It was between five and six o'clock in the morning. In the
Tuileries Gardens flowers, grass, and trees were drenched in dew,
the great shadow of the Palace spread grey and cool over terraces
and slopes, while beyond the young sun had already shaken off all
cumbering mists, and was pouring from a cloudless sky over the
river with its barges and swimming-baths, over the bridges and the
quays, and the vast courts and facades of the Louvre. Yet among the
trees the air was still exquisitely fresh, the sun still a friend
to be welcomed. The light morning wind swept the open, deserted
spaces of the Gardens, playing merrily with the dust, the leaves,
the fountains. Meanwhile on all sides the stir of the city was
beginning, mounting slowly and steadily like a swelling tone.
On a bench under one of the trees in the Champs-Elysées sat a young
man asleep. He had thrown himself against the back of the bench,
his cheek resting on the iron, one hand on his knee. It was David
Grieve; the lad's look showed that his misery was still with him,
even in sleep.
He was dreaming, letting fall here and there a troubled and
disconnected word. In his dream he was far from Paris--walking
after his sheep among the heathery slopes of the Scout, climbing
towards the grey smithy among the old mill-stones, watching the Red
Brook slide by over its long, shallow steps of orange grit, and the
Downfall oozing and trickling among its tumbled blocks. Who was
that hanging so high above the ravine on that treacherous stone
that rocked with the least touch? Louie--mad girl!--come back. Ah!
too late--the stone rocks, falls; he leaps from block to block,
only to see the light dress disappear into the stony gulf below. He
cries--struggles--wakes.
He sat up, wrestling with himself, trying to clear his torpid
brain. Where was he? His dream-self was still roaming the Scout;
his outer eye was bewildered by these alleys, these orange-trees,
these statues--that distant arch.
Then the hideous, undefined cloud that was on him took shape. Elise
had left him. And Louie, too, was gone--he knew not where, save
that it was to ruin. When he had arrived the night before at the
house in the Rue Chantal, Madame Merichat could tell him nothing of
Mademoiselle Delaunay, who had not been heard of. Then he asked,
his voice dying in his throat before the woman's hard and cynical
stare--the stare of one who found the chief savour of life in the
misfortunes of her kind--he asked for his sister and the Cervins.
The Cervins were staying at Sevres with relations, and were
expected home again in a day or two; Mademoiselle Louie?--well,
Mademoiselle Louie was not with them. Had she gone back to
England? _Mais non!_ A trunk of hers was still in the Cervins'
vestibule. Did Madame Merichat know anything about her? the lad
asked, forcing himself to it, his blanched face turned away. Then
the woman shrugged her shoulders and spoke out.
If he really must know, she thought there was no doubt at all
that where Monsieur Montjoie was, Mademoiselle Louie was too.
Monsieur Montjoie had paid the arrears of his rent to the
_proprietaire_, somehow or other, and had then made a midnight
flitting of it so as to escape other creditors who were tired of
waiting for his statue to be finished. He had got a furniture van
there at night, and he and the driver and her husband between them
had packed most of the things from the studio, and M. Montjoie had
gone off in the van about one o'clock in the morning. But of course
she did not know his address! she said so half-a-dozen times a day
to the persons who called, and it was as true as gospel. Why,
indeed, should M. Montjoie let her or anyone else know, that he
could help? He had gone into hiding to keep honest people out of
their money--that was what it meant.
Well, and the same evening Mademoiselle Louie also disappeared.
Madame Cervin had been in a great way, but she and mademoiselle had
already quarrelled violently, and madame declared that she had no
fault in the matter and that no one could be held responsible for
the doings of such a minx. She believed that madame had written to
monsieur. Monsieur had never received it? Ah, well, that was not
surprising! No one could ever read madame's writing, though it made
her temper very bad to tell her so.
Could he have Madame Cervin's address? Certainly. She wrote it out
for him. As to his old room?--no, he could not go back to it.
Monsieur Dubois had lately come back, with some money apparently,
for he had paid his _loyer_ just as the landlord was going to
turn him out. But he was not at home.
Then she looked her questioner up and down, with a cool, inhuman
curiosity working in her small eyes. So M'selle Elise had thrown
him over already? That was sharp work! As for the rest of her news,
her pessimism was interested in observing his demeanour under it.
