Thatevening after dinner I deliberately tempted the Providence which had offered me Fifine as a mild mental stimulant. There were several of my paintings hanging on the walls of the sitting-room, and, when I followed her in thither, I found her standing meditatively, cigarette in hand, before one of them. I came and stood behind her.
“Ah!” I said, “that is one of the things in which I successfully hid from you what my choice of your dress revealed.”
She turned and looked me quite frankly and coolly in the face.
“What is it all about?” she said.
“Call it,” I answered, “a psychologic exercise in paint.”
“Then it is not a picture?”
“O! yes it is—or at least I hope so.”
“But—” she shook her head—“I do not understand. A picture is a picture, and a sum is a sum, and a psychologic exercise is a psychologic exercise.”
“You mean they are not assimilable terms. What, then, is your definition of a picture?”
She considered, drawing thoughtfully at her cigarette.
“I think,” she said presently, “it is art—just that.”
“Well, what is art?”
Again she considered, and answered, “Form.”
“Form is an elusive term,” I said, “impossible of hard and fast definition. There is no way of proving that any two of us agree about it—no way of ascertaining that our mental and material optics come to the same conclusion with regard to it.”
“Then why should you expect people to take your view of it, in—in a thing like this?”
“I don’t—in a thing like this. I merely utter my protest in the thing against the accepted conventions of form. It is an impression, conveyed and caught through atmospheric vibration, of what form actually suggested, at that particular moment, in that particular instance, to my individual temperament.”
“I think,” she said calmly, after a pause, “that that is nonsense.”
“What,” I demanded, astonished, “is nonsense?”
“All that talk about impressions and individual temperaments. It is only an excuse for idleness—for trying the short cut to laborious ends. It is so much easier to spend an hour over a picture—over a canvas—than a month. A burglar might claim just the same excuse for stealing a year’s income in a night, instead of earning it in a year. Besides, if your temperament is individual, what is the good of trying to impose it on people who have individual temperaments of their own. You can’t expect them to understand you; so what is the good?”
“None,” I said briefly—and grimly. This “mild mental stimulant” was beginning to reveal itself a headier posset than I had ever dreamed it to be.
“Then,” she answered, “why do you protest? You know you said you did.”
“As a revolutionist, I am bound to,” I replied weakly.
“A revolutionist from what?”
“From stereotype and standards. Standards are for yard measures, and bushel measures, and other such commercial or scientific essentials. They are not for art.”
“Why not?”
“O, Cousin! See to what they have led us—the lifeless petrifactions of the schools and academies.”
“Well, they are art, if they are bad art. And there will always be bad art and bad artists. Butyouwant to lead us away from art altogether—into psychologic exercises—impressions that only you can understand. Do you paint for yourself alone, then? In that case why do you complain of your lack of appreciation?”
“I don’t.”
“O, you do! I know it from Mademoiselle your sister. You are very humorous and philosophical, but you are hurt in your heart that the world will not comprehend you better. I have seenpicturesby those who think like you—Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse—and I suppose, if they did notfeellike you, that they would hardly exhibit in public galleries impressions which were just peculiar to themselves, and impossible of understanding by others differently constituted.”
Why should shenothave seen them, these mutinous ones? Why, on the other hand, had I admitted this viper to my hearth?
“I, too, have exhibited in public galleries,” I said, “and found sympathy and understanding among the elect.”
“Well, who elected them?” she said—“themselves? There are always to be found inconsiderable people to applaud what they don’t understand. A little man blowing a big trumpet gets some of the credit for the noise, you see.”
“But they did understand.”
“They couldn’t, you know, if we all see with different eyes.”
“O, this is puerile!” I cried, with a little shrug and laugh. “You don’t like my pictures, or what I call pictures. Very well, then, you don’t.”
“I think they are stuff and nonsense,” she answered, turning away from the wall. “But Idolike your little mother: she is a real darling.”
She was lying in a corner, unfinished—my little clay model of startled yet innocent maternity.
“O! you like that!” I said, a solacing glow about my heart.
“You needn’t sneer,” she answered. “Why didn’t your atmospheric vibrations make a shapeless jelly of her too?”
“That is different. You must allow for the medium.”
“I don’t. There should be only one rule in Art, I am sure. What applies to this applies to all; and it amounts in the end to form. Everyone with the right eyes knows what beauty of form means. You do yourself, you see; and yet you can go and paint those pictures.”
“O, for heaven’s sake leave my pictures alone!”
“You shouldn’t raise your voice. It squeaks and cracks when you do. I’m sure I’ll leave them alone with pleasure.” But she couldn’t. “I’m glad anyhow,” she said, “thatIdon’t see things, even for a moment, as if they were all made up of one huge nettlerash.”
Poor Pissarro, with his light analyses and colour vibrations! I was bound to feel very small; but I could not help sniggering over the impudent candour of this hussy. She turned, and dropped the butt of her cigarette into a brass pot, and went silently scrutinising the “things” along the walls. Presently she stopped before a little framed piece, an interior with figures, very rich and sombre in tone, but made cloudier than its due by the dirty state of the glass.
“O, I like that!” she said—“Idolike that. I think you must be an artist after all. Why do you not always paint in that way?”
“Every producer, you know, has his own best for enemy. What do you find in this to like so much?”
“It is a picture—a little bit of truth and beauty brought into the limits of the eye’s understanding. It seems to satisfy everything—one’s love of colour, one’s sense of form, and—yes, just the little place in one’s emotions the two appeal to. It doesn’t matter a bit about the subject. It is the scheme of colour whichisthe subject, and the figures are only patterns in it.” She turned on me. “O, youarestupid, to go and paint those other things when you can do like this!”
“Well, I can’t,” I said. “As a matter of fact it is by a friend of mine. It is very good, as you say; but the critics would have none of it.”
“The critics!” she snapped her rosy fingers disdainfully. “They are just the flies on that glass, that have made it all dirty and obscure. But the picture is behind all the time to speak for itself; and some day posterity will clean away the dirt with a wet sponge, and the truth will come out. I should like to know the man who painted it.”
“Sorry,” I said shortly. “He’s dead.”
Something in my tone seemed to strike her. Her eyes were on me, and suddenly a strange light, like wistfulness or pity, came into them.
“I am sorry if I hurt you,” she said. “I did not know—how could I? And I am sure, after seeing that dear little mother, you could paint pictures like this if you would.”
“Would you like me to?” I said. I don’t know what made me say it. This young callow criticism, refreshing as it might be, was hardly worth the most transitory waiving of my principles. Yet oddly there came into my mind the face, hectic and eager, of the boy Ronsin, whose work, and gift to me, the picture had been—and I was jealous. Yes, absurd as it may sound, because she had said she would like to know him, I was jealous. For my art, or what else? Ah, that I cannot tell. Yet at least I could not deny that, whatever the youthfulness of this criticism, it had seen clearly here: the picture was, of its kind, remarkably good.
