Ilived up at the top of the house, absolutely alone. After eleven o’clock in the morning, when my servant left, I was my own doorkeeper. Like most solitaries in strange places, whenever I heard a ring I had a feeling that perhaps after all it might be the ring of romance. This time it was the telegraph-boy. I gave him a penny, because in France, much more than in England, every one must live, and the notion still survives that a telegram has sufficient unusualness to demand a tip; the same with a registered letter. I read the telegram, and my evening lay suddenly in fragments at my feet. The customary accident, the accident dreaded by every solitary, had happened. “Sorry, prevented from coming to-night,” etc. It was not yet six o’clock. I had in front of me a wilderness of six hours to traverse. In my warm disgust I went at once out in the streets. My flat had become mysteriously uninhabitable, and my work repugnant. The streets of Paris, by reason of their hospitality, are a refuge.
0045
The last sun of September was setting across the circular Place Blanche. I sat down at the terrace of the smallestcaféand drank tea. Exactly opposite were the crimson wings of the Moulin Rouge, and to the right was the establishment which then held first place among nocturnal restaurants in Montmartre. It had the strange charm of a resort which is never closed, night or day, and where money and time are squandered with infantile fatuity. Somehow it inspired respect, if not awe. Its terrace was seldom empty, and at that hour it was always full. Under the striped and valanced awning sat perhaps a hundred people, all slowly and deliberately administering to themselves poisons of various beautiful colours. A crowd to give pause to the divination of even the most conceited student of human nature, a crowd in which the simplest bourgeois or artist or thief sat next to men and women exercising the oldest and most disreputable professions—and it was impossible surely to distinguish which from which!
0051
Out of the medley of trams, omnibuses, carts, automobiles, and cabs that continually rattled over the cobbles, an openfiacrewould detach itself every minute or so, and set down or take up in front of the terrace. Among these was one carrying two young dandies, an elegantly dressed girl, and another young girl in a servant’s cap and apron. They were all laughing and talking together. The dandies and the elegancy got out and took a vacant table amid the welcoming eager bows of amaître d’hotel, a chasseur,and a waiter. She was freshly and meticulously and triumphantly got up, like an elaborate confection of starched linen fresh from the laundress. Her lips were impeccably rouged. She delighted the eye by her health and her youth and her pretty insolence. A single touch would have soiled her, but she had not yet been touched. Her day had just begun. Probably, her bed was not yet made. The black-robed, scissored girls of the drapery store at the next angle of theplacewere finishing their tenth hour of vigil over goods displayed on the footpath. And next to that was a creamery where black-robed girls could obtain a whole day’s sustenance for the price of one glass of poison. Evidently the young creature had only just arrived at the dignity of a fashionable dressmaker, and a servant of her own. Her ingenuous vanity obliged her to show her servant to theplace, and the ingenuous vanity of the servant was content to be shown off; for the servant might have a servant to-morrow—who could tell? The cabman and the servant began to converse, and presently the cabman in his long fawn coat and white hat descended and entered the vehicle and sat down by the servant, and pulled out an illustrated comic paper, and they bent their heads over it and giggled enormously in unison; he was piling up money at the rate of at least a sou a minute. Occasionally the young mistress threw a loud sisterly remark to the servant, who replied gaily. And the two young dandies bore nobly the difficultrôleof world-worn men who still count not the cost of smiles. Say what you like, it was charming. It was one of the reasons why Paris is the city which is always forgiven. Could one reasonably expect that the bright face of the vapid little siren should be solemnised by the thought: “To-day I am a day nearer forty than I was yesterday”?
The wings of the Moulin Rouge, jewelled now with crimson lamps, began to revolve slowly. The upper chambers of the restaurant showed lights behind their mysteriously-curtained windows. The terrace was suddenly bathed in the calm blue of electricity. No austere realism of the philosopher could argue away the romance of the scene.
I turned down the steep Rue Blanche, and at the foot of it passed by the shadow of the Trinité, the great church of illicit assignations, at whose clock scores of frightened and expectant hearts gaze anxiously every afternoon; and through the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, where corsets are masterpieces beyond price and flowers may be sold for a sovereign apiece, and then into the full fever of the grand boulevard with its maddening restlessness of illuminated signs. The shops andcaféswere all on fire, making two embankments of fire, above which rose high and mysteriousfaçadesmasked by trees that looked like the impossible verdure of an opera. And between the summits of the trees a ribbon of rich, dark, soothing purple—the sky! This was the city. This was what the race had accomplished, after eighteen Louises and nearly as many revolutions, and when all was said that could be said it remained a prodigious and a comforting spectacle. Every doorway shone with invitation; every satisfaction and delight was offered, on terms ridiculously reasonable. And binding everything together were the refined, neighbourly, and graceful cynical gestures of the race; so different from the harsh and awkward timidity, the self-centred egotism and artistocratic hypocrisy of Piccadilly. It seemed difficult to be lonely amid multitudes that so candidly accepted human nature as human nature is. It seemed a splendid and an uplifting thing to be there. I continued southwards, down the narrow, swarming Rue Richelieu, past the immeasurable National Library on the left and Jean Goujon’s sculptures of the rivers of France on the right, and past the Theatre Français, where nice plain people were waiting to seeL’Aventurière, and across the arcaded Rue de Rivoli. And then I was in the dark desert of the Place du Carrousel, where the omnibuses are diminished to toy-omnibuses. The town was shut off by the vast arms of the Louvre. The purple had faded out the sky. The wind, heralding October, blew coldly across the spaces. The artfully arranged vista of the Champs Elysées, rising in flame against the silhouette of Cleopatra’s needle, struck me as a meretricious device, designed to impress tourists and monarchs. Everything was meretricious. I could not even strike a match without being reminded that a contented and corrupt inefficiency was corroding this race like a disease. I could not light my cigarette because somebody, somewhere, had not done his job like an honest man. And thus it was throughout.