Certainly he did not seem to take it gaily; but what else did he
expect with his sister?--'_Je vous demande_!'
The young man dropped his head and went out, shrinking together
into the darkness. She called her husband to the door, and the two
peered after him into the lamp-lit street, dissecting him, his
mistress, and his sister with knifelike tongues.
David went away and walked up and down the streets, the quays, the
bridges, hour after hour, feeling no fatigue, till suddenly, just
as the dawn was coming on, he sank heavily on to the seat in the
Champs-Elysées. The slip with Madame Cervin's address on it dropped
unheeded from his relaxing hand. His nervous strength was gone, and
he had to sit and bear his anguish without the relief of frenzied
motion.
Now, after his hour's sleep, he was somewhat revived, ready to
start again--to search again; but where? whither? _Somewhere_
in this vast, sun-wrapped Paris was Elise, waking, perhaps, at this
moment and thinking of him with a smile and a tear. He _would_
find her, come what would; he could not live without her!
Then into his wild passion of loss and desire there slipped again
that cold, creeping thought of Louie--ruined, body and soul--ruined
in this base and dangerous Paris, while he still carried in his
breast that little scrap of scrawled paper! And why? Because he had
flung her to the wolves without a thought, that he and Elise might
travel to their goal unchecked. '_My God_!'
The sense of some one near him made him look up. He saw a girl
stopping near the seat whom in his frenzy he for an instant took
for Louie. There was the same bold, defiant carriage, the same
black hair and eyes. He half rose, with a cry.
The girl gave a quick, coarse laugh. She had been hurrying across
the Avenue towards the nearest bridge when she saw him; now she
came up to him with a hideous jest. David saw her face full, caught
the ghastly suggestions of it--its vice, its look of mortal illness
wrecking and blurring the cheap prettiness it had once possessed,
and beneath all else the fierceness of the hunted creature. His
whole being rose in repulsion; he waved her away, and she went,
still laughing. But his guilty mind went with her, making of her
infamy the prophecy and foretaste of another's.
He hurried on again, and again had to rest for faintness' sake,
while the furies returned upon him. It seemed as though every
passer-by were there only to scourge and torture him; or, rather,
out of the moving spectacle of human life which began to flow past
him with constantly increasing fulness, that strange selective
poet-sense of his chose out the figures and incidents which bore
upon his own story and worked into his own drama, passing by the
rest. A group of persons presently attracted him who had just come
apparently from the Rive Gauche, and were making for the Rue
Royale. They consisted of a man, a woman, and a child. The child
was a tiny creature in a preposterous feathered hat as large as
itself. It had just been put down to walk by its father, and was
dragging contentedly at its mother's hand, sucking a crust. The man
had a bag of tools on his shoulder and was clearly an artisan going
to work. His wife's face was turned to him and they were talking
fast, lingering a little in the sunshine like people who had a few
minutes to spare and were enjoying them. The man had the blanched,
unwholesome look of the city workman who lives a sedentary life in
foul air, and was, moreover, undersized and noways attractive, save
perhaps for the keen amused eyes with which he was listening to his
wife's chatter. The great bell of Notre-Dame chimed in the
distance. The man straightened himself at once, adjusted his bag of
tools, and hurried off, nodding to his wife.
She looked after him a minute, then turned and came slowly along
the alley towards the bench where David sat, idly watching her. The
heat was growing steadily, the child was heavy on her hand, and she
was again clearly on the way to motherhood. The seat invited her,
and she came up to it.
She sat down, panting, and eyed her neighbour askance, detecting at
once how handsome he was, and how unshorn and haggard. Before he
knew where he was, or how it had begun, they were talking. She had
no shyness of any sort, and, as it seemed to him, a motherly,
half-contemptuous indulgence for his sex, as such, which fitted
oddly with her young looks. Very soon she was asking him the most
direct questions, which he had to parry as best he could. She made
out at once that he was a foreigner and in the book trade, and then
she let him know by a passing expression or two that naturally she
understood why he was lounging there in that plight at that hour in
the morning. He had been keeping gay company, of course, and had
but just emerged from some nocturnal orgie or other. And then she
shrugged her strong shoulders with a light, pitiful air, as though
marvelling once more for the thousandth time over the stupidity of
men who would commit these idiocies, would waste their money and
health in them, say what women would.