“Of course I should,” she answered. “You admitted yourself, you know, that it was a fine work.”
“Itisa fine work,” I said, “and I am not so dogmatic as to profess that there is only one right theory of art in the world. But every fox looks after his own skin, says the proverb; and dislikes, adds I, the having it flayed from him to adorn a rival.”
And so ended our first disputation—which was by no means our last—on the subject. If I was heckled and browbeaten, it was also agreeably clear to me that I had got no fool for my housemate.
Fifine, come out of her shell of apathy, was a surprise indeed.
Veryearly I made a strange discovery: Fifine was doing the housework. It did not, perhaps, amount to much, which was likely the reason that the fact was impressed upon me gradually; but, when at length conviction came, I was immensely surprised and interested. The little domestic bienséances, obligatory even in Bohemia, came one by one to be appropriated to meeter hands than mine, so that by and by I was altogether without the occupations which, to speak truth, had served me hitherto as an excuse for much self-malingering in the matter of my professional work.
It began, properly enough, perhaps, with Fifine’s quiet intimation that I was to regard her bedroom as her own exclusive property and care; and it ended by her every day makingmybed, sous ce nom-là, as well as her own. That was sufficiently gratifying; and so was it to find her cleaning up the plates and dishes after meals; but, when it came to her offering to take my place at the electric stove, I was inclined to kick a little.
“It would go against my social conscience,” I said, “to accept such a return for the little hospitality I can offer you.”
“But I should like it.”
“But I should not.”
“I know perfectly well what that means,” she said, turning on me with a scornful lip: “not in the least that you are shocked at my demeaning myself, but that you are in terror of my cookery.”
“That is nonsense,” I answered. “How can I fear the unknown?”
“Yet you say you would not like it?”
“Not like your so repaying me, I mean.”
“With bad for good, that is to say. Yet you are not the only one in the world who knows how to cook an omelet.”
“O, for heaven’s sake,” I exclaimed, “cook what you like! I am equal to anything, if it comes to that. A man who has dined, day in and day out, on ‘arlequins’ at two sous the plate in the Marché St. Germain is not likely to be fastidious.”
She stared at me incredulously.
“Have you really done that?”
“Often enough,” I said, “in my student days.”
She tossed her head, turning away: “I do not want to know about those. Please to leave it to me to perform the proper duties of a woman, while you go to your own, which you have been neglecting too long.”
The proper duties of a woman! Now could she know anything about them in such a connexion? It was just an absorbing new game to her, I supposed, as her hameau, with its laiterie and moulin and ferme, had been to Marie Antoinette. But a wilful woman must have her way; and so, with a laugh and shrug, I went and left her alone.
And now a surprising thing happened: Fifine, at déjeuner, came up to time with a quite well-cooked little repast. How she had managed it I could not tell, bred as she must have been, if not in luxury, in all that prescriptive ineptitude associated with a class wholly untrained in the principles of self-help. Possibly, it occurred to me, the penurious Marquis held unaccustomed views on household economy; and at that I left it. The young lady, meanwhile, hung, I could see, on my verdict.
“You are a wonder, Fifine,” I said.
She started at the term, and drew back.
“Did I not tell you,” she said, “I would not be called that?”
“I am sorry. It slipped out unawares.”
“Well,” she said, relenting in a moment, “it is at least better than the ‘arlequins,’ is it not?”
“As much better as this time is than that.”
She leaned her elbows on the table and her chin on her closed knuckles, and sat regarding me.
“Were you a very bad man in those days?” she said presently.
“Do I give you that impression?” I answered. “How can you look at me and ask?”
Still she conned me with unwinking eyes.
“Used you to go to the cabarets artistiques—Les Noctambules, andde l’Enfer, and theMoulin Rouge, and all those?”
“Not all; but to some, and to some better, in my time. There was theChat-Noirfor instance, to whose collection I had the honour of contributing a trifle of statuary.”
“And to theElysée Montmartre?”
“O, now and again!”
“To theBal des Quat’z Artsthere?”
I fairly gasped.
“How on earth,” I said, “did you come to hear of all these places?”
She nodded her head once or twice.
“People have spoken of them before me—and always à coin de l’œil.”
“Well, we won’t speak of them, with a leer or otherwise. Shall we have a cigarette, Cousin? I am of an inquisitive nature, and I have been to all sorts of places in quest of information. Once, when I was a young man, I was seized with an idea that it would be well for me to harden myself to the sight of physical mutilation, so I got a professional friend to take me to the operating theatre of a hospital. I didn’t want to go again; and I am content, also, with my one visit to the students’ ball. The impression I brought away from each was something of the same sort—an orgy of crucified human nature.”
Still leaning on one hand, and drawing casually at her cigarette, she came out suddenly with a startling question:—
“Who was your particular petite ouvrière when you were a student? Was she very pretty?”
I actually started to my feet.
“You can assume anything you like,” I said—“my badness, or my goodness, or my utter ordinariness, which would be the normal mean: only bear in mind that itisall assumption.”
She gave the tiniest insolent laugh, wafting a puff of smoke away with her hand.
“I will tell you what I think of you,” she said; “and why, according to your own statement, your present is happier than your past. It is because with your restless, volatile nature you are incapable of developing a lasting attachment, and your age now saves you from any fear of being importuned for your own sake.”
I burst out laughing. “True,” I said; “at my years a man should have come to easy terms with himself as to his own superannuation; and perhaps also he should have learned to look a little deeper than the beauty peu profond for his soul’s satisfaction.”
“O, that is rubbish!” Fifine exclaimed.
“What is?”
“Skin-deep beauty. How can you talk such nonsense and pretend to be an artist? There is no such thing. Just as if the skin could be anything but what the bones and the muscles underneath make it!”
That was not, perhaps, very original; yet a wonder perpetually grew in me over the extraordinary precocity of this young woman of nineteen. Her dictatorialness I could understand: it was just unaffected class assurance. What I could not understand was the positiveness of her views, where her views came in question. As I stood, with nothing to say, she looked up at me.
“What made you come to be an artist at all?” she asked.
“O!” I answered: “I suppose the usual creative itch—the desire to produce beautiful things.”
“Comme ça!” She gave a little shrug implying helplessness. “I should have thought the scalpel was more in your line than the pencil.”
“Why?”
“O, just because you are so inquisitive. Were you obliged to dosomethingfor a living?”
“More or less,” I said. “But I haven’t been very successful.”
“Were you born of the people, Monsieur?”
