming bores,' cried the painter; 'they take
themselves too seriously. It is, after all, only another dogmatism.
One should believe in nothing--not even in one's doubts.'
'Yes,' replied the journalist, knocking out his pipe, with a
sardonic little smile--'strange fact! One may swim in free thought
and remain as _banal_ as a bishop all the time.'
'I say,' shouted a fair-haired youth opposite, 'who has seen C. 's
Holy Family? Who knows where he got his Madonna?'
Nobody knew, and the speaker had the felicity of imparting an
entirely fresh scandal to attentive ears. The mixture in the story
of certain brutalities of modern manners with names and things
still touching or sacred for the mass of mankind had the old
Voltairean flavour. But somehow, presented in this form and at this
moment, David no longer found it attractive. He sat nursing his
knee, his dark brows drawn together, studying the story-teller,
whose florid Norman complexion and blue eyes were already seared by
a vicious experience.
The tale, however, was interrupted and silenced by the first notes
of a piano. The room was now full, and a young actor from the
Gymnase company was about to give a musical sketch. The subject of
it was 'St. Francis and Santa Clara.'
This performance was perhaps more wittily broad than anything which
had gone before. The audience was excessively amused by it. It was
indeed the triumph of the evening, and nothing could exceed the
grace and point of the little speech in which M. Edmond, the
manager of the cafe, thanked the accomplished singer afterwards.
While it was going on, David, always with that poignant, shrinking
thought of Elise at his heart, looked round to see if there were
any women present. Yes, there were three. Two were young,
outrageously dressed, with sickly pretty tired faces. The third was
a woman in middle life, with short hair parted at the side, and a
strong, masculine air. Her dress was as nearly as possible that of
a man, and she was smoking vigorously. The rough _bonhomie_ of
her expression and her professional air reminded David once more of
George Sand. An artist, he supposed, or a writer.
Suddenly, towards the end of the sketch, he became conscious of a
tall figure behind the singer, a man standing with his hat in his
hand, as though he had just come in, and were just going away. His
fine head was thrown back, his look was calm, David thought
disdainful. Bending forward he recognised M. Regnault, the hero of
the morning.
Regnault had come in unperceived while the dramatic piece was
going on; but it was no sooner over than he was discovered,
and the whole _salle_ rose to do him honour. The generosity, the
extravagance of the ovation offered to the young painter by this
hundred or two of artists and men of letters were very striking to
the foreign eye. David found himself thrilling and applauding with
the rest. The room had passed in an instant from cynicism to
sentiment. A moment ago it had been trampling to mud the tenderest
feeling of the past; it was now eagerly alive with the feeling of
the present.
The new-comer protested that he had only dropped in, being in the
neighbourhood, and must not stay. He was charming to them all,
asked after this man's picture and that man's statue, talked a
little about the studio he was organising at Tangiers, and then,
shaking hands right and left, made his way through the crowd.
As he passed David, his quick eye caught the stranger and he
paused.
'Were you not in the Louvre this morning with Mademoiselle
Delaunay?' he asked, lowering his voice a little; 'you are a
stranger?'
'Yes, an Englishman,' David stammered, taken by surprise.
Regnault's look swept over the youth's face, kindling in an instant
with the artist's delight in beautiful line and tint.
'Are you going now?'
'Yes,' said David hurriedly. 'It must be late?'
'Midnight, past. May I walk with you?'
David, overwhelmed, made some hurried excuses to his two
companions, and found himself pushing his way to the door, an
unnoticed figure in the tumult of Regnault's exit.
When they got into the street outside, Regnault walked fast
southwards for a minute or so without speaking. Then he stopped
abruptly, with the gesture of one shaking off a weight.
'Pah! this Paris chokes me.'
Then, walking on again, he said, half-coherently, and to himself:
'So vile,--so small,--so foul! And there are such great things in
the world. _Beasts!--pigs!_--and yet so generous, so struggling,
such a hard fight for it. So gifted,--many of them! What are you
here for?'
And he turned round suddenly upon his companion. David, touched and
captured he knew not how by the largeness and spell of the man's
presence, conquered his shyness and explained himself as
intelligibly as he could:
An English bookseller, making his way in trade, yet drawn to France
by love for her literature and her past, and by a blood-tie which
seemed to have in it mystery and pain, for it could hardly be
spoken of--the curious little story took the artist's fancy.