Presently he discovered that she was giving him advice of different
kinds, counselling him above all to find a good wife who would work
and save his wages for him. A decent marriage was in truth an
economy, though young men would never believe it.
David could only stare at her in return for her counsels. The
difference between his place at that moment in the human comedy and
hers was too great to be explained; it called only for silence or a
stammering commonplace or two. Yet for a few moments the
neighbourhood of her and her child was pleasant to him. She had a
good comely head, which was bare under the sun, a little shawl
crossed upon her ample bust, and a market-basket on her arm. The
child was playing in the fine gravel at her feet, pausing every now
and then to study her mother's eye with a furtive gravity, while
the hat fell back and made a still more fantastic combination than
before with the pensive little face.
Presently, tired of her play, she came to stand by her mother's
knee, laying her head against it.
'_Mon petit ange! que tu es gentille!_' said the mother in a
low, rapid voice, pressing her hand on the child's cheek. Then,
turning back to David, she chattered on about the profit and loss
of married life. All that she said was steeped in prose--in the
prose especially of sous and francs; she talked of rents, of the
price of food, of the state of wages in her husband's trade. Yet
every here and there came an exquisite word, a flash. It seemed
that she had been very ill with her first child. She did not mince
matters much even with this young man, and David gathered that she
had not only been near dying, but that her illness had made a moral
epoch in her life. She was laid by for three months; work was slack
for her husband; her own earnings, for she was a skilled
embroideress working for a great linen-shop in the Rue Vivienne,
were no longer forthcoming. Would her husband put up with it, with
the worries of the baby, and the _menage_, and the sick wife,
and that sharp pinch of want into the bargain, from which during
two years she had completely protected him?
'I cried one day,' she said simply; 'I said to him, "You're just
sick of it, ain't you? Well, I'm going to die. Go and shift for
yourself, and take the baby to the _Enfants Trouves. Alors--_"'
She paused, her homely face gently lit up from within. 'He is not a
man of words--Jules. He told me to be quiet, called me _petite
sotte_. "Haven't you slaved for two years?" he said. "Well,
then, lie still, can't you?--_faut bien que chacun prenne son
tour!_"'
She broke off, smiling and shaking her head. Then glancing round
upon her companion again, she resumed her motherly sermon. That was
the good of being married; that there was some one to share the bad
times with, as well as the good.
'But perhaps,' she inquired briskly, 'you don't believe in being
married? You are for _l'union libre?_'
She spoke like one touching on a long familiar question--as much a
question indeed of daily life and of her class as those other
matters of wages and food she had been discussing.
A slow and painful red mounted into the Englishman's cheek.
'I don't know,' he said stupidly. 'And you?'
'No, no!' she said emphatically, twice, nodding her head. 'Oh, I was
brought up that way. My father was a Red--an Anarchist--a great man
among them; he died last year. He said that liberty was everything.
It made him mad when any of his friends accepted _l'union
légale_--for him it was a treason. He never married my mother,
though he was faithful to her all his life. But for me--' she
paused, shaking her head slowly. 'Well, I had an elder sister--that
says everything. _Faut pas en parler;_ it makes melancholy,
and one must keep up one's spirits when one is like this. It is
three years since she died; she was my father's favourite. When
they buried her--she died in the hospital--I sat down and thought a
little. It was abominable what she had suffered, and I said to
myself, "Why?"'
The child swayed backward against her knee, so absorbed was it in
its thumb and the sky, and would have fallen but that she caught it
with her housewife's hand, being throughout mindful of its
slightest movement.
'"Why?" I said. She was a good creature--a bit foolish perhaps,
but she would have worked the shoes off her feet to please anybody.
And they had treated her--but like a dog! It bursts one's heart to
think of it, and I said to myself,--_le mariage c'est la
justice!_ it is nothing but that. It is not what the priests
say--oh! not at all. But it strikes me like that--_c'est la
justice_; it is nothing but that!'
And she looked at him with the bright fixed eyes of one whose
thoughts are beyond their own expressing. He interrupted her,
wondering at the harsh rapidity of his own voice. 'But if it is the
woman who will be free?--who will have no bond?'
Her expression changed, became shrewd, inquisitive, personal.
'Well, then!' she said with a shrug, and paused. 'It is because one
is ignorant, you see, or one is bad--_on peut toujours être une
coquine!_ And one forgets--one thinks one can be always young,
and love is all pleasure--and it is not true! one get old--and
there is the child--and one may die of it.'
