PUGIN
Pugin lived in the Boulevard Haussmann. He had begun life quite low down
in the Parisian world on the quays as apprentice to Manasis, a jew
book-dealer, who has been dead twenty-five years, whose money has been
dispersed, whose name has been forgotten, of whom nothing remains on earth
but the few hours a day of time filched from him by Pugin.
Pugin had a hard and bitter fight for twenty years before he obtained
recognition. The garret and starvation act had been unduly prolonged in
the case of this genius, and it seemed a mystery where and how in the
ruined city which is at the heart of every city, in that _cour des
Miracles_ where the Bohemians camp, he had found, like a crystal vase, his
exquisite style, preserved it unbroken by mischance or shock of fate, and
carried it safely at last to the hands of Fame.
He was very rich now, very powerful, and very fortunate. Charitable, too,
and ever ready to assist a fellow-worker in straitened circumstances, and
to-day as he sat reading in the cool recesses of his library, and
listening to the sound of the Paris he loved floating in with the warm
June air through the open window, he felt at peace with all the world and
in a mood to do justice to his bitterest enemy.
The striped sun-blinds filtered the blaze outside, letting pass only a
diffused and honey-coloured twilight; a great bowl of roses filled the
room with the simple and deep poetry of summer, the story of the hedges
and the fields, of orchards shot through with the voices of birds, of
cattle knee-deep in cool water where the dragon-flies keep up their
eternal dance to the flute-like ripple of the river amidst the reeds.
Pugin, his book upon his knees, was enjoying these pictures of summer
woven by perfume, when a servant entered and handed him Adams's card and
the letter of introduction written by Sabatier.
He ordered the visitor to be shown in. Adams, when he entered, found
himself before a small man with a big head; an ugly little man, with a
look of kindness and a very gracious and charming manner.
To Pugin Adams seemed a giant. A giant bronzed by unknown suns, talking
French indifferently well, and with a foreign accent. An interesting
person, indeed, but a being quite beyond his range of knowledge.
Pugin, in physical matters, was timid as a rabbit. He had never travelled
farther than Trouville or Ostend, and when he indicated a chair, and when
these two sat down to talk to each other, the mastiff-man felt
instinctively the presence of the rabbit-man, and was at a loss how to
begin.
Not for long, though. Bluffly, and with little grace enough, but with
earnestness and a cunning one would never have suspected, he told of
Maxine's great admiration for the author's work, and how she had suggested
the enlistment of the said author in the crusade against crime which he,
Adams, was endeavouring to raise.
Pugin listened, making little bows, sniffing the lettuce which the
mastiff-man had so cunningly placed before his nose.
Then honestly and plainly and well, Adams told his tale, and the rabbit
held up its hands in horror at the black doings disclosed to it. But it
was horror divorced from sentiment. Pugin felt almost as great a revulsion
toward the negroes upon whom these things were done as toward the doers.
He could not see the vast drama in its true proportions and its poetical
setting of forest, plain, and sky. The outlandish names revolted him; he
could not see Yandjali and its heat-stricken palms or M'Bassa burning in
the sun.
But he listened politely and it was this that chilled the heart of the
story-teller who instinctively felt that though he had shocked his hearer,
he had not aroused that high spirit of revolt against injustice which
converts a man into a living trumpet, a living axe, or a living sword.
Pugin would have been a great force could his sentiment have been
awakened; but he could not see palm trees.
"What would you have? You cannot grow baobabs on the Boulevards."
"_Ma foi!_" said he, "it is terrible what you tell me, but what are we to
do?"
"I thought you might help," said Adams.
"I? With all the power possible and goodwill. It is evident to me that
should you wish for success in this matter, you should found a society."
"Yes?"
"There is nothing done in a public way without coöperation. You must found
a society; you may use my name. I will even let you put it on the
committee list. I will also subscribe."
Now Pugin was on the committee lists of half a dozen charitable and
humanitarian concerns. His secretary had them all down in a book; but
Pugin himself, lost in his art and the work of his life, had forgotten
their very names. So would it be with this.
"Thanks," said the visitor.
Pugin would lend his purse to the cause, and his name, but he would not
lend his pen--simply because he could not. To every literary man there are
dead subjects; this question was dead to the author of "Absolution"--as
uninspiring as cold mutton.
"Thanks," said Adams, and rose to take his leave. His rough-hewn mind
understood with marvellous perspicuity Pugin's position.
"And one moment," cried the little man, after he had bidden his visitor
good-bye and the latter was leaving the room. "One moment; why did I not
think of it before? You might go and see Ferminard."