I wanted to dine, and there were a thousand restaurants within a mile; but they had all ceased to invite me. I was beaten down by the overwhelming sadness of one who for the time being has no definite arranged claim to any friendly attention in a huge city—crowded with pre-occupied human beings. I might have been George Gissing. I re-wrote all his novels for him in an instant. I persisted southwards. The tiny walled river, reflecting with industrious precision all its lights, had no attraction. The quays, where all the book shops were closed and all the bookstalls locked down, and where there was never acafé, were as inhospitable and chill as Riga. Mist seemed to heave over the river, and the pavements were oozing damp.
I went up an entry and rang a bell, thinking to myself: “If he isn’t in, I am done for!” But at the same moment I caught the sound of a violoncello, and I knew I was saved, and by a miracle Paris was herself again.
“Not engaged for dinner, are you?” I asked, as soon as I was in the studio.
“No. I was just thinking of going out.”
“Well, let’s go, then.”
“I was scraping some bits of Gluck.”
The studio was fairly large, but it was bare, unkempt, dirty, and comfortless. Except an old sofa, two hard imperfect chairs, and an untrustworthy table, it had no furniture. Of course, it was littered with the apparatus of painting. Its sole ornamentation was pictures, and the pictures were very fine, for they were the painter’s own. He and his pictures are well known among the painters of Europe and America. Successful artistically, and with an adequate private income, he was a full member of the Champ de Mars Salon, and he sold his pictures upon occasion to Governments. Although a British subject, he had spent nearly all his life in Paris; he knew the streets and resorts of Paris like a Frenchman; he spoke French like a Frenchman. I never heard of him going to England. I never heard him express a desire to go to England. His age was perhaps fifty, and I dare say that he had lived in that studio for a quarter of a century, with his violoncello. It was plain, as he stood there, well dressed, and with a vivacious and yet dreamy eye, that the zest of life had not waned in him. He was a man who, now as much as ever, took his pleasure in seeing and painting beautiful, suave, harmonious things. And yet he stood there unapologetic amid that ugly and narrow discomfort, with the sheet of music pinned carelessly to an easel, and lighted by a small ill-regulated lamp with a truncated, dirty chimney—sole illumination of the chamber! His vivacious and dreamy eye simply did not see all that, never had seen it, never saw anything that it did not care to see. Nobody ever heard him multiply words about a bad picture, for example,—he would ignore it.
With a gesture of habit that must have taken years to acquire he took a common rose-coloured packet of caporal cigarettes from the table by the lamp and offered it to me, pushing one of the cigarettes out beyond its fellows from behind; you knew that he was always handling cigarettes.
“It’s not really arranged for ’cello,” he murmured, gazing at the music, which was an air fromAlceste, arranged for violin. “You see it’s in the treble clef.”
“I wish you’d play it,” I said.
He sat down and played it, because he was interested in it. With his greying hair and his fashionable grey suit, and his oldest friend, the brown ’cello, gleaming between his knees, he was the centre of a small region of light in the gloomy studio, and the sound of the ’cello filled the studio. He had no home; but if he had had a home this would have been his home, and this his home-life. As a private individual, as distinguished from a public artist, this was what he had arrived at. He had secured this refuge, and invented this relaxation, in the middle of Paris. By their aid he could defy Paris. There was something wistful about the scene, but it was also impressive, at any rate to me, who am otherwise constituted. He was an exile in the city of exiles; a characteristic item in it, though of a variety exceedingly rare. But he would have been equally an exile in any other city. He had no consciousness of being an exile, of being homeless. He was above patriotisms and homes. Why, when he wanted even a book he only borrowed it!
“Well, shall we go out and eat?” I suggested, after listening to several lovely airs.
“Yes,” he said, “I was just going. I don’t think you’ve seen my last etching. Care to?”
I did care to see it, but I also desired my dinner.
“This is a pretty good print, but I shall get better,” he said, holding the sheet of paper under the lamp.
“How many shall you print?” I asked.
“Thirty.”
“You might put me down for one.”
“All right. I think it will give you pleasure,” he said with impartial and dignified conviction.