She spoke with the utmost simplicity, yet with a certain intensity.
Evidently she had a natural pride in her philosophy of life, as
though in a possession of one's own earning and elaborating. She
had probably expressed it often before in much the same terms, and
with the same verbal hitches and gaps.
The young fellow beside her rose hastily, and bade her good morning.
She looked mildly surprised at such an abrupt departure, but she
was not offended.
'Good day, citizen,' she said, nodding to him. 'I disturb you?'
He muttered something and strode away.
How much time had that wasted of his irrevocable day that was to
set him on Elise's track once more! The first post had been
delivered by this time. Elise must either return to her studio or
remove her possessions; anyhow, sooner or later the Merichats must
have information. And if they were forbidden to speak, well, then
they must be bribed.
That made him think of money, and in a sudden panic he turned aside
into a small street and examined his pockets. Nearly four napoleons
left, after allowing for his debt to Madame Pyat, which must be
payed that day. Even in his sick, stunned state of the evening
before, when he was at last staggering on again, after his fall, to
the Fontainebleau station, he had remembered to stop a Barbizon man
whom he came across and give him a pencilled message for the
deserted madame. He had sent her the Tue Chantal address, there
would be a letter from her this morning. And he must put her on the
watch, too--Elise could not escape him long.
But he must have more money. He looked out for a stationer's shop,
went in and wrote a letter to John, which he posted at the next
post-office.
It was an incoherent scrawl, telling the lad to change the cheque
he enclosed in Bank of England notes and send them to the Rue
Chantal, care of Madame Merichat. He was not to expect him back
just yet, and was to say to any friend who might inquire that he
was still detained.
That letter, with the momentary contact it involved with his
Manchester life, brought down upon him again the thought of Louie.
But this time he flung it from him with a fierce impatience. His
brain, indeed, was incapable of dealing with it. Remorse? rescue?
there would be time enough for that by-and-by. Meanwhile--to find
Elise!
And for a week he spent the energies of every thought and every
moment on this mad pursuit. Of these days of nightmare he could
afterwards remember but a few detached incidents here and there. He
recollected patrols up and down the Rue Chantal; talks with Madame
Merichat; the gleam in her eyes as he slipped his profitless bribes
into her hand; visits to Taranne's _atelier_, where the
_concierge_ at last grew suspicious and reported the matter
within; and finally an interview with the artist himself, from
which the English youth emerged no nearer to his end than before,
and crushed under the humiliation of the great man's advice. He
could vaguely recall the long pacings of the Louvre; the fixed
scrutiny of face after face; vain chases; ignominious retreats; and
all the wretched stages of that slow descent into a bottomless
despair! At last there was a letter--the long-expected letter to
Madame Merichat, directing the removal of Mademoiselle Delaunay's
possessions from the Rue Chantal. It was written by a certain M.
Pimodan, who did not give his address, but who declared himself
authorised by Mademoiselle Delaunay to remove her effects, and
named a day when he would himself superintend the process and
produce his credentials. David passed the time after the arrival of
this letter in a state of excitement which left him hardly master
of his actions. He had a room at the top of a wretched little hotel
close to the Nord station, but he hardly ate or slept. The noises
of Paris were agony to him night and day; he lived in a perpetual
nausea of mind and body, hardly able at times to distinguish
between the images of the brain and the impressions coming from
without.
Before the day came, a note was brought to him from the Rue
Chantal. It was from M. Pimodan, and requested an interview.
'I should be glad to see you on Mademoiselle Delaunay's behalf.
Will you meet me in the Garden of the Luxembourg in front of the
central pavilion, at three o'clock to-morrow?
'GUSTAVE PIMODAN.'
Before the hour came David was already pacing up and down the
blazing gravel in front of the Palace. When M. Pimodan came the
Englishman in an instant recognised the cousin--the lanky fellow
with the spectacles, who had injured his eyes by reading.
As soon as he had established this identification--and the two men
had hardly exchanged half-a-dozen sentences before the flashing
inward argument was complete--a feeling of enmity arose in his
mind, so intense that he could hardly keep himself still, could
hardly bring his attention to bear on what he or his companion was
saying. He had been brought so low that, with anyone else, he must
have broken into appeals and entreaties. With this man--No!