I laughed. “My father was an Englishavocat, Cousin; my mother one of the noblesse; I myself lay no claim to any sort of distinction but what myself may procure me.”
She stooped over her plate, slowly extinguishing her cigarette. There was a strange little frown between her eyes, an odd look in her face of some emotion I could have likened to disappointment or chagrin. Perhaps she was regretting now her own calm assumption of superiority. Then, without looking up, she said:—
“But you do not hate the people?”
“I don’t know what you mean by the people,” I said, “or where they begin and where they end. If you are out for intelligence, I know no one more interesting than a skilled mechanic of his hands; and if you are out for folly, a lord can provide you as well as a sweep. Knowledge, my cousin, and knowledge alone passes all distinctions—at least it is the one master-key in my opinion.”
She sat silent a little while; and then she sighed deeply, as if eased of some mental oppression, and rose to her feet, with a smile, verily like ingratiation, on her lips.
“Would it please you,” she said, “if, instead of slighting what I don’t understand, I were to ask you to explain the difficult thing to me?”
It was quite touching—so pretty, indeed, that I was surprised into humility.
“Why, I told you I was no positivist,” I said. “I take it that the sincere among us are all seeking Truth, and what do the thousand different ways, long or short, matter, provided they have that purpose in common? Art and religion should be one there; and for my part I have no more quarrel with an Academician than I have with a ‘Futurist,’ with a Bishop than I have with a Parsee. Only please don’t again talk of short cuts that save trouble. There is more than that, I assure you, in my philosophy.”
“Then you are not really idle?” she said, very sweetly, with her eyebrows raised.
“No, really,” I answered—“if an active brain counts for anything. I am thinking all the time.”
“Yes?” she said—and that was all.
“Well,” I retorted, “we think differently, you see; but at leastmythoughts are consistent.”
“Aren’t mine?”
“How can you ask it?—at one moment rubbing into me the futility of my producing work that only I can understand; at another implying that I am idle because I don’t endlessly produce futility. Well, I tell you, if I put all my thoughts into the shape I should like, I should want a garde-meuble to store them in. But I spare myself and a suffering world that vain burden.”
There was still a little amused questioning in her eyes, so that I could have thought I read into them the rejoinder ‘The world does not suffer fromsomefurniture being stored, but rather the reverse!’ She forbore all repartee, however, and answered me only, very simply and feelingly:—
“I am quite sure that is a natural attitude under the circumstances. Still you paint, do you not, if only for yourself?”
“Within reason,” I answered; “but my métier is the plastic business. I have plenty of sketches to show you, if you wish to see them.”
“O, yes!” she said—“please. That is what I want. And then you can tell me not why you painted them so, but——”
“But why I didn’t paint them not so? Very well. Marchez!”
We adjourned to the sitting-room, or studio, and I seated her in a good position and, getting out my portfolios, played judicious showman to my own goods—a fragmentary variety, impressions of men, things and places, forming the artistic excerpta of a vagabond and wanderer. She took them from me, one by one, a little mechanically, and I made no comment whatever, simply briefly stating the subjects and localities. Presently, pausing in her task, she looked up.
“Cousin,” she said, “will you give me a plain exposition, in as few and clear words as possible, of your theory of art?”
“The portrayal of all things, animate and inanimate, as we really see them.”
“In passing?”
“Yes, in passing: the momentary impression conveyed to us.”
“Then, to appreciate these sketches properly, one should look at them only for a moment.”
“If you like.”
“No, but it is not as I like but as I must. The impression is gone if I pause—the trick, the mere accident of vision which produced them. I know that if I want to understand the true purple of a shadow, the true blue of water, the true gloom of trees, I must look direct at none of these things, but only somewhere near them, so that while not actually seeing them I never lose the sense that they are there and revealing their inner truth to me.”
“Aha! You are getting near it.”
“Yes, but then I oughtn’t to look at your pictures either in order to understand them; and I think you should say that.”
“Say what?”
“Why, when you exhibit, that your pictures are not meant to be looked at.”
I laughed, though not quite at ease.
“But they are intended to represent what youdosee without knowing it,” I said.
“But youdon’tsee it,” she persisted, “if you look straight at the things.”
I tried another tack:—
“Ido,” I said; “and so will you, if you take the trouble to understand. The truth is that we have learned to look at all objects with sophisticated eyes. The schools have wrought that tangle about us, and the tangles within the tangle, until to our bewildered vision nothing appears as it is, but only as hidebound theory presents it. It is the purpose of us primitives to sweep away at one stroke all that accumulated litter of the schools, and to regard things once again with frank unbiassed eyes.”
“But you are not a primitive,” said Fifine; “so what is the good of pretending? You belong to the twentieth century, not the first, and have grown up from being one of the world’s schoolchildren. You might as well say that in education we all ought to go back to our ABCs. Art must grow, I suppose, with knowledge. For my part I am not interested to know what the men thought who scratched figures on bones and things, but what my own men think, the men of my own time, who try to speak to me in the language I understand. You call it confused and sophisticated: all I can say is that it isn’t to me.”
“Then you are satisfied with Art as you find it?”
“I am satisfied with its purpose and with its direction, as steadily pursued from age to age. Fancy thinking Botticelli all wrong, and Velasquez, and da Vinci, and wanting to sweep them away to get back to your bone-scratchers. I couldn’t live with a bone, however cleverly engraved; but I could live with that little picture on the wall there, because I should never tire of the food for thought it gave me. I think that an artist living day by day over his picture penetrates to the soul of things more deeply than any primitive capturing a passing impression. Not that some of yours are not beautiful bits of colour. But I suppose that was accident.”
So she chastised and patronised me. On that subject it was always the same. Call her a frank Philistine, if you like: she had clear views, at least, and she never compromised about them. She was very scornful of my insistence on the free rights of temperament. Art, she said, was the negation of all licence, which had never yet produced any enduring beauty in the world. Look at its decay contemporaneous with the corruption of the ancient monasteries. She had a plenty of information about many things. She called my school (which, by the by, I did not call it) the go-as-you-please school, likening it to a modern fashion of extravaganza in which every performer was at liberty to “gag” as he chose—a mere farrago of unconnected impromptus. She was sarcastic, too, about that deeper beauty I was unlucky enough to say my matured soul had come to crave; she supposed it must mean the bones I was after, to scratch my primitive impressions on.
In fact, I am fain to confess, whether from humour or chagrin, I came to feel out of sorts with my theories, and disinclined for the present to elaborate them. Instead I returned to my clay and made figures.
She was with me there, watchful, mostly silent, yet not without ideas. I owed many a good touch to her sharp intelligence.
