The pretender: A story of the Latin Quarter

by Robert W. Service

BOOK II—THE STRUGGLE

CHAPTER I
THE NEWLY-WEDS

It was nearly a week before I recovered from the surprise of my sudden marriage.

As far as the actual ceremony went it seemed as if I were the person least concerned. One, James Horace Madden, was tying himself in the most awkward manner to a member of the opposite sex, a slight, pale, neatly-dressed girl whose lucent blue eyes were already beginning to regard him with positive adoration. The said James Horace Madden, a tall, absent-minded young man, stared about him continually. He was, indeed, more like a curious and amused spectator than a principal in the affair, and it was nearly over before he decided to become interested in it.

Well, I was married, so they told me, as they shook my hand; and I had a wife, so she assured me as she clung lightly to my arm. She seemed extravagantly happy. When I saw she was so happy I was glad I had married her. To tell the truth, I had almost backed out. The inconsiderateness of Captain Fitzbarrington in not dying had hurt my feelings and aroused in me a resentment against Fate. In the end, however, good nature prevailed. I believe I am good-natured enough to marry a dozen women should occasion demand.

We had not been wed five minutes before Anastasia developed an extraordinary capacity, for unreserved affection. I have never been capable of unreserved affection, not even for myself; but I can appreciate it in others, particularly if I am the object of it. She also developed such a morbid fear of the infuriate O’Flather that on my suggesting we spend our honeymoon in Paris her enthusiasm was almost grotesque. When we arrived at the Gare du Nord I believe she could have knelt down and kissed the very stones.

And to tell the truth my own delight was hardly less restrained. There’s only one mood in which to approach Paris—Rhapsody. So for ten marvellous days I rhapsodised. The fact that I was on a honeymoon seemed trivial compared with my presence in the most adorable of cities. Truly my bride had reason to be jealous of this Paris, and, as she was given that way, doubtless she would have been had not she herself loved so well.

But there was another matter to distract me: had I not a new part to play? As a young married man it behooved me, in the first place, to acquire a certain seriousness and weight. After due reflexion I decided to give up the flippant cigarette and take to the more dignified pipe. So I made myself a present of a splendid meerschaum, and getting Anastasia to encase the bowl in a flannel jacket I began to colour it.

Imagine me, then, on a certain snappy morning of late December, nursing my flannel-clad meerschaum as I swing jauntily along the Quai des Tournelles. Seasonable weather! the brilliant sunshine playing on the Seine with all the glitter of cutlery: beyond the splendid stride of steel between the two Iles, the Hôtel de Ville: to the left the hideous Morgue; beyond that, again, the grey glory of Notre Dame, its bone-blanched buttresses like the ribs of some uncouth monster, its two blunt towers like timeworn horns, its gargoyles etched in ebon black against the sky.

“After all,” I am reflecting, “the advantages of marrying a person one does not know are sufficiently obvious. Then there is no bitterness of disillusionment, no chagrin of being found out. What woman can continue to idealise an unshaven man in pyjamas? What man can persist in adoring a female in a peignoir with her hair concentrated into knots? In good truth we never marry the person with whom we go through the wedding ceremony: it’s always some one else.”

Here I pause to stare appreciatively at the Fontaine St. Michel, amid whose icicles the sunbeams play at hide-and-seek. Then I watch the steam of a tug which the sunshine tangles in fleeces of gold amid the bare branches of a marronnier; after which in the same zestful way I regard a hearty man on a sand-barge toasting some beef on a sharpened stick over a fire. Suddenly these humble things seem to become alive with interest for me.

“Yes,” I continue, “love is an intoxicant, marriage the most effective of soberers. It is a part of life’s discipline, a bachelor’s punishment for his sins, a life-long argument in which one is wise to choose an opponent one can out-voice. How the fictitious values of courtship are discounted in the mart of matrimony! It makes philosophers of us all. Having been a benedict three weeks, of course I know everything about it.”