After another ten minutes, we were put on the quay.
“Grand autumn night?” he said appreciatively. “Where shall we have theapéritif?
“Apéritif!It’s after eight o’clock, man!”
“I think we shall have time for anapéritif” he insisted, mildly shocked.
Drawing-rooms have their ritual. His life, too, had its ritual.
At nearly midnight we were sitting, three of us, in acaféof the Montparnasse quarter, possibly the principalcaféof the Montparnasse quarter. Neither notorious nor secretly eccentric; but an honestcafé, in the sense of “honest” applied to certain women. Being situated close to a large railway terminus, it had a broad and an indulgent attitude towards life. It would have received a frivoloushabituéof the Place Blanche, or a nun, or a clergyman, with the same placidity. And although the district was modified, and whole streets, indeed, de-Parisianised by wandering cohorts of American and English art-amateurs of both sexes, thiscaféremained, while accepting them, characteristically French. The cohorts thought they were seeing French life when they entered it; and they in fact were.
Thiscaféwas the chief club of the district, with a multitudinous and regularclientèleof billiard-players, card-players, draught-players, newspapers readers, chatterers, and simple imbibers of bock. Its doors were continually a-swing, and one or the other of the two high-enthroned caissières was continually lifting her watchful head from the desk to observe who entered. Its interior seemed to penetrate indefinitely into the hinterland of the street, and the effect of unendingness was intensified by means of mirrors, which reflected the shirt-sleeved arms and the cues of a score of billiard-players. Everywhere the same lively and expressive and never ungraceful gestures, between the marble table-tops below and the light-studded ceiling above! Everywhere the same murmur of confusing pleasant voices broken by the loud chant of waiters intoning orders at the service-bar, and by the setting down of heavy glass mugs and saucers upon marble! Over thecafé, unperceived, unthought of, were the six storeys of a large house comprising perhaps twenty-five separate and complete homes.
0060
The third man at our table was another exile, also a painter, but a Scotchman. He had lived in Paris since everlasting, but before that rumour said that he had lived for several years immovable at the little inn of a Norman village. Now, he never left Paris, even in summer. He exhibited, with marked discretion, only at the Indépendants. Beyond these facts, and the obvious fact that he enjoyed independent means, nobody knew anything about him save his opinions. Even his age was exceedingly uncertain. He looked forty, but there were acquaintances who said that he had looked forty for twenty years. He was one of those extremely reserved men who talk freely. Of his hopes, ambitions, ideals, disappointments, connections, he never said a word, but he did not refuse his opinion upon any subject, and on every subject he had a definite opinion which he would express very clearly, with a sort of polite curtness. His tendency was to cynicism—too cynical to be bitter. He did not complain of human nature, but he thoroughly believed the worst of it. These two men, the ’cellist and the Scotchman, were fast friends; or rather—as it might be argued in the strict sense neither of them had a friend—they were very familiar acquaintances, each with a profound respect for the other’s judgment and artistic probity. Further, the Scotchman admired his companion for a genius, as everybody did.
They talked together for ever and ever, but not about politics. They were impatient on politics. Both were apparently convinced that politics are an artificiality imposed upon society by adventurers and interferes, and that if such people could be exterminated politics would disappear. Certainly neither had any interest in the organic aspect of society. Their political desire was to be let alone. Nor did they often or for long “talk bawdy”; after opinions had been given which no sensible man ever confides to more than two reliable others at a time, the Scotchman would sweep all that away as secondary. Nor did they talk of the events of the day, unless it might be some titillating crime or mystery such as will fill whole pages of the newspaper for a week together. They talked of the arts, all the arts. And although they seemed to be always either in thatcafé, or in their studios, or in bed, they had the air of being mysteriously but genuinely abreast of every manifestation of art. And since all the arts are one, and in respect to art they had a real attitude and real views, all that they said was valuable suggestively, and their ideas could not by any prodigality be exhausted. As a patron of the arts even the State interested them, and herein they showed glimmerings of a social sense. In the intervals of this eternal and absorbing “art,” they would discuss with admirable restrained gusto the exacerbating ridiculousness of the cohorts of American and English art-amateurs who infested and infected the quarter.
Little bands of these came into thecaféfrom time to time, and drifting along the aisles of chairs would sit down where they could see as much as possible with their candid eyes. The girls, inelegant and blousy; the men, inept in their narrow shrewdness: both equally naïve, conceited, uncorrupted, and incorruptible, they were absolutely incapable of appreciating the refined and corrupt decadence, the stylistic charm, the exquisite tradition of the civilisation at which they foolishly stared, as at a peep-show. Not a thousand years would teach them the human hourly art of life as it was subtly practised by the people whose very language they disdained to learn. When loud fragments of French phrases, massacred by Americans who had floated on but not mingled with Paris for years, reached us from an Anglo-Saxon table, my friends would seem to shudder secretly, ashamed of being Anglo-Saxon. And if they were obliged to salute some uncouth Anglo-Saxon acquaintance, and thus admit their own unlatin origin, their eyes would say: “Why cannot these people be imprisoned at home? Why are not we alone of Anglo-Saxons permitted to inhabit Paris?”