And so the days went on—went on as if our compact were for life, and no disturbance to that odd partnership were ever to be apprehended. We kept strictly to the letter of our undertaking with Marion, practising all precautions and inviting no risks. I always locked Fifine in when I went abroad, and I spoke no word to any one as to the change in my ménage. Indeed more and more I came to avoid acquaintances, more and more to limit my issues and returns to the dark hours. A queer attraction was beginning to attach itself to my quarters; I was never long away from them but I wished myself back. There was some lure there in the way of mental stimulant that I found it pleasant not to resist.
As for Fifine herself, confinement and lack of air and exercise seemed in no wise to disturb her. Physically she was of a serene constitution; and her small occupations were enough for what variety she seemed to need. Moreover, on whatever absurd perversion founded, she was sufficiently alive to the supposed danger of her position to endure gladly the inaction and close concealment it entailed upon her. I was aware that her fears, while I believed them wholly unjustified, were entirely genuine, though I had made it my rule to ask no leading questions of her whatever. But her face had become a book to me, in which I found some matter for curious reading.
Our plan of privacy was easily enough maintained, Madame Crussol abetting. I don’t know what the worthy lady thought of it all—but not the best, il va sans dire. However, her sarcasms were for my ears alone; I was a favourite with her, when all is said; and it did not disturb me to hear myself called a vieux garçon, still uncertain of his steps at an age when most men had learned to walk steadily. For the rest, whether through prescriptive sympathy, or on the strength of some unconfessed understanding with my step-sister, the concierge managed to hold all undesired visitors aloof. I was so much a rolling-stone that the task was no more than simple: she had merely to shrug her shoulders and say, “He has locked his door on the outside and taken away the key. God knows when he will return.”
Indeed I wanted no visitors just then: I was fully amused, and fully contented to be left to the world’s oblivion. It was all quite superbly correct—the heart serenely conscious of its own probity, and so forth; what did it matter what gross old door-keepers concluded or suspected? Fifine and I became quite matter-of-fact friends; our rallies were purely intellectual, and not seldom acrimonious; we lived together on a footing of the most dispassionate comradeship. She was seldom haughty to me after a little—save in fits and starts, as if when suddenly remembering a duty, which she would desperately recover, but without conviction on either side. Early she discarded her smart evening dress in favour of others more simple, which she would concoct out of materials I bought for her. She had plenty of money, as she had said, and insisted upon paying her share of the household expenses. She was wonderfully deft with her needle, at which I rather marvelled, until I remembered that I had made a compact with myself to be surprised at nothing. But still on some festive occasions she would play the bedizened sylphid, enrapturing my eyes, and just awakening in me some faintly disturbing tremors. She liked me to design her frocks for her; and in truth I was nothing loth. It was a little thrilling to have a mannequin all of my own, and a very shapely one, on whom to hang my idle fancies. And she repaid my trouble, both by word and effect, though we were always very particular and formal in our relations of costumier and dummy. Never suppose that I forgot my responsibility to my charge, or my tremendous respect for the rank that condescended to me, or that Fifine herself made any motion of unbending in the matter of that mutual understanding. She trusted in me without question, and I never gave her cause to question.
Not that I will pretend the situation found me entirely without qualms of a sort. Nature, it must be admitted, abhors a Platonism, and I was not superior to Nature. Moreover, I could never quite forget Marion’s curiously ambiguous language in delivering my trust to me. It had seemed to take so small account of reputation provided the main issue were not involved. Still, no doubt, that apparent confusion had been due to the stress of the moment. Marion could never be anything but deeply moral and religious.
In any case I was—I had Marion’s word for it—a gentleman, and determined stoutly to justify that election. I had no choice about it, in fact, since I am speaking of emotions, trifling at best, which I felt were entirely unreciprocated. But I want the credit of my conscientiousness.
And so a fortnight passed; and deliverance came not. My sister did not appear, nor did she vouchsafe word or sign. Was the safe moment yet to strike? I did not seem to care at last; and that was a puzzling symptom.
Onesopping noon, as I was leaving the yard below on some rather arbitrary commission of Fifine’s, I met an old gentleman just entering it. I observed him, but superficially; and was going on my way without further notice, when an odd thought flashing into my mind brought me to a standstill. It was only this, that the stranger, seeing me, had come to a quick stop, as if suddenly petrified, and had thereafter fallen, rather than backed, against the wall to allow me passage while he stared at me. Just that; and what then? Why, nothing—nothing but a recollection of the absurd fable which would have charged me with the circumvention of a monster diabolically bent on the destruction of an innocent victim to his suspicion or jealousy. I did not believe that story; I have intimated as much; yet I felt in duty bound to act as if I did. Who, in short, was this old fellow, and what was he doing here?
He was no denizen of the block: I knew my neighbours generally by sight, and he was not one of them. But why not a visitor? Again, why not a spy or an assassin? With a laugh for my own idiotcy, I yetdidturn in my tracks and just peep into the yard. He had disappeared. Madame Crussol had him in charge, and she was to be trusted. En avant!
Trying to recall this intruder’s appearance, as I continued my way, I could only gather a general impression of bony insignificance, a little white, a little spoiled, a little pathetic, of a damp crow-like figure squatting under a minute umbrella, of two large eyes, like a fledgling’s, peering from that sheltering covert—not an heroic figure, by any means, nor one to be associated with secret agencies and stabs in the dark. A piano-tuner, probably: there had been something indescribably hopeless in his aspect, as of one who had spent all his ineffective life in desperately screwing-up things to a pitch destined not to last. I had forgotten him by the time I reached the Rue de Seine, for which I was bound.
But, as chance would have it, his exit and my return again synchronised. As I wheeled under the archway, there was he stepping from the vestibule, and putting up his umbrella in the act. It was a feminine umbrella, very small and very leaky, and somehow it seemed forlornly appropriate to the spare little nervous figure it only half sheltered. He stopped, seeing me, before spreading his tattered wings to fly; then snapped up the spring in sudden resolution and came on. An odd thing again; and this time I took determined stock of him as he approached. He did not evade my scrutiny, but on the contrary seemed lost in one of his own. Something impelled me, quite unwarrantably, to stop and address him as he came up.
“We have encountered once before, Monsieur. You were not by any chance seeking me?”
A sad, plaintive, timorous old face; a deprecating smile; a little contracted gesture of apology, of repudiation.
“No, no, Monsieur; no, indeed. I have accomplished my little mission, entirely to my satisfaction—O, yes, certainly so!”
He was gazing into my face, hungrily, but with a sort of propitiation. His feet, in their little worn ladies’ boots, shuffled uneasily on the flags; he was dressed in damaged black broadcloth, the waistcoat cut low over a frayed shirt, whose single stud had been reversed to hide the gaping of the buttonhole; and on his white head was a silk hat, mangy and much dinted, but set at a perceptible angle. His limbs were small, his bones protuberant; and the only points of vital colour about him lay in his vivacious brown eyes and the fresh yellow chrysanthemum bud in his coat-lapel. I apologised for my officiousness, and passed on.