The long slate-grey façade of the Louvre is sun-radiant, and like a point of admiration rears the Tower St. Jacques. Looking down the shining river the arches of the many bridges interlock like lacework, and like needles the little steamers dart gleaming through. The graceful river and the gleaming quays laugh in the sunshine, and as I look at them my heart laughs too.

“But,” I go on musingly, “to marry some one you don’t know, some one who has never inspired you with mad dreams, never lived for you in the glamour of romance: surely that is ideal. You have no illusions; her virtues as well as her faults are all to discover. Take my own case. So far, I haven’t discovered a single fault. My wife adores me. She can scarcely bear me out of her sight. Even now I know she’s anxiously awaiting my return; imagines I may have been run over by a taxi, and then arrested by a policeman for getting in its way. Or else I have a maîtresse. Frequently she shows signs of jealousy, and I’ve been away over an hour. Really I must hurry home to reassure her.”

With that I pass under the arch of the Institute, and turn up the rue de Seine. I glance with eager interest at the gorgelike rue Visconti; I itch to turn over the folios before the doors of the art dealers, but on I go stubbornly till I come to a doorway bearing the sign:

HÔTEL DU MONDE ET DU MOZAMBIQUE.

A certain tenebrous suggestion in the vestibule seems to account for the latter part of the title. It is a tall, decrepit building that at some time had been sandwiched between two others of more stalwart bearing who now support it. It consists chiefly of a winding stairway lit by lamps of oil. At every stage two rooms seem to happen; but they are so small as to appear accidental.

So up this precipitous stairway lightly I leap till I come to the third storey. There before a yellow door I knock three times.

“Come in!” cries a joyful voice, and I enter to find two soft arms around my neck, and two soft lips upheld expectantly.

“Hullo, Little Thing,” I shout cheerily.

“Oh, darleen, why you not come before? You affright me. I sink you have haxident, and I am anxieuse.”

“No, no, I’ve only been gone an hour. I’ve had several narrow escapes, though. Nearly got blown into the Seine, was attacked by an Apache in the Avenue de l’Opera, and, stepping off the pavement to avoid going under a ladder, was knocked down by a taxi. But no bones broken; got home at last.”

“Ah! you laugh; but me, I wait here and I sink all the time you was keel. Oh, darleen! if you was keel I die too.”

“Nonsense! You’d make rather a jolly little widow. Well, what else have you been doing, besides worrying about me?”

“Oh, I make blouse. I sink it will be very pretty. You will see.”

“All right, we’ll put it on and go to the opera to-night.”

The “opera” is a cinema house near the Place St. Michel, where we go on rainy evenings, usually in our oldest clothes, and joking merrily about opera cloaks and evening dress.

“See! Isn’t it nice?”

She holds up a shimmering sketch in silk and pins. “It’s the chiffon you geeve me. But you must not spend your money like that. You spoil me.”

“Not at all. But talking about money reminds me: I got my English gold changed to-day. Now, let’s form a committee of ways and means. Here is all that lies between you and me and the wolf.”

I throw a wad of flimsy French bills on the table.

“A thousand francs! Now that’s got to last us till some Editor realises that certain gems of literature signed ‘Silenus Starset’ are worth real money.”

“Oh, they are loovely, darleen, your writings. No one will refuse articles so beautiful.”

“My dear, you can’t conceive the intensity of editorial obfustication. I fear we’ve got to retrench. You must make the ‘economies.’”

“Yes, yes, that is easy for me. I know nussing but make the economies. You see it is the chance often if I have anysing to make the economies on.”

“Good! Well, the first thing is to get out of this hotel. We can’t afford palatial luxury at five francs a day.”

And here I look with some distaste at the best bedroom the Hôtel du Monde et du Mozambique affords. I see a fat, high bed of varnished pine, on which reposes a bloated crimson quilt. On the mantelpiece a glass bell enshrines a clock of gilt and chocolate-coloured marble. There is a paunchy, inhospitable chair of green plush, and two of apologetic cane. An oval table is covered by a fringed cloth of crimson velour, and there is a mirror in two sections, which, by an ingenious system of distortion immediately makes one hate oneself—one either looks mentally abnormal, or about as intelligent as a caveman.

