I
UNTIL the age of twenty-one, Armand Ulrich submitted to the controlling influences around him,—somewhat gracelessly, be it admitted. He sat out his uncle’s long dinners, and solaced himself by sketching on the cloth between the courses. He showed a discontented face at his mother’s weekly receptions in a big Parisian hotel, and all the while his heart was out upon the country roads and among the pleasant fields, where the children played under poplars and dabbled on the brim of reedy streams. At twenty-one, however, he regarded himself as a free man, and threw up a situation worth £50,000 a year or thereabouts. From this we may infer that he was a lad full of bright hopes and fair dreams.
He was the only son of a Frenchwoman of noble birth and of the junior partner of a wealthy Alsatian banking-house. His taste for strolling and camping out of doors, sketch-book in hand and pipe in mouth, was partly an inherited taste, with the difference that transmission had strengthened instead of having weakened the heritage. In earlier days Ulrich junior had not shown an undivided spirit of devotion to commercial interests; he had, on the contrary, permitted himself the treasonable luxury of gazing abroad upon many objects not connected with the business of the firm. Amateur theatricals had engaged his affections in youth; five-act tragedies, in alexandrines as long as the acts, had proved him fickle, and operatic music had sent him fairly distraught. He aspired to excel in all the arts, and as a fact was successful in none.
When congratulated upon his brother’s versatility, Ulrich senior would contemptuously retort that the fellow was able to do everything except attend to his business. As a result, he was held in light esteem at the bank, and the meanest client would have regarded himself insulted if passed for consultation to this accomplished but incompetent representative of the firm. However agreeable his tastes may have rendered him in society, it cannot be denied that they were of a nature to diminish his commercial authority. Humanity wisely draws the line at a sonneteering banker, and looks upon the ill-assorted marriage of account and sketch-book with a natural distrust.
This state of things broke the banker’s heart. He had a reverence for the firm of Ulrich Brothers, and if he considered himself specially gifted for anything, it was for the judicious management of its affairs. Thus he lived and died a misappreciated and misunderstood person. To him it was a grievous injustice that he should be treated as a man of no account, because of a few irregular and purely decorative accomplishments. His heart might be led astray, he argued, but his head was untampered with, and that, after all, is the sole organ essential to the matter of bonds and shares. A man may be a wise head of a family and an honest husband, and not for that unacquainted with lighter loves. Such trifles are but gossiping pauses in the serious commotions and preoccupations of life. But no amount of argument, however logical, could blind him or others to the fact that commercially he was a dead failure, because a few ill-regulated impulses had occasionally led him into idle converse with two or three of the disreputable Nine; and mindful of this, he solemnly exhorted his son Armand to fix his thoughts upon the bank, and not let himself be led astray like his misguided father by illusive talents and disastrous tastes.
Armand Ulrich was a merry young fellow, who cared not a button for all the privileges of wealth, and looked upon an office stool with loathing. He only wanted the free air, his pencil, and a comfortable pipe of tobacco,—and there he was, as he described himself, the happiest animal in France. Before his easel he could be serious enough, but in his uncle’s office he felt an irresistible inclination to burst into profane song, and make rash mention of such places of perdition as the Red Mill and the Shepherd Follies,—follies perfectly the reverse of pastoral. He was not in the least depraved, but he took his pleasure where he found it, and made the most of it. A handsome youngster, whom the traditional felt hat and velvet jacket of art became a trifle too well. At least he wore this raiment somewhat ostentatiously, and winked a conscious eye at the maids of earth. With such solid advantages as a bright audacious glance, a winning smile, and a well-turned figure, he was not backward in his demands upon their admiration, and it must be confessed, that men in all times have proved destructive with less material.
But he was an amiable rogue, not consciously built for evil, and he cheated the women not a whit more than they cheated him. He knew he was playing a game, and was fair enough to remember that there is honour among thieves. For the rest, he was fond of every sort of wayside stoppages, paid his bill ungrudgingly, in whatever coin demanded, like a gentleman, and clinked glasses cordially with artists, strollers, and such like vagabonds. The frock-coated individual alone inspired him with repugnance, and he held the trammels of respectability in horror. Whether nature or his art were responsible for a certain loose and merry generosity of spirit, I cannot say; but I am of opinion that, had his mind run to bank-books instead of paints, though his work might be of indifferent quality, he might have proved himself of sounder and more sordid disposition.