Occasionally a bore would complacently present himself for sufferance. Among these the chief was certainly the man whose existence was an endless shuttle-work between the various cities where art is or has been practised, from Munich to Naples. He knew everything about painting, but he ought to have been a bookmaker. He was notorious everywhere as the friend of Strutt, Strutt being the very famous and wealthy English portrait-painter of girls. All his remarks wereàproposof Tommy Strutt, Tommy Strutt—Tommy. He was invariably full of Tommy. And this evening he was full of Tommy’s new German model, whose portrait had been in that year’s Salon.. . . How Tommy had picked her up in the streets of Berlin; how she was nineteen, and the rage of Berlin, and was asked to lunch at the embassies, and had received five proposals in three months: how she refused to sit for any one but Tommy, and even for him would only sit two hours a day: how Tommy looked after her, and sent her to bed at nine-thirty of a night, and hired a woman to play with her; and how Tommy had once telegraphed to her that he was coming to Berlin, and how she had hired a studio and got it painted and furnished exactly to his fastidious taste all on her own, and met him at the station and driven him to the studio, and tea was all ready, etc.; and how pretty she was.. . .
“What’s her figure like?” the Scotchman inquired gruffly.
“The fact is,” said Tommy’s friend, dashed, “I haven’t seen her posing for the nude. I’ve seen her posing to Tommy in a bathing-costume on the seashore, but I haven’t yet seen her posing for the nude...” He became reflective. “My boy, do you know what my old uncle used to say to me down at the old place in Kildare, when I was a youngster? My old uncle used to say to me—and he was dying—‘My boy, I’ve always made a rule of making love to every pretty woman I met. It’s a sound rule. But let me warn you—you mustn’t expect to get more than five per cent, on your outlay!’”
“‘The old place in Kildare!’” murmured the Scotchman, in a peculiarly significant tone, after Tommy Strutt’s friend had gone; and this was the only comment on Tommy Strutt’s friend.
The talk on art was resumed, the renowned Tommy Strutt being reduced to his proper level of the third-rate and abruptly dismissed. One o’clock! A quarter past one! Thecaféwas now nearly empty. But these men had no regard for time. Time did not exist for them, any more than the structure of society. They were not bored, nor tired. They conversed with ease, and with mild pleasure in their own irony and in the disillusioned surety of their judgments. Then I noticed that the waiters had dwindled to two, and that only one cashier was left enthroned behind the bar; somewhat later, she too had actually gone! Both had at length rejoined their families, if any. The idea was startling that these prim and neat and mechanically smiling women were human, had private relations, a private life, a bed, a wardrobe. All over Paris, all day, every day, they sit and estimate the contents of trays, which waiters present to their practised gaze for an instant only, and receive the value of the drinks in bone discs, and write down columns of figures in long ledgers. They never take exercise, nor see the sun; they even eat in thecafé. Mystic careers!... A quarter to two. Now the chairs had been brought in from the terrace, and there was only one waiter, and no other customer that I could see. The waiter, his face nearly as pale as his apron, eyed us with patient and bland resignation, sure from his deep knowledge of human habits that sooner or later we should in fact depart, and well inured to the great Parisian principle that acaféexists for the convenience of itshabitués. I was uneasy: I was even aware of guiltiness; but not my friends.
Then a face looked in at the doorway, as if reconnoitring, and hesitated.
“By Jove!” said the violoncellist. “There’s the Mahatma back again! Oh! He’s seen us!”
The peering face preceded a sloping body into thecafé, and I was introduced to a man whose excellent poems I had read in a limited edition. He was wearing a heavily jewelled red waistcoat, and the largest ring I ever saw on a human hand. He sat down. The waiter took his order and intoned it in front of the service-bar, proving that another fellow-creature was hidden there awaiting our pleasure. When the Mahatma’s glass was brought, the Scotchman suddenly demanded from the waiter the total of our modest consumption, and paid it. The Mahatma said that he had arrived that evening direct from the Himalayas, and that he had been made or ordained a “khan” in the East. Without any preface he began to talk supernaturally. As he had known Aubrey Beardsley, I referred to the rumour that Beardsley had several times been seen abroad in London after his alleged death.
“That’s nothing,” he said quickly. “I know a man who saw and spoke to Oscar Wilde in the Pyrenees at the very time when Oscar was in prison in England.”
“Who was the man?” I inquired.
He paused. “Myself,” he said, in a low tone.
“Shall we go?” The Scotchman, faintly smiling, embraced his friend and me in the question.
We went, leaving the Mahatma bent in solitude over his glass. The waiter was obviously saying to himself: “It was inevitable that they should ultimately go, and they have gone.” We had sat for four hours.