Fifine was sitting in the studio when I entered it. She barely glanced up at me and down again. There was a self-conscious look on her face; a bowl of yellow chrysanthemums, which I had bought her the day before, stood on a table hard by.
“The piano is certainly sadly out of tune,” I said; “or was, when I last tried it.”
I was certain that her lip twitched—the ghost of an understanding smile.
“Try it again,” she answered. “I like to hear you play.”
I sat down, and shaped out a chord or two. “No,” I said, “it is still as impossible as ever; and that is the mystery.”
She did not comment on the mystery of my calling it one; and I asked no question—I was resolute in my philosophy of silence. But here was certainly an unlooked-for development of a situation already sufficiently cryptic. Did she know that I guessed? I think so, or she would not have passed my innuendo unchallenged. But in that case she must have known that I knew how she had betrayed her own retreat. And to whom—an emissary of Marion, of the Marquis himself, perhaps?
Hardly the first, since, if so, there was nothing to prevent her including me in her confidence. If the second, then I was being made catspaw to some mystery to which the other was only a blind. And that I could not believe: there had never been a suggestion of affectation in her part of fugitive, under whatever moral stimulus she had been brought to play it. She might know nothing as to the true cause of her titular father’s implacable malignity towards her—as I asked no questions I was in no position to judge—or she might know everything. That she genuinely hugged her concealment and dreaded discovery was proof sufficient that she could be in no secret collusion with the supposed terrific power which had made that concealment necessary. No, here was some collateral enigma, about which it really did not concern me to bother myself. If my guest chose to entertain, unknown to me, mysterious visitors, who for some reason regarded me curiously in passing, she had calculated, no doubt, the profits and risks of the game. I was playing my own promised part squarely and loyally; she must do as she liked with hers. I took a book, and sat reading in silence.
I thought Fifine glanced at me once or twice, as if in indecision or compunction; but nothing came of it, and presently she said:—
“You have not heard yet from Mademoiselle Herold?”
“My step-sister? No,” I answered, a little surprised, for this was the first time that any direct reference had been made by either of us to the all-important matter.
She gave a little sigh.
“Do you want me to hear?” I said, putting down my book. “Are you so tired of it all—the confinement, the sense of peril, your company?”
“I do not want to be beholden to my company for anything but itself and its interest.”
“Well, you know you are not. You are a locataire—a paying guest.”
“Yes, that is just it,” she said. “But——”
She hesitated, with a flushed cheek: and I understood. She was running short of cash. Could that be the explanation of the strange visitant? But, then, how could she have applied to him without my knowledge? And who was he? A moneylender? One did not adorn moneylender’s buttonholes with chrysanthemum buds. Or perhaps a money-borrower?
That thought was quite suddenly illuminating. I wondered that it had not occurred to me before. The man, possibly, had been appealing to her bounty—and with success. It was a solution; and yet not a solution. There still remained for elucidation the fact of his claim on her, and the means by which he had found access to her presence. However, as he had traced her somehow, and, presumably, to the effect desired, the moral appeared to lie in the direction of some understanding between them, to which the chrysanthemum bud figured, as it were, for the mystic accent. It was a riddle; but I easily gave it up.
“But,” I echoed, “you are wanting fresh supplies—is not that what you mean?”
“Yes, it is,” she answered, shortly and frankly.
“Cousin,” I said as frankly, “I am really grateful to you for your candour. It clears the air. Now let me propose, what has often been in my mind, that we keep a common purse between us.”
“A common purse!” she said, “into which I put nothing, and from which I take everything!”
“Not in the least: you will put in the account I keep against you for your share, and which you will liquidate at your convenience.”
“Convenience is a very doubtful debtor. Are you really satisfied with that?”
“O, yes! Completely.”
“You do not want to get rid of me, now you know the burden you are undertaking?”
“That is nonsense. We have come to be true comrades, I hope. And so let that close the matter.”
She sat looking down, and purposelessly twining her fingers together. Then suddenly she raised her eyelids, and I thought I detected a moisture on them.
“I think,” she said—“you may—that is to say—will you call me Fifine, Cousin?”
Truly there is no help like pecuniary for expanding the human emotions. No wonder that an unscrupulous man with a purse can make his opportunities.
“On condition that you call me Felix,” I said; and so it was decided.
But though the compact as to those credit notes was made, and scrupulously insisted on by Fifine, I could see, to do her justice, that she was never easy under the compromise. Her pride of family, I opined, rebelled against that indebtedness to a stranger. So one day I said to her point-blank: “Tell me the truth: you are unhappy at not hearing from my sister. Would you like me to go and see her, and tell her of your difficulties?”
She stared at me with open eyes, into which a positive terror grew.
“What do you mean?” she said. “No, not for worlds! Do you in the least realise the risk you would be running—for yourself; for us both? Sometimes I think you hardly take what you were told about me seriously. Either that, or you are really bent on shaking me off by whatever desperate means.”
“I told you I was not.”
“You never said so directly.”
“Well, I implied it clearly enough—just as clearly as you imply, perhaps without meaning it, the real reason for your worrying about Marion.”
“What is that?”
“Why, that the receiving this contemptible accommodation from me is wounding to your patrician pride.”
“Do I seem to imply that?” she said, in a low voice of wonder. Her cheek flushed; a shadowy smile twitched her lips. “It is quite to mistake me—— On the contrary——”
“Well, what?” I asked, as she paused abruptly.
“Nothing,” she said; and I thought she looked at me wistfully. After a moment she went on: “And anyhow it would be absurd, because you too belong to the Noblesse, though youdopretend to think nothing of such connexions. You do, do you not?”
“I wouldn’t affirm such a thing,” I answered. “Pride of family is the most excusable of all prides, because it is impersonal—a leaning upon the support of a genealogical tree for one’s identity. To claim recognition solely through the achievements of one’s ancestry is really a very pretty form of modesty, if looked at rightly. Besides, we owe something to those to whom we owe our own distinguished position, do we not? I admire you for doing that credit to your ancient lineage, I can assure you I do; and should think less of you if you were capable of accepting favours easily, like a commoner soul. Really, Cousin Fifine, you know, your rank is a very attractive part of you to me. Didn’t you ever guess it?”
She was looking down again, frowning and knitting her fingers together. She murmured something inaudible—it might have been protest or assent.