“In truth,” I observe, “the decorative scheme of our apartment puzzles me. Whether it is Empire or Louis Quinze I cannot decide. Really, we must seek something less complex.”

She looks at the money thoughtfully. “We might take a logement. Already have I think of it. To-day I have ask Madame who keep the hotel, and she tell me zere is one very near—rue Mazarin. The rent is five hundred by year. Perhaps it is too much,” she adds timidly.

“No, I think we might allow that. We pay three months in advance, I suppose. Allow other three hundred francs for furnishing—do you think we could manage on that?”

She looks doubtful. “Not very nice; but we will do for the best. I will be so careful.”

“Oh, we’ll arrange somehow. We’ll then have five hundred francs for food and other things. We must make that last for three months. By that time I’m sure to be making something out of my writings. Five hundred francs for two people for three months isn’t much, is it?”

“No, but we will take very much care, darleen. I do not care for myself; it is only for you.”

“Don’t lose any sleep over me. I’ll be all right if you will. It will be real fun scheming and dreaming, and making the best of everything. We’ll see how much happiness we can squeeze out of every little sou; we’ll get to know the joys and sorrows of the poor. They say that Bohemia is vanished; but we’ll prove that wherever there is striving and the happy heart in spite of need, wherever there is devotion to art in the face of poverty, there eternally is Bohemia. Hurrah! how splendid to be young and poor and to have our dreams!”

I laugh exultantly, and the girl enters into my joyous mood.

“Yes,” she says, “we shall be gay. As for me, I will buy a métier. I will work at my hem-broderie. I will make leetle money like that. Oh, not much, but it will assist. So we will be all right.”

“Yes,” I cry, enamoured of the vision. “And when success does come, how we will glory in it! How good will seem the feast after the fast! Ah! but sometimes, when we have our house near the Bois, will we not look back with regret to the days when we struggled and rejoiced there in our tiny Mansard of Dreams?”

I pause for a moment, while my kinematographic imagination begins to work. I go on dramatically:

“Then some day of December twilight, when the snow is falling, I will steal away from the flunkies and the marble halls, and go down to look at the old windows now so blind and dead. And as I stand wrapped in mournful reverie and a five hundred franc overcoat, suddenly I hear a soft step. There in the dusk I am aware of a shadowy form also gazing up at the poor old windows. Lo! it is you, and there are tears in your eyes. You too have slipped away from the marble halls to sentimentalise over the old home. Then we embrace, and, calling the limousine, whirl off to dinner at the Café de la Paix.... But that reminds me—let’s go to déjeûner. Where shall it be—chez Voisin, Foyet, or Laperouse?”

It turns out to be at the sign of the Golden Snail in the neighbourhood of the Markets, where for one franc seventy-five we have an elaborate choice of hors-de-œuvres, some meat that we strongly suspect to be horse, big white beans, a bludgeon of highly-glazed bread, a wedge of mould-sheathed Camembert (which she eats with joy, but which I cannot be induced to touch), and some purple wine that puts my teeth on edge. Yet, as I sit there with a large damp napkin on my knee and my feet in the saw-dust of the floor, I am superlatively happy.

“It is very extravagant,” I say, as I recklessly order coffee. “You know there are places where we can have déjeûner for one franc fifty, or even for one franc twenty-five. Just think of it! We might have saved a whole franc on this meal.”

“We save much more than that, when we have ménage. It will cost so little then. You will see.”

“Will it really? Come on, then, and let’s have a look at your apartment. It may be taken just ten minutes before we get there. They always are.”

Off we go as eager as children, and with rising excitement we reach the mouldering rue Mazarin. We reconnoitre a gloomy-looking building entered by a massive, iron-studded door. Through a tunnel-like porch-way we see a tiny court in the centre of which is a railed space about six feet square. Within it stand a few pots of dead geraniums and a weather-stained plaster-cast of Bellona, thus achieving an atmosphere of both nature and art.