As for M. Pimodan, the first sight of the young Englishman had
apparently wrought in him also some degree of nervous shock; for
the hand which held his cane fidgeted as he walked. He had the air
of a person, too, who had lately gone through mental struggle; the
red rims of the eyes under their large spectacles might be due
either to chronic weakness or to recent sleeplessness.
But however these things might be, he took a perfectly mild tone,
in which David's sick and irritable sense instantly detected the
note of various offensive superiorities--the superiority of class
and the superiority of age to begin with. He said in the first
place that he was Mademoiselle Delaunay's relative, and that she
had commissioned him to act for her in this very delicate matter.
She was well aware--had been aware from the first day--that she was
watched, and that M. Grieve was moving heaven and earth to discover
her whereabouts. She did not, however, intend to be discovered; let
him take that for granted. In her view all was over--their relation
was irrevocably at an end. She wished now to devote herself wholly
and entirely to her art, without disturbance or distraction from
any other quarter whatever. Might he, under these circumstances,
give M. Grieve the advice of a man of the world, and counsel him to
regard the matter in the same light?
David walked blindly on, playing with his watch-chain. In the name
of God whom and what was this fellow talking about? At the end of
ten minutes' discourse on M. Pimodan's part, and of a few rare
monosyllables on his own, he said, straightening his young figure
with a nervous tremor:
'What you say is perfectly useless--I shall find her.'
Then a sudden angry light leapt into the cousin's eyes.
'You will _not_ find her!' he said, drawing a sharp breath. 'It
shows how little you know her, after all--compared with--those
who--No matter! Oh, you can persecute and annoy her! No one doubts
that. You can stand between her and all that she now cares to live
for--her art. But you can do nothing else; and you will not be
allowed to do that long, for she is not alone, as you seem to
think. She will be protected. There are resources, and we shall
employ them!'
The cousin had gone beyond his commission. David guessed as much.
He did not believe that Elise had set this man on to threaten him.
What a fool! But he merely said with a sarcastic dryness,
endeavouring the while to steady his parched lips and his eyelids
swollen with weariness.
'_A la bonne heure!_--employ them. Well, sir, you know, I
believe, where Mademoiselle Delaunay is. I wish to know. You will
not inform me. I therefore pursue my own way, and it is useless for
me to detain you any longer.'
'Know where she is!' cried the other, a triumphant flash passing
across his sallow student's face; 'I have but just parted from her.'
But he stopped. As a physician, he was accustomed to notice the
changes of physiognomy. Instinctively he put some feet of distance
between himself and his companion. Was it agony or rage he saw?
But David recovered himself by a strong effort.
'Go and tell her, then, that I shall find her,' he said with a
shaking voice. 'I have many things to say to her yet.'
'Absurd!' cried the other angrily. 'Very well, sir, we know what to
expect. It only remains for us to take measures accordingly.'
And drawing himself up he walked quickly away, looking back every
now and then to see whether he were followed or no.
'Supposing I did track him,' thought David vaguely, 'what would he
do? Summon one of the various _gardiens_ in sight?'
He had, however, no such intention. What could it have ended in but
a street scuffle? Patience! and he would find Elise for himself in
spite of that prater.
Meanwhile he descended the terrace, and threw himself, worn out,
upon the first seat, to collect his thoughts again.
Oh, this summer beauty:--this festal moment of the great city!
Palace and Garden lay under the full June sun. The clipped trees on
the terraces, statues, alleys, and groves slept in the luminous
dancing air. All the normal stir and movement of the Garden seemed
to have passed to-day into the leaping and intermingling curves of
the fountains; the few figures passing and repassing hardly
disturbed the general impression of heat and solitude.
For hours David sat there, head down, his eyes on the gravel, his
hands tightly clasped between his knees. When he rose at last it
was to hurry down the Rue de Seine and take the nearest bridge and
street northwards to the Quartier Montmartre. He had been dreaming
too long! and yet so great by now was his confusion of mind that he
was no nearer a fresh plan of operations than when the cousin left
him.
When he arrived at Madame Merichat's _loge_ it was to find
that no new development had occurred. Elise's possessions were
still untouched; neither she nor M. Pimodan had given any further
sign. The _concierge_, however, gave him a letter which had
just arrived for him. Seeing that it bore the Manchester postmark,
he thrust it into his pocket unread.