Outside, cabs were still rolling to and fro. After cheerful casual good-nights, we got indolently into three separate cabs, and went our easy ways. I saw in my imagination the vista of the thousands of similar nights which my friends had spent, and the vista of the thousands of similar nights which they would yet spend. And the sight was majestic, tremendous.
You could smell money long before you arrived at the double portals of the flat on the second floor. The public staircase was heated; it mounted broadly upwards and upwards in a very easy slope, and at each spacious landing was the statue of some draped woman holding aloft a lamp which threw light on an endless carpet, and on marble mosaics. There was, indeed, a lift; but who could refuse the majestic invitation of the staircase, deserted, silent, and mysterious? The bell would give but oneting, and always the sameting; it was not an electric device by which the temperament and mood of the intruder on the mat are accurately and instantly signalled to the interior.
The door was opened by the Tante herself—perhaps she had been crossing from one room to another—and I came into the large entrance-hall, which even on the brightest summer day was as obscure as a crypt, and which the architect had apparently meant to be appreciated only after nightfall. A vastarmoireand a vast hat-and-coat stand were features of it.
“My niece occupies herself with the children,” the Tante half-whispered, as she took me into the drawing-room. And in her voice were mingled pride, affection, and also a certain conspiratorial quality, as though the mysteries of putting a little boy and a little girl to bed were at once religious and delicious, and must not be disturbed by loud tones even afar off.
She was a stout woman of seventy, dressed in black with a ruching of white at the neck and the wrists; very erect and active; her hair not yet entirely grey; an aquiline eye. The soft, fresh white frill at the wrist made a charming contrast with the experienced and aged hand. She had been a widow for very many years, and during all those years she had matched herself against the world, her weapons being a considerable and secure income, and a quite exceptional natural shrewdness. The result had left her handsomely the victor. She had an immense but justifiable confidence in her own judgment and sagacity; her interest in the spectacle of existence was unabated, and a long and passionate study of human nature had not embittered her. She was a realist, and a caustic realist, but she could excuse; she could accept man as she knew him in his turpitude. Her chief joys were to arrange and rearrange her “reserves” of domestic goods, to discuss character, and to indicate to a later generation, out of her terrific experience of Parisian life, the best methods of defence against the average tradesman and the average menial. So seldom did anybody get the better of her that, when the unusual did occur, she could afford to admit the fact with a liberal laugh: “Il m’a roulée, celui-là! Il a roulé la vieille!”
In a corner of the drawing-room she resumed the topic, always interesting to her, of my adventures among charwomen, generously instructing me the whole time in a hundred ways. And when the conversation dropped she would sigh and go back to something previously said, and repeat it. “So she polishes the door-knobs every day! Well, that is a quality, at least.” Then my hostess (her niece-inlaw) came blandly in: a woman of thirty-five, also in mourning, with a pale, powdered face and golden hair; benevolent and calm, elegant, but with the elegance of a confessed mother.
“Ça y est?” asked the Tante, meaning—were the infants at last couched?
“Ça y est” said the mother, with triumph, with relief, and yet also with a little regret.
There was a nurse, but in practice she was only an under-nurse; the head-nurse was the mother.
“Eh bien, mon petit Bennett,” the mother began, in a new tone, as if to indicate that she was no longer a mother, but a Parisienne, frivolous and challenging, “what there that is new?”
“He is there,” said the Tante, interrupting.
We heard the noise of the front-door, and by a common instinct we all rose and went into the hall.
The master of the home arrived. He entered like a gust of wind, and Marthe, the thin old parlourmaid, who had evidently been lying in wait for him, started back in alarm, but alarm half-simulated. My host, about the same age as his wife, was a doctor, specialising in the diseases of women and children, and he had his cabinet on the ground-floor of the same house. He was late, he was impatient to regain his hearth, he was proud of his industry; and the simple, instinctive joy of life sparkled in his eye.
“Marie,” he cried to his wife. “I love thee!” And kissed her furiously on both cheeks.
“It is well,” she responded, calmly smiling, with a sort of flirtatious condescension.
“I tell thee I love thee!” he insisted, with his hands on her shoulders. “Tell me that thou lovest me!”
“I love thee,” she said calmly.
“It is very well!” he said, and swinging round to Marthe, giving her his hat. “Marthe, I love you.” And he caught her a smack on the shoulder.
0073
“Monsieur hurts me,” the spinster protested.
“Go then! Go then!” said the Tante, as the beloved nephew directed his assault upon her in turn. She was grimly proud of him. He flattered her eye, for, even at his loosest, he had a professional distinction of deportment which her long-deceased husband, a wholesale tradesman, had probably lacked.
“Well, my old one,” the host grasped my hand once more, “you cannot figure to yourself how it gives me pleasure to have you here!” His voice was rich with emotion.
This man had the genius of friendship in a very high degree. His delight in the society of his friends was so intense and so candid that only the most inordinately conceited among them could have failed to be aware of an uncomfortable grave sense of unworthiness, could have failed to say to themselves fearfully: “He will find me out one day!”