Even the brightest nature finds a shadow somewhere upon the shine, and the shade that dimmed the sun for Armand was his mother’s want of faith in his artistic capacities. He loved his mother fondly, and took refuge from her wounding scepticism in his conviction that women, by nature and training, are unfitted to comprehend or pronounce upon the niceties of art. They may be perfect in all things else, but they have not the artistic sense, and cannot descry true talent until they have been taught to do so. It has ever been the destiny of great men to be undervalued upon the domestic hearth, and ’tis a wise law of Nature to keep them evenly balanced, and set a limit to their inclination to assume airs. Thinking thus, he shook off the chill of unappreciated talent, and warmed himself back into the pleasant confidence that was the lad’s best baggage upon the road of life. For a moment an upbraiding word, a cold comment upon dear lips, might check his enthusiasm and cloud his mirthful glance, but a whistled bar of song, a smart stroke of pencil or brush, a glimpse of his becoming velvet jacket in a mirror, were enough to send hope blithely through his veins, and speed him carolling on the way to fame.
It chanced one morning that he was interrupted at his easel by a letter from that domestic unbeliever who cast the sole blot upon his artist’s sunshine. There was a certain haziness in Armand’s relations with art. He worked briskly enough at intervals, but he was naturally an idler. The attitude he preferred was that of uneager waiter upon inspiration, and he had a notion that the longer he waited, provided the intervals of rest were comfortably subject to distraction, the better the inspiration was likely to be. He had neither philosophy nor moral qualifications to fit him for the jog-trot of daily work. So that no interruption ever put him out, and no intruder ever found him other than unaffectedly glad to be intruded upon. Such a youth would of course attack his letters in the same spirit of hearty welcome that he fell upon his friends.
But as he sat and read, his bright face clouded, and his lips screwed and twisted themselves into a variety of grimaces. He had a thousand gestures and expressions at the service of his flying moods, and before he had come to the end of his mother’s letter, not one but had been summoned upon duty. The letter ran thus:—
MY DEAR SON,—It will, I hope, inspire you with a little common sense to learn that your cousin Bernard Francillon has just arrived from Vienna to take your place at the bank. I have had a long interview with your uncle, who makes no secret of his intentions, should you persist in wasting your youth and prospects in this extravagant fashion. And I cannot blame him, for his indulgence and patience have much exceeded my expectations. This absurd caprice of yours has lasted too long. You are no longer a boy, Armand, but a young man of twenty-three, and you have no right to behave like a silly child, who aspires to fly, instead of contentedly riding along in the solid family coach provided for him. If I had any confidence in your talent I might, as you do, build my hopes upon your future fame, and console myself for present disappointment in the faith that your sacrifice is not in vain. But even a mother cannot be so foolish as to believe that her son is going to turn out a Raphael because he has donned a velvet coat and bought a box of paints. Some natural talent and cultivation will help any young man to become a fair amateur, perhaps even a tenth-rate artist; but for such it is hardly worth while to wreck all worldly prospects. Take your father as an example. He did all things fairly well; he drew, painted, sang, composed, and wrote. What was the end of it? Failure all round. He had not the esteem of his commercial colleagues, while the artists, in whose society he delighted, indulged his tastes as those of an accomplished banker whose patronage might be useful to them. While he was wrecked upon versatility, you intend to throw away your life upon a single illusion. Whose will be the gain?
Your whim has lasted two years, and you cannot be blind to the little you have done in that time. You have not had any success to justify further perseverance. Then take your courage in both hands; assure yourself that it is wiser to be a good man of business than a bad artist; lock up your studio and come back to your proper place. If you do so at once, Bernard will have less chance of walking in your shoes. He is much too often at Marly, and seems to admire Marguerite; but I do not think a girl like Marguerite could possibly care for such a perfumed fop.
When you feel the itch for vagabondage and sketch-book, you can be off into the country, and it need never be known that your holidays are passed in any but the most correct fashion. As for your uncle, he will not endure paint-boxes or pencils about him. He is still bitter upon the remembrance of your father’s sins in office hours. I am told he used to draw caricatures on the blotting pads, and write verses on the fly-leaves of the account-books. He was much too frivolous for a banker, and I fear you have inherited his light and unbusinesslike manners. But be reasonable now, and come at once to your affectionate mother,
Poor Armand! The mention of Raphael in connection with the velvet coat and paint-box was a sore wound. It whipped the susceptible blood into his cheeks, for though sweet-tempered, a sneer was what he could not equably endure. Surely his mother might have found a tenderer way to say unpleasant things, if the performance of this duty can ever be necessary! And bitter to him was the assumption that his choice was a caprice without future or justification. Having swallowed his pill with a wry face, he was still in the middle of a subsequent fit of indigestion, when the door opened, and a young man in a linen blouse cried gaily: ‘It’s a case of the early bird on his matutinal round.’
‘Come in, since the worm is fool enough to be abroad. You may make a meal of him, my friend, and welcome, but a poor one, for he’s at this moment the sorriest worm alive.’