He ran to a desk in the corner of the room, took a visiting card and
scribbled Ferminard's address upon it, explaining as he wrote that
Ferminard was the deputy for ---- in Provence; a Socialist it is true, but
a terrible man when roused; that the very name of injustice was sufficient
to bring this lion from his den.
"Tell him Pugin said so," cried he, following his visitor this time out on
the landing and patting him on the shoulder in a fatherly manner, "and you
will find him in the Rue Auber, No. 14; it is all on the card; and convey
my kind regards to Mademoiselle ----, that charming lady to whose
appreciation of my poor work I owe the pleasure of your visit."
"Nice little man," said Adams to himself as he walked down the Boulevard
Haussmann.
He found Ferminard at home, in an apartment smelling of garlic and the
south. Ferminard, a tall, black-bearded creature, with a glittering eye; a
brigand from the Rhone Valley who had flung himself into the politics of
his country as a torpedo flings itself into the sea, greeted Adams with
effusion, when he read Pugin's card; gave him cigarettes, and shut the
open window in honour of his guest.
He worked himself into a state of indignation over Adams's story; as a
matter of fact he knew the whole thing well; but he was too polite to
discount his visitor's grievance, besides it gave him an opportunity to
declaim--and of course the fact that a king was at the bottom of it all,
added keenness to the arrows of his invective.
As Adams listened, delighted to have awakened such a trumpet; as he
listened to Ferminard thundering against all that over there, speaking as
though he were addressing the Chambre, and as though he had known Africa
intimately from his childhood, he noticed gradually and with alarm that
the topic was changing; just a moment ago it was Africa and its luckless
niggers; the Provençal imagination picturing them in glowing colours, and
the Provençal tongue rolling off their disabilities and woes. One would
have fancied from the fervour of the man that is was Ferminard who had
just returned from the Congo, not Adams.
Well, a moment after, and Africa had quite fallen out of the discussion.
As a child lets a Noah's Ark fall from its hands--elephants, zebras and
all on to the floor whilst he grasps for a new toy--so Ferminard let
Africa tumble whilst he grasped for Socialism, found it and swung it like
a rattle, and Socialism went the way of Africa as he seized at last that
darling toy--himself. The speech, in its relationship to the subject in
point, was the intellectual counterpart of the cry of those mechanical
pigs which the street venders blow up, and which, standing on a board,
scream in the face of Oxford Street, loudly at first, and then, as the
figure collapses, weakening in voice to the buzzing of a fly.
Ferminard was, in fact, a great child with a good heart, a Provençal
imagination, a power of oratory, a quickness in seizing upon little things
and making them seem great, coupled with a rather obscure understanding as
to the relative value of mountains and mole-hills. A noise maker of a
first-class description, but useless for any serious work. _Feu de bruit_
was his motto, and he lived up to it.
It is only when you try to enlist men on your side in some great and holy
cause, that you come to some knowledge of the general man's weakness and
want of holiness--your own included. Adams, during the fortnight that
followed his visit to Pugin, had this fact borne in on him. All the
thinking minds of the centre of civilization were so busy thinking
thoughts of their own making, that it was impossible to attract their
attention for more than a moment; from Bostoc the dramatist to Bastiche
the anarchist, each individual was turning his own crank diligently, and
not to be disturbed, even by Papeete's skull.
With such a thing in one's hand, picked up like some horrible talisman
which, if not buried, will eventually cast its spell upon human thought
and the future of the world; with such a thing in one's hand, surely the
Church would present itself to the mind as a court of appeal.
But as the Roman Catholic Church had actually put its broad back against
the door of the torture chamber, and was, in fact, holding it tight shut
whilst Papeete's head was being hacked from his body, it would scarcely be
logical to bring out the victim's skull hoping for redress. Other
denominations being of such little power in France, Adams determined to
leave the attempt to rouse them till he reached England, whither he
determined to go as soon as Berselius's health would permit him.
One evening, a fortnight after his visit to Pugin, on his return to the
Avenue Malakoff, Maxine met him in the hall.
He saw at once from her face that something had happened.
Berselius was worse; that afternoon he had suddenly developed acute
neuralgia of the right side of the head, and this had been followed almost
immediately by twitching and numbness of the left arm. Thénard had been
summoned and he had diagnosed pressure on the brain, or, at least,
irritation from depressed bone, due to the accident.
He declared himself for operation, and he had gone now to make
arrangements for nurses and assistants.
"He will operate this evening," said Maxine.
"And Madame Berselius?"
"I have telegraphed for her."