CHAPTER VI
Very early 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 making my bed, 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, and de l’Enfer, and the Moulin Rouge, and all those?”
“Not all; but to some, and to some better, in my time. There was the Chat-Noir for instance, to whose collection I had the honour of contributing a trifle of statuary.”
“And to the Elysée Montmartre?”
“O, now and again!”
“To the Bal des Quat’z Arts there?”
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 it is all 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 do something for 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 English avocat, 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 least my thoughts 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 from some furniture 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 you do see without knowing it,” I said.
“But you don’t see it,” she persisted, “if you look straight at the things.”
I tried another tack:—
“I do,” 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.