The dining-room was large, and massively furnished, and lighted by one immense shaded lamp that hung low over the table. Among the heavily framed pictures was a magnificent Jules Dupré, belonging to the Tante. She had picked it up long ago at a sale for something like ten thousand francs, apparently while the dealers were looking the other way. It was a known picture, and one of the Tante’s satisfactions was that some dealer or other was always trying to relieve her of it, without the slightest success. She had a story, too, that on the day after the sale a Duchesse who affected Duprés had sent her footman offering to take the picture off her at a ten per cent, increase because it would make a pair with another magnificent Dupré already owned by the Duchesse. “Eh, well,” the widow of the tradesman had said to the footman, “you will tell Madame la Duchesse that if she wants my picture she had better come herself and inquire about it.” In the flat, the Dupré was one of the great pictures of the world. Safer to sneeze at the Venus de Milo than at that picture! Another favourite picture, also the property of Tante, was one by a living and super-modern painter, an acquaintance of another nephew of hers. I do not think she much cared for it, or that she cared much for any pictures. She had bought it by a benevolent caprice. “What would you? He had not the sou.C’est un très gentil garçon, of a great talent, but he was eating all his money with women—with those birds that you know. And one day it may be worth its price.”
What always interested me most in the furniture of that dining-room was not the pictures, nor the ample plate, nor the edifices called sideboards, etc., but the apron of Marthe, who served. A plain, unstarched, white apron, without a bib—an apron that no English parlourmaid would have deigned to wear; but of such fine linen, and all the exactly geometric creases of its folding visible to the eye as Marthe passed round and round our four chairs! Whenever I saw that apron I could see linen-chests, and endless supplies of linen, and Tante and Marthe fussing over them on quiet afternoons. And it went so well with her dark-blue shiny frock! When Tante had joined her nephew’s household she had brought with her Marthe, already old in her service. These two women were devoted to each other, each in her own way. “Arrive then, with that sauce,vieille folle!” Tante would command; and Marthe, pursing her lips, would defend herself with a “Mais madame—!” There was no high invisible wall between Marthe and her employers. One was not worried, as one would have been in England, by the operation of the detestable and barbaric theory that Marthe was an automaton, inaccessible to human emotions. I remember seeing in the work-basket of the wife of a wealthy English socialist a little manual of advice to domestic servants upon their deportment, and I remember this: “Learn to control your voice, and always speak in a low voice. Never show by your demeanour that you have heard any remark which is not addressed to you.” I wonder what Marthe, who had never worn a cap, nor perhaps seen one, would have thought of the manual, which possibly was written by a distressed gentlewoman in order to earn a few shillings. Martha could smile. She could even laugh and answer back—but within limits. We had not to pretend that Marthe consisted merely of two ministering hands animated by a brain, but without a soul. In France a servant works longer and harder than in England, but she is permitted the constant use of a soul.
A simple but an expensive dinner, for these people were the kind of people that, desiring only the best, were in a position to see that they had it, and accepted the cost as a matter of course. Moreover, they knew what the best was, especially the Tante. They knew how to buy. The chief dish was just steak. But what steak! What a thickness of steak and what tenderness! A whole cow had lived under the most approved conditions, and died a violent death, and the very essence of the excuse for it all lay on a blue and white dish in front of the hostess. Cost according! Steak; but better steak could not be had in the world! And the consciousness of this fact was on the calm benignant face of the hostess and on the vivacious ironic face of the Tante. So with the fruits of the earth, so with the wine. And the simple, straightforward distribution of the viands seemed to suit well their character. Into that flat there had not yet penetrated the grand modern principle that the act of carving is an obscene act, an act to be done shamefully in secret, behind the backs of the delicate impressionable. No! The dish of steak was planted directly in front of the hostess, under her very nose, and beyond the dish a pile of four plates; and, brazenly brandishing her implements, the Parisienne herself cut the titbits out of the tit-bit, and deposited them on plate after plate, which either Marthe took or we took ourselves, at hazard. Further, there was no embarrassment of multitudinous assorted knives and forks and spoons. With each course the diner received the tools necessary for that course. Between courses, if he wanted a toy for his fingers, he had to be content with a crust.
During the meal the conversation constantly reverted with pleasure to the question of food; it was diversified by expressions of the host’s joy in his home, and the beings therein; and for the rest it did not ascend higher than heterogeneous personal gossip,—“unstitched,” as the French say.
Instead of going into the drawing-room, we went through a bed-chamber, into a small room at the back. By taking a circuitous service-passage, and infringing on the kitchen, we might ultimately have arrived at that room without passing through the bedchamber; but the proper, the ceremonious way to it was through the bedchamber. This trifling detail illuminates the methods of the French architect even when he is building expensively—methods which persist to the present hour. Admirable at façades, he is an execrable planner, wasteful and maladroit, as may be seen even in the most important public buildings in Paris—such as the Town Hall. In arranging the “disposition” of flats, he exhausts himself on the principal apartments, and then, fatigued, lets the others struggle as best they may for light and air and access in the odd corners of space which remain. Of course, he is strong in the sympathy of his clients. It is a wide question of manners, stretching from the finest palaces of France down to the labyrinthine coverts of industrialism. Up to twenty-five years ago, architects simply did not consider the factors of either light or ventilation. I have myself lived in a flat, in one of the best streets of central Paris, of which none of the eight windows could possibly at any period of the year receive a single direct gleam of sunlight. Up to twenty-five years ago, nobody had discovered a reason why, in a domestic interior, a bedroom should not be a highroad.. . .