The corpulent concierge emerges from her cubby-hole.— Yes, she will show us the apartment. There has been a Monsieur to see it that very morning. He has been undecided whether to take it or not, but will let her know in the morning.

This makes us keen to secure it, and it is almost with a determination to be pleased that we mount five flights of dingy stairs. A faded carpet accompanies us as far as the fourth flight, then deserts us in disgust.

Nothing damps our ardour, however. We decide that the smallness of the two rooms is a decided advantage, the view into the mildewed court quaint and charming, the fact that water is obtained from a common tap on the landing no particular detriment. The girl, pleased that I am pleased, becomes enthusiastic. It will be her first home. Her heart warms to it. Scant as it is, no other will ever be quite so dear. With the eye of fancy she sees its bareness clad and comforted. Poor lonely house! Seeing the light ashine in the wistful blue eyes, I too become enthusiastic, and thus we inspire each other.

“It’s a dear little apartment,” I say. “How lucky we are to have stumbled on it. I’m going to take it at once. We’ll pay the first quarter’s rent right now.”

“You must geeve somesing to the concierge,” she whispers as I pay.

“Ah, I see! a sop to Cerebus. All right.”

“How much you geeve?”

“Twenty francs.”

“Mon Dieu! Twenty francs! Ten was enough. She sink now we are made of money.”

Anastasia is always ready to remind me that we have entered on a régime of economy. She seems to have made up her mind that, like all Americans, I have no idea of the value of money, and that as a thrifty and prudent woman of the most thrifty and prudent race in the world, it behooves her to keep a close hand on the purse strings. I am just like a child, she decides, and she must look after me like a mother.

What a busy week it is! She takes into her own hands the furnishing of our home, calculating every sou, pondering every detail. Time after time we prowl past the furnishing shops on the Avenue du Maine, trying to decide what we had best take. There is a novel pleasure in this. Thus I am absurdly pleased when, on our deciding to take a table at twenty-two francs, I find a place where I can buy exactly the same for twenty-one.

We save money on the cleaning of the house by doing it ourselves. There is the floor to wax and polish. For the latter operation I sit down on a pad of several thicknesses of flannel, then she, catching my feet, pulls me around on the slippery surface till it shines like a mirror. We are very proud of that glossy floor, and regard our work almost with reverence, stepping on it as one might the sacred carpet of Mecca.

Then comes the furnishing. First, there is the bedroom. We buy two little beds of the fold-up variety, and set them side by side. Our bedding, though only of cotton, is, we decide, softer and nicer than linen and wool; and the pink quilt that covers both beds, could, we declare, scarce be told from silk. Our wardrobe—what is easier than to make a broad shelf about six feet high, and hang from it chintz curtains behind which a dozen hooks are screwed into the wall.

Equally simple are our other arrangements. A cosy corner can be deftly made of boards and cushions. She insists on me buying a superannuated armchair, and she re-covers it, so that it looks like new. She selects cheap but dainty curtains, a pretty table-cloth to hide the rough table, so that you’d never know; a little buffet, a mirror for the bedroom, pictures for the walls, kitchen things, table things—really, it’s awful how much you require for a ménage, and how quickly in spite of yourself your precious money melts.

These are the merry days, but at last all is finished—the first home. What if we have exceeded the margin a little? Everything is really cosy and comforting.

“This is an occasion,” I say. “Let us celebrate it.”

In our little stove, heated to a cherry glow, we roast our maiden chicken. The first time we put it on the table it is not quite enough done. We peer at it anxiously, we probe at it cautiously, finally we decide to put it back for another quarter of an hour. But then—ye gods! What a bird! How plump and brown and savoury! How it sizzles in the amber gravy! Never, think we, have we tasted fowl so delicious. We eat it with reverence.

After that she makes one of the seven-and-thirty salads of that land of salads; then we have a dish of petits pois, and we finish off with a great golden brioche and red currant jam.

“Now,” I say, “we’ll drink to ourselves, and to our ’appy ’ome; and, by the gods, we’ll drink in champagne!”