“But for that very reason,” I went on, “there should be no foolish embarrassment between us in such a matter. Your suggesting such seems like a reflection on my own inferior standing. If you want me to feel on the same social plane as yourself, you must regard this question of funds as totally immaterial.Ishould, believe me, if our positions were reversed; and so, I think, would anybody not a tradesman.”
Still she did not answer; but presently, and quite suddenly, she rose, and, going hastily into her bedroom, shut the door between us.
I was surprised—perhaps; or perhaps I was not. Anyhow, let that pass—and some subsequent days, during which nothing more was said on the subject. In the meantime life went on as before, and I, for my part, found it agreeable. We shared our differences impartially, as we did our amenities; and the money question was shelved.
Early in our acquaintanceship Fifine had cleaned the glass of the little picture by Auguste Ronsin that she so much admired. I don’t know why, but it always piqued me to hear her extravagant eulogies of this piece, which was after all nothing so wonderful, though it was out of the common. One day, when she was in her bedroom, I took the thing off the wall and hid it. She was not long in noticing its disappearance.
“Why have you removed it?” she asked me immediately.
“I want you, for a change, to praise something of mine.”
“Well, I do. Your plats are the most perfect things—models of tasteful cookery.”
“Je veux le croire, Mademoiselle. But I refer to the business of the palette, not of the palate. There comes a limit to welcoming praise of other people at one’s own expense.”
“If I praised a picture of yours it would be in spite of my not understanding it; and what value would my praise have then?”
“O, to perdition with this question of understanding! There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
“No, Felix—no, indeed: I want to have my eyes opened, if you will only believe me. Show me your sketches again.”
I was nothing loth; there can be no question of vanity in proselytism; and I got out a portfolio of colour notes made in Provence. As before, Fifine considered them without emotion, while I confined myself to the simple enumeration of their titles. Presently we came to one before which she paused in a stupefaction so desperate that I was tickled for once into a brief exposition:—
“Imagine yourself waking in bed on a brilliant June morning, and facing a window outside which the plumy tops of a row of plane trees trellised the blue. What would be the impression to your eyes, winking and blinking between dreams and reality? That was painted at Orange.”
Fifine looked up quickly.
“Orange!” she said. “That was where I was born.”
I felt a little surprise; but only for a moment. What was against her being born where she liked? And then she went on, with just a little suggestion of flurry: “How much you must have travelled, judging by all the places you have sketched. And I have never travelled at all.”
“Have you not? Save from Orange to Paris, of course. Do you want to?”
“It would be amusing to see my birthplace again.”
“Well, why not? Let us go together.”
She glanced up, with a quick startled look.
“And run straight,” she said, “into the arms of my enemies.”
“If that is your only objection,” I answered, “I don’t think it need prevent you.”
“Ah!” she said. “You do not believe—I know that.”
“Whether or not, my cousin, makes no difference. To slip out cautiously, and leave the impression, if any such exists, that you were still here, would be to my mind an excellent policy. Think of their watching the empty cage while we were ranging the free earth, unsuspected and without fear.”
She was conning me with eyes in which some astonishment was visible.
“Do you really mean it?”
“Mean what?”
“That about our running away and travelling together?”
“I suggested it quizzically; but really on reflection I don’t know why we shouldn’t. From one particular aspect—that of appearances——”
“You needn’t go on,” she said, interrupting me. “It couldn’t be, of course, and, if I appeared to listen, it was only in jest. Besides, I couldn’t afford it.”
I did not answer to that, because I knew what was in her mind. But the idea which had come into my own remained there to germinate. This hole and corner existence was already figuring as irksome in the light of that wider prospect, and the nomadic instinct in me began immediately to stir and stretch its limbs, like an unswaddled infant laid to kick on its nurse’s lap.
“Very well,” I said: “we will drop the subject for the time being. Are these things making my methods and principles any clearer to you?”
She shook her head forlornly.
“I am very sorry,” she said.
“You want your Ronsin back?”
“Or something in its place. I know you can if you will, Felix. It is only perversity that prevents you. Do, to please me, paint something Icanunderstand.”
“But that I cannot? Well, shall I paint you, Fifine?”
“Like these?”
“No, like that?”
“There!” she cried triumphantly, and in a delighted voice—“I knew it was only theory, and not incapacity at all. O, do, do, Felix!”
“I hope you will appreciate it at its full value—the abnegation of all my most cherished principles. But I declared I was no dogmatist, and this shall go to prove it. Only you must not build too much on the result. You know, after all, I have not young Ronsin’s genius.”
“But you have your own,” she said; “and, try as you will, you have not been able to hide it under that flimsy stuff.”
That portrait of the young woman gave me infinite trouble, but I will admit also infinite satisfaction. As I proceeded, I grew positively enthusiastic over it.
“This shall be something of a revelation,” I said—“perhaps even to yourself. I should recommend any artist, wishing to get at the soul of his subject, to live with it on terms of intimacy for some weeks beforehand. You cannot record a face properly on first acquaintance; and, as to hasty transcripts, one might as well pretend to render the depth and mystery of the moon in a blob of white lead.”
Fifine, who was a very good sitter—perhaps because she was of a sleepy indolent disposition—laughed at that.
“Why?” I demanded.
“O!” she said, “what a jelly you are!”
“A jelly, Madam!”
“Yes; just as dancingly elastic; and such a beautiful coherent shape until something at a touch divides you completely against yourself.”
“You amaze me. Then you do not regard me as consistent?”
“Only in not being so.”
“What a very unamiable characteristic.”
“Well, I don’t think so—or I shouldn’t have said it.”
I glanced up at her in surprise; then continued my work in silence.
Thepopulation of our globe, at any given moment, approximates two thousand millions; the section of Immensity visible from it includes some hundred million worlds, most of which, probably, all, possibly, are proportionately inhabited. How much conceit, per cubic inch of his moral and mental capacity, is deducible from a solitary human unit bent on glorifying his own transitory crumb of existence by way of an autobiographical memoir?
It sounds absurd, in whatever terms of dynamics one explains that unit. There may be a force imprisoned in a grain enough to wreck a continent; but, even then, what is a continent to infinity? The unit is as nothing, though he be as packed with condensed power as a cordite shell: he is one speck of cosmic dust, myriad-accompanied, travelling swiftly across a sunbeam from darkness to extinction: he is vivified into his brief moment of meaningless excitement about nothing, and he ends as meaninglessly. Relatively he is of no more account, points no more original moral, than any other of his microscopic relations. Gladness, hope, disillusionment—so runs the scale with them and him, so it has run, so it will always run. There may be notes beyond the mortal gamut, colours outside the rainbow; for living knowledge, for living guidance they neither exist nor have existed. He just runs up the keys, from bass to treble, runs out at the end—ceases.