When he entered the evil-smelling passage of his hotel, a
_garcon_ emerged from the restaurant, dived into the _salle
de lecture_, and came out with an envelope, which he gave to the
Englishman. It had been left by a messenger five minutes before
monsieur arrived. David took it, a singing in his ears; mounted to
the first landing, where the gas burnt at midday, and read it.
'Gustave tells me you would not listen to him. Do you want to make me
curse our meeting? Be a man and leave me to myself! While I know that
you are on the watch I shall keep away from Paris--_voilà, tout_. I
shall eat my heart out,--I shall begin to hate you,--you will have
chosen it so. Only understand this: I will _never_ see you again, for
both our sakes, if I can help it. Believe what I say--believe that what
parts us is a fate stronger than either of us, and go! Oh! you men talk
of love--and at bottom you are all selfish and cruel. Do you want to
break me more than I am already broken? Set me free!--will you kill both
my youth and my art together?'
He carefully refolded the letter and put it into its envelope. Then
he turned and went downstairs again towards the street. But the
same frowsy waiter who had given him his letter was on the watch
for him. In the morning monsieur had commanded some dinner. Would
he take it now?
The man's tone was sulky. David understood that he was not
considered a profitable customer of the hotel--that, considering
his queer ways, late hours, and small spendings, they would
probably be glad to be rid of him. With a curious submission and
shrinking he followed the man into the stifling restaurant and sat
down at one of the tables.
Here some food was brought to him, which he tried to eat. But in
the midst of it he was seized with so great a loathing, that he
suddenly rose, so violently as to upset a plate of bread beside
him, and make a waiter spring forward to save the table itself. He
pushed his way to the glass-door into the street, totally
unconscious of the stir his behaviour was causing among the stout
women in bonnets and the red-faced men with napkins tucked under
their chins who were dining near, fumbled at the handle, and
tottered out.
'_Quel animal!_' said the enraged _dame du comptoir_,
who had noticed the incident. 'Marie!'--this to the sickly girl who
sat near with the books in front of her, 'enter that plate, and
charge it high. To-morrow I shall raise the price of his room. One
must really finish with him. _C'est un fou!_'
Meanwhile David, revived somewhat by the air, was already in the
Boulevard, making for Opera and the Rue Royale. It was not yet
seven, the Salon would be still open. The distances seemed to
him interminable--the length of the Rue Royale, the expanse
of the Place de la Concorde, the gay and crowded ways of the
Champs-Elysée. But at last he was mounting the stairs and battling
through the rooms at the top. He looked first at the larger picture
which had gained her _mention honorable_. It was a study of
factory girls at their work, unequal, impatient, but full of a warm
inventive talent--full of _her_. He knew its history--the
small difficulties and triumphs of it, the adventures she had gone
through on behalf of it--by heart. That fair-haired girl in the
corner was studied from herself; the tint of the hair, the curve of
the cheek were exact. He strained his eyes to look, searching for
this detail and that. His heart said farewell--that was the last,
the nearest he should ever come to her on this earth! Next year?
Ah, he would give much to see her pictures of next year, with these
new perceptions she had created in him.
He stood a minute before the other picture, the portrait--a study
from one of her comrades in the _atelier_--and then he wound
his way again through the thronged and suffocating rooms, and out
into the evening.
The excessive heat of the last few days was about to end in storm.
A wide tempestuous heaven lay beyond the Arc de Triomphe; the red
light struck down the great avenue and into the faces of those
stepping westwards. The deep shade under the full-leafed trees--how
thinly green they were still against the sky that day when she
vanished from him beside the arch and their love began!--was full
of loungers and of playing children; the carriages passed and
repassed in the light. So it had been, the enchanting never-ending
drama, before this spectator entered--so it would be when he had
departed.
He turned southwards and found himself presently on the Quai de la
Conference, hanging over the river in a quiet spot where few people
passed.
His frenzy of will was gone, and his last hope with it. Elise had
conquered. Her letter had brought him face to face with those
realities which, during this week of madness, he had simply refused
to see. He could pit himself against her no longer. When it came to
the point he had not the nerve to enter upon a degrading and
ignoble conflict, in which all that was to be won was her hatred or
her fear. That, indeed, would be the last and worst ruin, for it
would be the ruin, not of happiness or of hope, but of love itself,
and memory.