With that I triumphantly produce a half-bottle of Mousseux that I have been hiding, a graceful bottle with a cap of gold. Appalling extravagance! Veuve Amiot! Who could tell it from Veuve Clicquot?—and it costs only a franc and a half.

Cut the wire! Watch the cork start up, slowly, slowly ... then— Pop! away it springs, and smacks the ceiling. Quickly I fill her a foaming glass, and we drink to “La France.” After that, sitting over the fire, we plunge long spongy biscuits into the bubbling wine that seems to seethe in fierce protest at being thus tormented. And if you do not think we are as happy as the joyous liquor we sip, you do not know Youth and Paris. To conclude the evening, we scurry off to the Cinema theatre as merry as children.

Most of the films are American, and what is my amazement to find that one of them, all cowboys, breeze, and virtue rewarded, is a cinematisation of my own book, Rattlesnake Ranch. Yes, there are my characters—the sheriff’s daughter, Mike the Mule-skinner, and the rest. A thrill runs down my back, almost a shiver.

“How do you like it?” I ask the girl.

“I love it. I love all sings Americaine now.”

“Really, it’s awful rubbish. You mustn’t judge America by things like that.”

“I love it,” she protests stoutly.

We get home quite tired; but after she has gone to bed, I get out my pen and plunge into a new article. It is called, How to be a Successful Wife.

CHAPTER II
THAT MUDDLE-HEADED SANTA CLAUS

In the morning Anastasia always has her ménage to do. She sweeps till the parquet is like a mirror, and dusts till not a speck can you find from floor to ceiling. No priest could take his ministrations more seriously than Anastasia her daily routine as a femme d’intérieur, and on these occasions she makes me feel negligible to the point of humility. So I kiss her, and after being duly inspected and adjured to take precious care of myself, I am permitted to depart.

Oh, these morning walks! How this Paris inspires and exalts me! The year is closing with a seasonable brilliancy of starry nights and diamond-bright mornings. How radiant the sunshine seems as I emerge from our gloomy porch-way, with its prison-like gate! The gaunt rue Mazarin is a lane of light, and the ancient houses, with their inscriptions of honourable service seem to smile in every wrinkle. Each has a character of its own. There are some that step disdainfully back from their fellows, and there are quaint roofs and unexpected, pokey little windows, and a dilapidated irregularity that takes one back to the days of swashbuckling romance.

At the end of the street I stop to give a penny to the blind man who stamps his cold feet and holds out his red hand. On this particular morning he stamps a little more vigorously than usual, and the red hand is so numb that it seems insensible to the touch of the copper coin. The Seine flashes with light. Upholstered with its long, slim quays, it looks more than ever gilt and gracious. Yes, it is cold. The darting bâteaux-mouche are icicle-fringed, and the guardians of the few book-bins that are open are muffled to the ears. I wear no coat, because, except for my old mackintosh, I do not possess one. I have, however, bought a long muffler which I wind around my throat, and allow to flutter behind. People look oddly at me; because, where the world wears a coat, the coatless man becomes a mark.

From the Pont des Arts the river is yellow in colour, and seethes with slush ice. The sun is poised above the Institute, whose dome is black against the sky. The Ile de la Cite is a wedge of high grey houses that seem to pierce the Pont-Neuf bridge, and protrude in a green point, dominated by an enormous tree, through whose branches I can dimly discern the statue of Henri Quatre. Afar, the sweeping rampart of houses that overhang the river melts in pearly haze, and the dim ranges of roofs uprise like an arena amid which I can see the time-defying towers of Notre Dame and the piercing delicacy of the spire, as it claims the sun in a lance of light.

Here I pause to fill (with reverence) the meerschaum pipe, which is colouring as coyly as a sunkissed peach. “What a privilege to live in this adorable Paris!” I think: “How exasperatingly beautiful!”