And yet he will always be talking about himself—and why? Because, I think, in his conscious indestructibility, he is himself in epitome the whole wonder, tragedy and mystery of Creation. He feels these all in his own soul as an individual possession, and feels that they would be his, though his soul lived in utter solitude apart from its fellows—nay, apart from its body. They are the things to be discussed and recorded, and, because they are him, he must have the conceit of his immortality. He never views them in his heart as ephemeral; they do not cease with his material being. Wherefore it is that we are eternally compelled to regard ourselves, our little passions and our brief histories, as stories not ended but begun; and wherefore it is that, in spite of all our cosmic diminutiveness, Fifine and I shall feel as entitled as any others to talk about ourselves.
And what will it all matter in a few years’ time? I am more reasonable than most rationalists, and I say I don’t know. Nothing may matter; or so much, that any philosophical callousness to which I resolved to discipline my soul now might be found to have worked its own retribution in our eternal severance. I will not risk that, whatever my scepticisms or beliefs; nor could I if I would. Something has suffered in me a “sea-change,” which makes such a mood for ever more unattainable; and, if I appear resigned or indifferent, it is for pride and the world’s sake. There are some feelings we would not share even with a divinely sympathetic archangel.
It is not to be supposed, however, that all this time my intelligent interests were summed up in Fifine and her affairs. Somebody once said of me—wittily as he supposed and as I did not—that I had got too many irons in my fire ever to let it burn properly. He meant, of course, that I was not one of those monomaniacs who cannot pursue one ideal unless they neglect all others. Well, I am not, and, if I lose anything by the fact, it is not interest. Were we made omnivorous, I should like to know, to feed on boiled rice or beans? The man who could “pinch” his own soul of buds, like a prize chrysanthemum, in order to develop one monstrous head, was always a fool to me.Iprefer, improving upon Ancient Pistol, to make the world not only mine oyster, but my pepper, my Chablis, my feast of a hundred dishes from hors-d’œuvre to savoury; and so, if you like, the last decanter being drained, to sleep under the table. Most properly, Death is the only drunkard who never wakes with a headache.
Well, Fifine interested me; but Fifine was not my universe. I can recall quite a number of subjects in which I was more or less immersed during those early days of our comradeship: correspondences with Galt, of the English Meteorological Society, on the question of climatological changes in the upper air strata, with some suggestions for an improved recording instrument; with Hénault, of the geological department of the Jardin des Plantes, on the formations of the Rhone delta, especially as regarded the aluminium beds of les Baux, and with others on the same or kindred subjects. Then I was engaged with Gondran, a practical mechanic, in elaborating a design for a bicycle to be part driven by a dynamo-electric screw, the details of which it gave me infinite pleasure to work out; and I was writing a paper for an Art Magazine on Pigments and their Mediums, with a discursus on the genesis and growth of Art, its psychological necessity and devolution.
That last was a subject inviting some minor collaboration; and my treatment of it owed in certain small details to my companion. We used to worry the thing together, and extract a good deal of amusement out of it. Why, given reality, human nature should have come to desire its artificial presentment: the necessity of gathering generalities to a focus for their better understanding and appreciation: emotion epitomised, as spirit is produced by condensation of diffuser liquids: the inexplicable charm of reflected images, originating very possibly the idea of framed pictures: the permanent recording of heroic deeds, leading by a natural process to the appropriation of design to ignobler and less masculine uses—such points, and fifty others, were suggested and discussed between us, until they began to assume an orderly progression in my mind. And presently the article was written, which I am free to confess it would likely have been less promptly without Fifine’s intervention.
Still, for the most part, my interests were continued independently of her; though I will not say they borrowed no additional relish from her neighbourhood. Pursuing them, it was like—to use a base simile—working with a dram at one’s elbow. To “sip” her in the intervals of reflection was to find one’s hand surer, one’s brain brighter. Then one day it occurred to me that I was getting rather to depend on this moral stimulant, and that I might feel somewhat lost when, in the nature of things, it should be withdrawn. That consideration surprised me into an effort to do without it, by affecting more exclusiveness in my labours; but the effort was not a success.
I don’t know why it was (or do I or did I?); but a favourite topic with Fifine was class distinctions. She frequently recurred to it, and always, it seemed, with a desire to enlist my sympathies on the side of the proletariat—with the kindly intention, perhaps, to put me on good terms with my own less distinguished origin. I took, however, rather a mischievous pleasure in bewildering her—and sometimes myself—as to my sentiments on the subject, though mostly I let her suppose my predilections to be for the “classes”—as thus:—
“The people are the people and will remain the people, not because they are wronged and oppressed, but because they are deficient in certain qualities of the superpeople. Not all the efforts of democrats earnest or democrats self-interested will ever close up and obliterate the line of cleavage; no social reform whatever will make the two one except in name. It is a state of mind, not of condition, which separates them; and that, not class tyranny, was the origin of the division. I think the question of education has nothing to do with it; we have all the same opportunities in that respect. But I think the question of happiness has a great deal to do with it. The people, for all the material misery which infects their masses, are nearer Nature, and therefore further from self-consciousness, than the superpeople, and on that account happier. Finally, the people do not aim at being anything higher than themselves: they aim—and that only when worked upon by demagogues—at reducing the superpeople to their own level.”
“Then anyhow you think the people happier than the superpeople?” says Fifine.
“It seems so.”
Her bosom swelled to a little sigh (she was sitting to me at the moment), and the meditative brown eyes seemed to search me for some reassuring sign.
“Then,” said she, “if I were you, I should know, without any question of qualities, where to seek for happiness.”
“Among the people? And you can say that, remembering the happiness I told you I derived from your high-born condescension?”
She sat back, with a little impatient gesture.
“I wish, for once, you would treat me as an intelligent being,” she said, “and not always with that sort of bantering flippancy. It is not in the least funny, and does not in the least take me in. I don’t condescend, and you know I don’t; and, if I did, the only malicious pleasure you would derive from it would be in laughing in your sleeve at my silly vanity. Sometimes, from my lower place, I wonder if you are really as clever as you would like to appear. Are you?”
I could only glance up with a modest expression.
“There was once a great Englishman, Fifine, whose name was Bacon, and he had a pet proverb, ‘The vale best discovereth the hills.’ Am I, you ask? I leave it to you.”
“Then I think you are not.”
“Ah! Then now I grant your intelligence, and I will never banter you again. Sit quiet a little. Do you know I am nearly at the end of my task?”
She did not answer, and I worked on. She had never from the start been permitted to see the portrait: it was to be a surprise to her—and, possibly, a revelation. Absorbed in some final technical detail, I did not look at her again; until presently, putting down my palette and brushes with a grunt of satisfied relinquishment, I leaned back and our eyes met.
“My dear child!” I said: “Fifine, my dear child!”