He took out her letter and re-read it. Then he searched for some of
the writing materials he had bought when he had written his last
letter to Manchester, and, spreading a sheet on the parapet of the
river wall, he wrote:
'Be content. I think now--I am sure--that we shall never meet
again. From this moment you will be troubled with me no more. Only
I tell you for the last time that you have done ill--irrevocably
ill. For what you have slain in yourself and me is not love or
happiness, but _life_ itself--the life of life!'
Foolish, incoherent words, as they seemed to him, but he could find
no better. Confusedly and darkly they expressed the cry, the inmost
conviction of his being. He could come no nearer at any rate to
that desolation at the heart of him.
But now what next? Manchester?--the resumption and expansion of his
bookseller's life--the renewal of his old friendships--the pursuit
of money and of knowledge?
No. That is all done. The paralysis of will is complete. He cannot
drive himself home, back to the old paths. The disgust with life
has sunk too deep--the physical and moral collapse of which he is
conscious has gone too far.
_'Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of
this death?'_
There, deep in the fibre of memory lie these words, and others like
them--the typical words of a religion which is still in some sense
the ineradicable warp of his nature, as it had been for generations
of his forefathers. His individual resources of speech, as it were,
have been overpassed; he falls back upon the inherited, the
traditional resources of his race.
He looked up. A last gleam was on the Invalides--on the topmost
roof of the Corps Législatif; otherwise the opposite bank was
already grey, the river lay in shade. But the upper air was still
aglow with the wide flame and splendour of the sunset; and beneath,
on the bridges and the water and the buildings, how clear and
gracious was the twilight!
_'Who shall deliver me?' 'Deliver thyself!'_ One instant, and
the intolerable pressure on this shrinking point of consciousness
can be lightened, this hunger for sleep appeased! Nothing else is
possible--no future is even conceivable. His life in flowering has
exhausted and undone itself, so spendthrift has been the process.
So he took his resolve. Then, already calmed, he hung over the
river, thinking, reviewing the past.
Six weeks--six weeks only!--yet nothing in his life before matters
or counts by comparison. For this mood of deadly fatigue the
remembrance of all the intellectual joys and conquests of the last
few years has no savour whatever. Strange that the development of
one relation of life--the relation of passion--should have been
able so to absorb and squander the power of living! His fighting,
enduring capacity, compared with that of other men, must be small
indeed. He thinks of himself as a coward and a weakling. But
neither the facts of the present nor the face of the future are
altered thereby.
_The relation of sex_--in its different phases--as he sees the
world at this moment, there is no other reality. The vile and
hideous phase of it has been present to him from the first moment
of his arrival in these Paris streets. He thinks of the pictures
and songs at the 'Trois Rats' from which in the first delicacy and
flush of passion he had shrunk with so deep a loathing; of the
photographs and engravings in the shops and the books on the
stalls; of some of those pictures he had passed, a few minutes
before, in the Salon; of that girl's face in the Tuileries Gardens.
The animal, the beast in human nature, never has it been so present
to him before; for he has understood and realised it while loathing
it, has been admitted by his own passion to those regions of human
feeling where all that is most foul and all that is most beautiful
are generated alike from the elemental forces of life. And because
he had loved Elise so finely and yet so humanly, with a boy's
freshness and a man's energy, this animalism of the great city had
been to him a perpetual nightmare and horror. His whole heart had
gone into Regnault's cry--into Regnault's protest. For his own
enchanted island had seemed to him often in the days of his wooing
to be but floating on the surface of a ghastly sea, whence emerged
all conceivable shapes of ruin, mockery, terror, and disease. It
was because of the tremulous adoration which filled him from the
beginning that the vice of Paris had struck him in this tragical
way. At another time it might have been indifferent to him, might
even have engulfed him.
But he!--he had known the best of passion! He laid his head down on
the wall, and lived Barbizon over again--day after day, night after
night. Now for the first time there is a pause in the urging
madness of his despair. All the pulses of his being slacken; he
draws back as it were from his own fate, surveys it as a whole,
separates himself from it. The various scenes of it succeed each
other in memory, set always--incomparably set--in the spring green
of the forest, or under a charmed moonlight, or amid the flowery
detail of a closed garden. Her little figure flashes before
him--he sees her gesture, her smile; he hears his own voice
and hers; recalls the struggle to express, the poverty of words,
the thrill of silence, and that perpetual and exquisite recurrence
to the interpreting images of poetry and art. But no poet had
imagined better, had divined more than they in those earliest
hours had _lived_! So he had told her, so he insisted now with
a desperate faith.