Visualise the magnificent straight boulevard, full of the beautiful horizontal glidings of trams and automobiles; the lofty and stylistic frontages; the great carved doors of the house; the quasi-Oriental entrance and courtyard, shut in from the fracas of the street; the monumental staircase; the spacious and even splendid dining-room; and then the bedroom opening directly off it; and then the still smaller sitting-room opening directly off that; and us there—the ebullient doctor, his elegant and calm wife, the Tante (on a small chair), and myself—sitting round a lamp amid a miscellany of bookcases and oddments. This was the room that the doctor preferred of an evening. He would say, joyously: “C’est le décor home!”
A cousin of the host was announced; and his relatives and I smiled archly, with affectionate malice, before he came in; for it was notorious that this cousin, an architect by profession, and a bachelor of forty years standing, had a few days earlier solemnly and definitely “broken” with hispetite amie. I knew it. Everybody knew it within the wide family-radius. It was one of those things that “knew themselves.” This call was itself a proof that the cousin had dragged his anchor. Moreover, he embraced his aunt with a certain self-consciousness. He was a tall, dark-bearded man, well dressed in a dark-grey suit—a good specimen of French tailoring, but a French tailor cannot use an iron and he cannot “roll” a collar. A rather melancholy and secretive and flaccid man, but somewhat hardened and strengthened by the lifelong use of a private fortune. They all had money—money of their own, independently of earned money; the wife had money—and I do not think that it occurred to any of them to live up to his or her income; their resources were always increasing, and the reserves that the united family could have brought up to face a calamity must have been formidable. None of them had ever been worried about money, and by reason of their financial ideals they were far more solid than a London family receiving, but spending, thrice their income.
Marthe came with another coffee cup, and the cousin, when the hostess had filled it, set it down to go cold, after the French manner.
“Well, my boy,” said Tante, whose ancient eyes were sparkling with eagerness. “By what appears, thou art a widower since several days.”
“How a widower?”
“Yes,” said the host, “it appears that thou art a widower.” And added enthusiastically: “I am pretty content to see thee, my old one.”
The hostess smiled at the widower with sympathetic indulgence.
“Who has told you?”
“What! Who has told us? All Paris knows it!”
“Well,” said the cousin, looking at the carpet and apparently communing with himself—he always had an air of self-communing, “I suppose it’s true!” He drank the tenth of a teaspoonful of coffee.
“Eh, well, my friend,” the Tante commented. “I do not know if thou hast done well. That did not cost thee too dear, and she had a good-hearted face.” Tante spoke with an air of special intimacy, because she and the cousin had kept house together for some years at one period.
“Thou hast seen her, Tante?” the hostess asked, surprised a little out of the calm in which she was crocheting.
“Have I seen her? I believe it well! I caught them together once when I was driving in the Bois.”
“That was Antoinette,” said the cousin.
“It was not Antoinette,” said the Tante. “And thou hast no need to say it. Thou quittedst Antoinette in ‘96, before I had begun to hire that carriage. I recall it to myself perfectly.”
“I suppose now it will be the grand spree,” said the hostess, “during several months.”
“The grand spree!” Tante broke in caustically. “Have no fear. The grand spree—that is not his kind. It is not he who will scatter his money with those birds. He is not so stupid as that.” She laughed drily.
“Is sherosse, the Tante, all the same!” the host, flowing over with good nature, comforted his cousin.
Then Marthe entered again:
“The children demand monsieur.”
The host bounded up from his chair.
“What! The children demand monsieur!” he exploded. “At nine o’clock! It is not possible that they are not asleep!”
“They say that monsieur promised to return to them after dinner.”
“It is true!” he admitted, with a gesture of discovery. “It is true!”
“I pray thee,” said the mother. “Go at once. And do not excite them.”
“I think I’ll go with you,” I said.
“My little Bennett,” the mother leaned towards me, “I supplicate you—at this hour—”
“But naturally he will come with me!” the host cried obstreperously.
We went, down a long narrow passage. There they were in their beds, the children, in a small bedroom divided into two by a low screen of ribbed glass, the boy on one side and the girl on the other. The window gave on to a small subsidiary courtyard. Through the half-drawn curtains the lighted windows of rooms opposite could be discerned, rising, storey after storey, up out of sight. A night-light burned on a table. The nurse stood apart, at the door. The children were lively, but pale. They had begun to go to school, and, except the journey to and from school, they seemed to have almost no outdoor exercise. No garden was theirs. The hall and the passages were their sole playground. And all the best part of their lives was passed between walls in a habitation twenty-five or thirty feet above ground, in the middle of Paris. Yet they were very well. The doctor did not romp with them. No! He simply and candidly caressed them, girl and boy, in turn, calling them passionately by the most beautiful names, burying his head in the bedclothes, and fondling their wild hair. He then entreated them, with genuine humility, to compose themselves for sleep, and parted last from the girl.