Regnault did his best to draw out more of it, helped the young
fellow with his French, tried to get at his impressions, and
clearly enjoyed the experience to which his seeking artist's sense
had led him.
'What a night!' he said at last, drawing a full draught of the May
into his great chest. 'Stop and look down those streets in the
moonlight. What surfaces,--what gradations,--what a beauty of
multiplied lines, though it is only a piece of vulgar Haussmann!
Indoors I can't breathe--but out of doors and at night this Paris
of ours,--ah! she is still beautiful--_beautiful_! Now one has
shaken the dust of that place off, one can feel it. What did you
think of it?--tell me.'
He stooped and looked into his companion's face. David was tall and
lithe, but Regnault was at least half a head taller and broader in
proportion.
David walked along for a minute without answering. He too, and even
more keenly than Regnault, was conscious of escape and relief. A
force which had, as it were, taken life and feeling by the throat
had relaxed its grip. He disengaged himself with mingled loathing
and joy. But in his shyness he did not know how to express himself,
fearing, too, to wound the Frenchman. At last he said slowly:
'I never saw so many clever people together in my life.'
The words were bald, but Regnault perfectly understood what was
meant by them, as well as by the troubled consciousness of the
black eyes raised to his. He laughed--shortly and bitterly.
'No, we don't lack brains, we French. All the same I tell you, in
the whole of that room there are about half-a-dozen people,--oh,
not so many!--not nearly so many!--who will ever make a mark, even
for their own generation, who will ever strike anything out of
nature that is worth having--wrestle with her to any purpose. Why?
Because they have every sort of capacity--every sort of
cleverness--and _no character_!'
David walked beside him in silence. He thought suddenly of
Regnault's own picture--its strange cruelty and force, its
craftsman's brilliance. And the recollection puzzled him.
Regnault, however, had spoken with passion, and as though out of
the fulness of some sore and long-familiar pondering.
'You never saw anything like that in England,' he resumed quickly.
David hesitated.
'No, I never did. But I am a provincial, and I have seen nothing at
all. Perhaps in London--'
'No, you would see nothing like it in London,' said Regnault
decidedly. 'Bah! it is not that you are more virtuous than we are.
Who believes such folly? But your vice is grosser, stupider. Lucky
for you! You don't sacrifice to it the best young brain of the
nation, as we are perpetually doing. Ah, _mon Dieu_!' he broke
out in a kind of despair, 'this enigma of art!--of the artist! One
flounders and blunders along. I have been floundering and
blundering with the rest,--playing tricks--following this man and
that--till suddenly--a door opens--and one sees the real world
through for the first time!'
He stood still in his excitement, a smile of the most exquisite
quality and sweetness dawning on his strong young face.
'And then,' he went on, beginning to walk again, and talking much
more to the night than to his companion, 'one learns that the secret
of life lies in _feeling_--in the heart, not in the head. And
no more limits than before!--all is still open, divinely open.
Range the whole world--see everything, learn everything--till at
the end of years and years you may perhaps be found worthy to be
called an artist! But let art have her ends, all the while, shining
beyond the means she is toiling through--her ends of beauty or of
power. To spend herself on the mere photography of the vile and the
hideous! what waste--what sacrilege!'
They had reached the Place de la Concorde, which lay bathed in
moonlight, the silver fountains plashing, the trees in the
Champs-Elysées throwing their sharp yet delicate shadows on the
intense whiteness of the ground, the buildings far away rising
softly into the softest purest blue. Regnault stopped and looked
round him with enchantment. As for David, he had no eyes save for
his companion. His face was full of a quick responsive emotion.
After an experience which had besmirched every ideal and bemocked
every faith, the young Frenchman's talk had carried the lad once
more into the full tide of poetry and romance. 'The secret of life
lies in _feeling_, in the heart, not the head'--ah, _that_ he
understood! He tried to express his assent, his homage to the
speaker; but neither he nor the artist understood very clearly
what he was saying. Presently Regnault said in another tone:
'And they are such good fellows, many of them. Starving often--but
nothing to propitiate the _bourgeois_, nothing to compromise
the "dignity of art." A man will paint to please himself all day,
paint, on a crust, something that won't and can't sell, that the
world in fact would be mad to buy; then in the evening he will put
his canvas to the wall, and paint sleeve-links or china to live.