The young man shot into the room, inelegantly performed a step of the Red Mill to a couple of bars of unmelodious song of a like diabolical suggestion, and seated himself on the arm of a chair, twisting both legs over and round the other arm and back. In this grotesque attitude he languidly surveyed his friend, and said sentimentally: ‘I have had a letter from her this morning. She relents, my friend, in long and flowery phrases, with much eloquence spent upon the harshness of destiny and the cruelty of parents. Where would happy lovers be, Armand, if there were no destiny to rail against and no parents to arrange unhappy marriages?’
‘Nowhere, I suppose. Doubtless the parents have the interests of the future lover in view when they chose the unsympathetic husband, and everything is for the best. I congratulate you. For the moment, I am empty-handed, and filled with a sense of the meanness of all things; so I am in a position to give you my undivided attention,’ said Armand dejectedly.
‘What’s this? I come to you, to pour the history of my woes and joys into a sympathetic bosom, and if you had just buried all your near relatives you could not look more dismal.’
‘I should probably feel less dismal, had I done so. But it is a serious matter when your art is scoffed at, and you are told that you imagine yourself a Raphael because you wear a velvet coat and handle a brush.’
‘En effet, that is a much more serious matter,’ Maurice admitted, and at once assumed an appropriate air of concern.
Armand glanced ruefully at his coat sleeve, and began to take off the garment of obloquy with great deliberateness.
‘Spare thyself, my poor Armand, even if others spare thee not. Knowest thou not that the coat is more than half the man? A palette and a velvet coat have ever been wedded, and why this needless divorce?’
‘I will get a blouse like yours, Maurice, and wear it,’ said Armand, with an air of gloomy resignation befitting the occasion.
‘And who has reduced you to these moral straits, and to what deity is the coat a holocaust?’
For answer Armand held out his mother’s letter, which the young man took, and read attentively, with an expression of lugubrious gravity. He lifted a solemn glance upon Armand, and shook his head like a sage.
‘Your mother is not a flattering correspondent, I admit. It is clear, she expected you to justify your immoral choice by an extraordinary start. She does not define her expectations. ’Tis a way with women. But I take it for granted that she esteemed it your duty to cut out Meissonnier, or by a judicious combination of Puvis de Chavannes and Carolus Duran, show yourself in colours of a capsizing originality, and finally go to wreck upon a tempest of your own making. For there is nothing in life more unreasonable than a mother. But go to her to-morrow, and tell her you have doffed the obnoxious coat, and intend to live and die in the workman’s modest blouse.’
‘I am not going,’ Armand protested sullenly. ‘I have made my choice, and I can’t be badgered and worried any more about it.’
As behoves a poor devil living from hand to mouth upon the problematical sale of his pictures, Maurice Brodeau had a tremendous respect for all that wealth implies, and like the rest of the world, regarded Armand’s renunciation of it as a transient caprice that by this time ought to be on the wing. He expressed himself with a good deal of sound sense, and thereby evoked a burst of wrathful indignation.
‘Money! Money! Ah, how I hate the word, hate still more the look of the thing! I have watched them at the bank shovelling gold, solid gold pieces, till my heart went sick. Where’s the good of it? It fills the prisons, takes all life and brightness out of humanity, builds us iron safes, and turns us into sordid-minded knaves. Where’s the crime that can’t be traced to its want? and where’s the single ounce of happiness it brings? We are dull with it, envious without it, and yet it is only the uncorrupted poor who really enjoy themselves and who are really generous. The rich man counts where the poor man spends, and which of the two is the wiser? In God’s name, let us knock down the brazen idol, and proclaim, without fear of being laughed at, that there are worthier and pleasanter objects in life, and that it is better to watch the fair aspects of earth than to jostle and strive with each other in its mean pursuit. My very name is distasteful to me, because it represents money. It is a password across the entire world, at which all men bow respectfully. And yet, I vow, I would sooner wander through the squalor and wretchedness of Saint-Ouen, any day, than find myself in the neighbourhood of the Rue de Grenelle. There may be other houses in that long street, but for me it simply means the bank. So I feel upon sight of my mother’s hotel. Her idle and overfed servants irritate me. Everything about her brings the air of the bank about my nostrils, and I only escape it here, where, thank God, I have not got a single expensive object. I smoke cheap cigarettes, which my poorest friends can buy. I drink beer, and sit on common chairs. Well, these are my luxuries, and I take pride in the fact that there is very little gold about me. I can sign a cheque for a friend in need, whenever he asks me, and that’s all the pleasure I care to extract from the legacy of my name. For the rest, I would forget that I have sixpence more than is necessary for independence.’
A youth of such moral perversity was not to be driven down the cotton-spinner’s path, you perceive, and Maurice, with the tact and discretion of his race, forbore further argument, and contented himself with a silent shrug.