“She is exquisite—exquisite!” he murmured to me ecstatically, as we returned up the passage from this excursion.
She was.
In the small sitting-room the cousin was offering to the Tante some information of a political nature. The Tante kept a judicious eye on everything in Paris. .
“What!” The host protested vociferously. “He is again in his politics! Cousin, I supplicate thee—”
A good deal of supplication went on there. The host did succeed in stopping politics. With all the weight of his vivacious good-nature he bore politics down. The fact was, he had a real objection to politics, having convinced himself that they were permanently unclean in France. It was not the measures that he objected to, but the men—all of them with scarcely an exception—as cynical adventurers. On this point he was passionate. Politics were incurably futile, horriblyassommant. He would not willingly allow them to soil his hearth.
“What hast thou done lately?” he asked of the cousin, changing the subject.
And the talk veered to public amusements. The cousin had been “distracting himself” amid his sentimental misadventures, by much theatre-going. They all, except the Tante, went very regularly to the theatres and to the operas. And not only that, but to concerts, exhibitions, picture-shows, services in the big churches, and every kind of diversion frequented by people in easy circumstances and by artists. There was little that they missed. They exhibited no special taste or knowledge in any art, but leaned generally to the best among that which was merely fashionable. They took seriously nearly every craftsman who, while succeeding, kept his dignity and refrained from being a mountebank. Thus, they were convinced that dramatists like Edmond Rostand and Henri Lavedan, actors and actresses like Le Bargy and Cécile Sorel, painters like Edouard Détaille and La Gandara, composers like Massenet and Charpentier, critics like Adolphe Brisson and Francis Chevassu, novelists like René Bazin and Daniel Lesueur, poets like Jean Riche-pin and Abel Bonnard, were original and first-class, and genuinely important in the history of their respective arts. On the other hand their attitude towards the real innovators and shapers of the future was timidly, but honestly, antipathetic. And they could not, despite any theorising to the contrary, bring themselves to take quite seriously any artist who had not been consecrated by public approval. With the most charming grace they would submit to be teased about this, but it would have been impossible to tease them out of it. And there was always a slight uneasiness in the air when they and I came to grips in the discussion of art. I could almost hear the shrewd Tante saying to herself: “What a pity this otherwise sane and safe young man is an artist!”
“Figure to yourself,” the host would answer me with an adorable, affectionate mien of apology, when I asked his opinion of a new work by Maurice Ravel, heard on a Sunday afternoon, “Figure to yourself that we scarcely liked it.”
And with the same mien, of a very fashionable comedy in which Lavedan, Le Bargy, and Julia Bartet had combined to create a terrific success at the Théâtre Français:
“Figure to yourself, it was truly very nice, after all! Of course one might say.. . .”
The truth was, it had carried them off their feet.
Upon my soul I think I liked them the better for it all. And, in talking to them, I understood a little better the real and solid basis upon which rests all that overwhelming, complex, expensive apparatus of artistic diversions laid out for the public within a mile radius of the Place de l’Opéra. Thereisa public, a genuine public, which desires ardently to be amused and which will handsomely put down the money for its amusement. And it is never tired, never satiated. The artist, who seldom pays, is apt to wonder if any considerable body of persons pay, is apt to regard the commercial continuance of art as a sort of inexplicable miracle. But these people paid. They always paid, and richly. And there were whole streets of large houses full of other people who shared their tastes and their habits, if not their extreme attractiveness.
I wondered where we should be without them, we artists, as I took leave of them at something after midnight. My good friend, the melancholy cousin, had departed. Tante had gone to bed, though she protested she never slept. We had been drinking weak tea as we wandered about the dining-room. And now I, obdurate against the host’s supplications not to desert them so early, was departing too. At the door the hostess lighted a little taper, and gave it to me. And when the door was opened they moderated their caressing voices; for a dozen other domestic interiors, each intricate and complete, gave on the resounding staircase. And with my little taper I descended through the silence and the darkness of the staircase. And at the bottom I halted in the black entrance way, and summoned the concierge out of his sleep to release the catch of the small door within the great portals. There was a responsive click immediately, and in the blackness a sudden gleam from the boulevard. The concierge and his wife, living for ever sunless in a room and a half beneath all those other interiors, were throughout the night at the mercy of a call, mine or another’s. “Curious existence!” I thought, as my shutting of the door echoed about the building, and I stepped into the illumination of the boulevard. “The concierge is necessary to them. And without the equivalent of such as they, such as I could not possess even a decent overcoat!” On thefaçadeof the house every outer casement was shut. Not a sign of life in it.