And so generous to each other: they will give each other all they
have--food, clothes, money, knowledge. That man who gave that
abominable thing about St. Francis--I know him, he has a little
apartment near the Quai St.-Michel, and an invalid mother. He is a
perfect angel to her. I could take off my hat to him whenever I
think of it.'
His voice dropped again. Regnault was pacing along across the
Place, his arms behind him, David at his side. When he resumed, it
was once more in a tone of despondency.
'There is an ideal; but so twisted, so corrupted! What is wanted
is not less intelligence but _more_--more knowledge, more
experience--something beyond this fevering, brutalising Paris,
which is all these men know. They have got the poison of the
Boulevards in their blood, and it dulls their eye and hand. They
want scattering to the wilderness; they want the wave of life to
come and lift them past the mud they are dabbling in, with its
hideous wrecks and _debris_, out and away to the great sea, to
the infinite beyond of experience and feeling! you, too, feel with
me?--you, too, see it like that? Ah! when one has seen and felt
Italy--the East,--the South--lived heart to heart with a wild
nature, or with the great embodied thought of the past,--lived at
large, among great things, great sights, great emotions, then there
comes purification! There is no other way out--no, none!'
So for another hour Regnault led the English boy up and down and
along the quays, talking in the frankest openest way to this
acquaintance of a night. It was as though he were wrestling his own
way through his own life-problem. Very often David could hardly
follow. The joys, the passions, the temptations of the artist,
struggling with the life of thought and aspiration, the craving to
know everything, to feel everything, at war with the hunger for a
moral unity and a stainless self-respect--there was all this in his
troubled, discursive talk, and there was besides the magic touch of
genius, youth, and poetry.
'Well, this is strange!' he said at last, stopping at a point
between the Louvre on the one hand and the Institute on the other,
the moonlit river lying between.--' My friends come to me at Rome
or at Tangiers, and they complain of me, "Regnault, you have grown
morose, no one can get a word out of you"--and they go away
wounded--I have seen it often. And it was always true. For months I
have had no words. I have been in the dark, wrestling with my art
and with this goading, torturing world, which the artist with his
puny forces has somehow to tame and render. Then--the other
day--ah! well, no matter!--but the dark broke, and there was light!
and when I saw your face, your stranger's face, in that crowd
to-night, listening to those things, it drew me. I wanted to say my
say. I don't make excuses. Very likely we shall never meet
again--but for this hour we have been friends. Good night!--good
night! Look,--the dawn is coming!'
And he pointed to where, behind the towers of Notre-Dame, the first
whiteness of the coming day was rising into the starry blue.
They shook hands.
'You go back to England soon?'
'In a--a--week or two.'
'Only believe this--we have things better worth seeing than "Les
Trois Rats"--things that represent us better. That is what the
foreigner is always doing; he spends his time in wondering at our
monkey tricks; there is no nation can do them so well as we; and
the great France--the undying France!--disappears in a splutter of
_blague_!'
He leant over the parapet, forgetting his companion, his eyes fixed
on the great cathedral, on the slender shaft of the Sainte
Chapelle, on the sky filling with light.
Then suddenly he turned round, laid a quick hand on his companion's
shoulder.
'If you ever feel inclined to write to me, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
will find me. Adieu.'
And drawing his coat round him in the chilliness of the dawn, he
walked off quickly across the bridge.
David also hurried away, speeding along the deserted pavements till
again he was in his own dark street. The dawn was growing from its
first moment of mysterious beauty into a grey disillusioning light.
But he felt no reaction. He crept up the squalid stairs to his
room. It was heavy with the scent of the narcissus.
He took them, and stole along the passage to Elise's door. There
were three steps outside it. He sat down on the lowest, putting his
flowers beside him. There was something awful to him even in this
nearness; he dare not have gone higher.
He sat there for long--his heart beating, beating. Every part of
his French experience so far, whether by sympathy or recoil, had
helped to bring him to this intoxication of sense and soul.
Regnault had spoken of the 'great things' of life. Had he too come
to understand them--thus?
At last he left his flowers there, kissing the step on which they
were laid, and which her foot must touch. He could hardly sleep;
the slight fragrance which clung to the old bearskin in which he
wrapt himself helped to keep him restless; it was the faint
heliotrope scent he had noticed in her room.