She rose, as I rose; but I hurried to stop her before she could escape.
“What is it, m’amie? You were not really hurt by my tone? Why I never thought your interest in the question was any but a mildly controversial one. I would not have laughed at you for one moment, Fifine, if I had believed you serious.”
“Yes,” she said, trying resolutely to blink back the drops that would yet collect and fall; “and I wasn’t serious, of course. I don’t know; but perhaps—perhaps this confinementisbeginning to tell on me a little; and the long sitting was trying.”
“It is the last,” I answered. “Come and look, Fifine, and speak your mind about it.”
She needed no coaxing; she was the remotest from your weeping woman, obstinate and self-pitying. I took her hand, and she came at once, and stood with me before the picture.
She did not speak for a long time; but at length she turned to me, and I was content in the guerdon of her look.
“Felix,” she said softly, “women are really of coarser fibre than men. You see us not as we are, but as your transcendent imaginations paint us. And we know that well enough; and that is why we will always submit to the judgment of men, rather than to that of our own sex, who know the truth.”
“You are pleased, Fifine?”
“That you can see this in me? I should not be a woman otherwise.”
“But, with the style—the technique?”
“It is all beautiful; only—only you have not yet painted what I can understand.”
“Not?”
“No—how I can look like this—to you, to any one.”
I knew her very well. There was no coquetry, no fishing for a compliment in what she said. Suddenly she turned, and approached her face one instant towards mine—God knows on what emotional impulse. It was checked as soon as felt; a vivid flush overspread her cheek.
“I am very tired,” she murmured. “I think I will go and lie down for a little. Vive le maître!”
“Fifine!” I exclaimed; but she was already at the door of her room.
I hadstarted with the word, but I made no attempt to follow: the momentary impulse to do so was reflex and independent of my will. Resolutely I turned to the clearing away of my paraphernalia, whistling as I moved about—ostentatiously noisy. I was savage over having been betrayed even into that one exclamation, significant solely through its tone. It had been surprised out of me; but the warning it conveyed should be unconditional. That glimmer of a Gorgon head had turned me instantly into stone: adamant I would remain thenceforth.
The next day I put a suddenly formed resolve into execution. Telling Fifine through the door that I probably should not be home till late, and that she had better not sit up for me, I went out very early after breakfast, leaving her still half asleep in bed. I had no very definite purpose in my mind but a judicious absenteeism, which I might turn to the profit, or not, of some provisional reconnoitring; and I wished to be abroad betimes in order to avoid chance meetings with acquaintances.
I am ashamed to confess that I did not even know the exact spot of my step-sister’s ministrations; but a few enquiries guided me easily to a place so considerable. The Hôtel Beaurepaire stood, more or less about where I should have expected to find it, in the Avenue Henri-Martin. The actual building was pointed out to me by a precocious bebloused infant, shouldering, like a miniature Hercules, a club of bread. The Hôtel presented nothing more remarkable to the street than a huge white face of painted stucco, broken by innumerable tall windows having each its little white balcony and white jalousies, the latter mostly closed. In the middle, great wrought-iron gates, white, also, and as jealously shut, gave upon an inner quadrangle like an inn courtyard. A glimpse of enclosing buildings, of a welling fountain-basin, of oranges and oleanders in tubs, was to be caught through the foliated interstices of the gate. There was no sign of life anywhere visible; and if there had been, my concern with it was purely speculative. Yet I could not forbear lingering a minute or two in a sort of abstract curiosity, to consider the occasion which associated this august residence, unconsciously to itself, with my insignificant eyrie in the Rue de Fleurus. The sense of disproportion evoked by the thought tickled me: it was little Jack against all Blunderboreland—a thimbleful of mushroom self-assurance against the impregnable stronghold of ages. Could we conceivably defy to the end the forces represented in this place, hoodwink its astute councils, succeed in making our own terms before surrender? One thing did strike me as grotesque—my brief startled impulse of the evening before. That might seem possible in the Rue de Fleurus connexion; it was an incredible audacity here. And here was Fifine’s natural habitat; from such as this she drew her code, her sentiments, her living colour. It was only a marvel that, by whatever force of fear impelled, she could have adapted herself so easily to those changed conditions. But she had been oppressed and persecuted: I had been told so and must believe it, however monstrous it seemed to me that one so attractive and endearing could have been made the subject of a parent’s unnatural tyranny. Perhaps to be allowed to live herself, though in the humblest circumstances, was compensation enough for all the loss implied by what I looked on. Yet shehadnot been crushed; did the fact appear in her conduct, her speech, her imperturbable serenity? And what then?
O! leave all problems to mathematicians. With a laugh I turned away. Why had I come at all? I did not quite know, unless it were, in a sudden access of prudence, to learn something about the place and circumstances of the conspiracy in which I was involved. I had a restless impulse on me to jog the situation somehow, since it was getting congested beyond my management; and this had seemed a first vague step in the direction of movement and change.
What should I do with myself, decided as I was to break, anyhow temporarily, the spell of perilous inaction in which I had become entangled? I strolled aimlessly into the Bois de Boulogne, where the sweepers were at work with their long thin brooms, ruffling the untidy grass which Paris never learns to shave and trim. Loitering slowly on, I heard hurried footsteps behind me, and turned to encounter Marion.
She was mottled in the face—agitation always made her so—and she breathed noisily. Even in that surprised moment I could not help mentally criticising the figure she presented, and uttering a secret thanksgiving that she was my sister only by courtesy. A brother in fact had had reason to feel small pride in the connexion, though in this matter of family credit little allowance is usually made for that unnatural creature’s feelings. Yet I thought I could appreciate the hot anguish of gilded youth forced to chaperon, fraternally and shamefully, a figure so aggressively undesirable as this. She had, it is true, conceded to fashion a hat of the feminine swashbuckler type, which blinded one eye and aggravated the inflammatory defiance of the other; but the scornful plainness of her costume and her flat-heeled stride hopelessly discounted any half compromise with custom her head might display. If there is one thing I detest in women it is the long-skirted jacket, and Marion’s was so long that it left a quite inconsiderable fringe of dress between its end and her strong ankles.
“Walk on,” she said, panting for breath: “don’t stop, but walk on.”
We turned towards the lake; there were few people about, and the morning was still and misty. Presently she opened upon me in her authoritative way:—
“What are you doing here, Felix Dane?”
I glanced at her, amused, raising my eyebrows.
“You are not asking that seriously, Marion?”
“Yes,” she said, compressing her lips, “I am.”
“My dear Marion; I am doing nothing, then, but just pleasing myself.”
“I happened to be looking from a window,” she said, “and I saw you asking a boy to point you out the house.”
“My ignorance was inexcusable, I admit.”