But Madame Ulrich was not so discreet. She was a woman of determination, moreover, and knew something of her son’s temperament. If in her strife with what Armand gloriously called his mistress she had been worsted, as was shown by the boy’s sulky silence, she could enlist in her service a weapon of whose terrible power she had no doubt. A man may sulk in the presence of his mother, but unless he has betaken himself to the woods in the mood of a Timon, he cannot sulk in the presence of a beautiful young woman, who comes to him upon sweet cousinly intent.
At least Armand could not, and he had too much sense to make an effort to do so. On the whole, he was rather proud of his weakness as an inflammable and soft-hearted youth. He saw the fair vision, behind his mother’s larger proportions, for the first time in his studio, and made a capitulating grimace for the benefit of his friend, who was staring at the biggest heiress of Europe with all his might, amazed to find her such a simple-looking and inexpensively arrayed young creature. Maurice had perhaps an indistinct notion that the daughters of millionaires traversed life somewhat overweighted by the magnificence of their dress, bonneted as no ordinary girl could be, and habited accordingly.
‘One sees thousands of women dressed like her,’ he thought to himself, after a quick appraising glance at her gown and hat. ‘A hundred francs, I believe, would cover the cost. But there is this about a lady,’ he added, as an after reflection, while his eyes eagerly followed her movements and gestures, the flow of her garments and the lines of her neck and back; ‘simplicity is her crown. There is no use for the other sort to try it; they can’t succeed, and we know them. If Armand does not follow that girl to bank or battle, he’s an unmannerly ass.’
It was not in Armand to meet unsmilingly the arch glance of a smiling girl, even if there were not beauty in her to prick his senses and hold him thrilled. Forgetful of the unwelcome fact that she was worth more than her weight in solid gold, he melted at the sound of her voice, and his foolish heart went out to her upon the touch of her gloved fingers. Not as a lover certainly, for was she not the desired of all unmarried Europe? There was not a titled or moneyed bride-hunter upon the face of the civilised world with whom he had not heard her name coupled, while he was ignorant of the fact that the great man, her father, had destined him to complete her, until he bolted in pursuit of fortune on his own account.
It flattered him to see that she had captivated his friend, too, not contemptuous of the prospect of exciting a little envy in the breast of that individual; and he shot him a look of radiant gratitude when he saw him bent upon engaging the attention of Madame Ulrich, who was nothing loth to be so caught. She smiled sadly, as Maurice chattered on in high praise of her son’s genius, and quoted the opinion of their common master in evidence of his own discernment. From time to time she cast a hopeful eye upon the cousins, and mentally thanked Marguerite for her delicate tact and rare wisdom.
Not a word of comment or surprise upon the bareness of the studio or the shabbiness of the single-cushioned chair upon which she sat; no allusion to his sacrifice, or wonder at it. The charming girl seemed to take it for granted that a lad of talent should find the atmosphere of commerce irksome, and gallantly admitted that such a choice would have been hers, had she been born a boy. To wander about the world with a knapsack, and eat in dear little cheap inns with rough peasants; to wear a silk kerchief and no collar, and have plenty of pockets filled with cord and penknives, and matches, and tobacco, and pencils, and pocketbooks; to sleep under the stars, and bear a wetting bravely,—this is the sort of thing she vowed she would have enjoyed, did petticoats and sex and other contrarieties not form an impediment.
Such pretty babble might not be intended to play into her elders’ hands, Madame Ulrich perhaps thought, but it was very wise play for that susceptible organ, a young man’s heart, whether conscious or not. And that once gained, one need never despair of the reversal of all his idols for love.
When they left the studio, Armand stood looking after them, with his hands in his pockets, under his linen blouse, plunged in profound meditation, the nature of which he revealed soon to his friend.
‘And to think there goes the biggest prey male rascal ever sighed for, Maurice. What title do you imagine will buy her? Prince or duke, for marquis is surely below the mark. Think of it, my friend. There is hardly a wish of hers that money cannot gratify, unless it be a throne or a cottage. And the throne itself is easier come by for such as she than the cottage. What an existence! What a dismal future! What lassitude! What hunger, by and by, for dry bread and cheese and common pewter! A more nauseous destiny must it be, that of the richest woman in the world than even that of the richest man. At least a man can smoke a clay pipe, and take to drink, or the road to the devil in any other way. But what is there left a woman whose wedding trousseau will contain pocket-handkerchiefs that cost a hundred pounds apiece! My aunt Mrs. Francillon’s handkerchiefs cost that. Mighty powers! what an awful way these charming and futile young creatures are brought up! And you see for yourself, this girl is no mere fashionable fool. She, too, would have sacrificed the title and the handkerchiefs, if it were not for the restrictions with which she has been hedged from birth. Let us bless our stars, Maurice, that we were not born girls, and equally bless our stars that girls are born for us.’