But, poor soul! even as he insists, the agony within rises, breaks
up, overwhelms the picture. He lives again through the jars and
frets of those few burning days, the growing mistrust of them, the
sense of jealous terror and insecurity--and then through the
anguish of desertion and loss. He writhes again under the wrenching
apart of their half-fused lives--under this intolerable ache of his
own wound.
_This_ the best of passion! Why his whole soul is still
athirst and ahungered. Not a single craving of it has been
satisfied. What is killing him is the sense of a thwarted gift, a
baffled faculty--the faculty of self-spending, self-surrender.
This, the best?
Then the mind fell into a whirlwind of half-articulate debate, from
the darkness of which emerged two scenes--fragments--set clear in a
passing light of memory.
That workman and his wife standing together before the day's
toil--the woman's contented smile as her look clung to the mean
departing figure.
And far, far back in his boyish life--Margaret sitting beside 'Lias
in the damp autumn dawn, spending on his dying weakness that
exquisite, ineffable passion of tenderness, of pity.
Ah! from the very beginning he had been in love with loving. He
drew the labouring breath of one who has staked his all for some
long-coveted gain, and lost.
Well!--Mr. Ancrum may be right--the English Puritan may be
right--'sin' and 'law' may have after all some of those mysterious
meanings his young analysis had impetuously denied them--he and
Elise may have been only dashing themselves against the hard facts
of the world's order, while they seemed to be transcending the
common lot and spurning the common ways. What matter now! A certain
impatient defiance rises in his stricken soul. He has made
shipwreck of this one poor opportunity of life--confessed! now let
the God behind it punish, if God there be. _'The rest is silence.
'_ With Elise in his arms, he had grasped at immortality. Now a
stubborn, everlasting 'Nay' possesses him. There is nothing beyond.
He gathered up his letter, folded it, and put it into the
breast--pocket of his coat. But in doing so his fingers touched
once more the ragged edges of a bit of frayed paper.
_Louie!_
Through all these half-sane days and nights he had never once
thought of his sister. She had passed out of his life--she had
played no part even in the nightmares of his dreams.
But now!--while that intense denial of any reality in the universe
beyond and behind this masque of life and things was still
vibrating through his deepest being, it was as though a hand gently
drew aside a curtain, and there grew clear before him, slowly
effacing from his eyes the whole grandiose spectacle of buildings,
sky, and river, that scene of the past which had worked so potently
both in his childish sense and in Reuben's maturer conscience--the
bare room, the iron bed, the dying man, one child within his arm,
the other a frightened baby beside him.
It was frightfully clear, clearer than it had ever been in
any normal state of brain, and as his mind lingered on it,
unconsciously shaping, deepening its own creation, the weird
impression grew that the helpless figure amid the bedclothes rose
on its elbow, opened its cavernous eyes, and looked at him face to
face, at the son whose childish heart had beat against his father's
to the last. The boy's tortured soul quailed afresh before the
curse his own remorse called into those eyes.
He hung over the water pleading with the phantom--defending
himself. Every now and then he found that he was speaking aloud;
then he would look round with a quick, piteous terror to see
whether he had been heard or no, the parched lips beginning to move
again almost before his fear was soothed.
All his past returned upon him, with its obligations, its fetters
of conscience and kinship, so slowly forged, so often resisted and
forgotten, and yet so strong. The moment marked the first passing
away of the philtre, but it brought no recovery with it.
_'My God! my God! I tried, father--I tried. But she is lost,
lost--as I am!'_
Then a thought found entrance and developed. He walked up and down
the quay, wrestling it out, returning slowly and with enormous
difficulty, because of his physical state, to some of the normal
estimates and relations of life.
At last he dragged himself off towards his hotel. He must have some
sleep, or how could these hours that yet remained be lived
through--his scheme carried out?
On the way he went into a shop still open on the boulevard. When he
came out he thrust his purchase into his pocket, buttoned his coat
over it, and pursued his way northwards with a brisker step.