Under the statue of Voltaire I stop for a moment to regard that enigmatic smile: then I turn to the rue Bonaparte. The École des Beaux-Arts is disgorging its students, fantastic little fellows with broad-brimmed hats and dark, downy faces. Here they come, these vivacious rapins drawn from all the world by that mighty magnet, Paris. Art is in the very air. In that old quadrangle it quivers from each venerable stone. It challenges at every turn. The shops that line the street exude it. Since I have come here it is odd how I have felt its inspiration, so confident and serene, making me disgusted with everything I have done.

Striking up the rue de Rennes I come to a doorway bearing the sign in large letters:

MONT DE PIETE

Trust the French to do things gracefully. Now, if this was a sordid Anglo-Saxon pawnshop I would be reconnoitring up and down, imagining every one knew my errand. Then I would sneak upstairs like a thief trying to dispose of stolen property. But a Mont de Piété—“here goes!”

In spite, however, of its benevolent designation I find this French pawnshop in no way disposed to generosity. Even the most hardened London pawnbroker could hardly be more niggard in appraisal of my silver cigarette case than this polite Mont de Pietist who offers me twenty francs on it. Twenty! it is worth eighty; but my French is too rudimentary for argument, and as twenty francs is not enough for my purpose I draw forth with a sigh my precious meerschaum and realise another five francs on that.

“What does it matter?” I think dolefully. “’Til the tide turns no more smoking. After all, oh mighty Nicotine, am I thy slave? Never! Here do I defy thee! Oh, little pipe, farewell! We’ll meet again, I trust, in the shade of the mazuma tree.”

It is now nearly half-past eleven, and already the Parisian mind is turning joyfully to thoughts of déjeûner. Portly men, to whom eating is a religion are spurring appetite with apéritif. Within the restaurants many have already lunched on a sea of Graves and gravy. “Be it ever so humble,” I decide. “There’s no cooking like ‘Home.’”

With which sentiment I pause before a little shop devoted to the sale of ladies’ furs, and joyfully regard the object of my journey. It is a large, sleek, glossy muff of the material known as electric rabbit, and its price is twenty-five francs. It just matches a long wrap of Anastasia’s, rather worn out but still nice looking.

“How lucky I ran across it yesterday!” I think, as I hurry joyfully home with the muff under my arm. “And to-morrow’s Christmas Day too. I don’t mind giving up tobacco one bit.”

So many others are hastening home with parcels under their arms! Such a happy Santa Claus spirit fills the air! Every one seems so glad-eyed and rosy. I almost feel sorry for the naked cherubs in the centre of the basin in the Luxembourg. Icicles encase them to the toes. Poor little Amours! so pretty in the spring sunshine, now so forlorn.

How quietly I let myself into the apartment, I am afraid she will hear my key scroop in the lock and run as usual to greet me. Softly I slip into the bedroom and pushing the parcel into the suitcase I lock it quickly. Safe!

“Little Thing!” I shout, but there is no reply.

I look into the kitchen, into the dining-room, into the cupboard—no sign of her. Yet often she will hide in order to jump out on me.

“Come out! I know you’re there,” I cry in several corners. No Little Thing.

Then I must confess I begin to feel just a wee bit anxious; when cautiously I hear another key scroop in the lock. It is Anastasia, and she has evidently been walking briskly for her eyes are radiant, and a roseleaf colour flutters in her cheeks. I watch her steal in just as I have done, holding behind her a largish parcel.

“Hullo! What have you got there?”

She jumps, then tries to conceal the package. Seeing that it is useless she turns on me imperiously.

“Go away one moment! Oh go, please!”

“Tell me what’s in your parcel, then.”

“It’s nossing. It’s not your affair. Please give it to me. Now you are not nice. Oh thanks! Now you are nice. To-morrow I show you what it is.”

So I leave off teasing her and make no further reference to the mysterious packet.

There is no doubt the Christmas spirit is getting into me, for I find it more and more difficult to keep my mind on my work. This is distressing, because lately I have been making but slow progress. Often I find myself halting ten minutes or more to empale some elusive word. Greatly am I concerned over rhythm and structure. Of ideas I have no lack; it is form, form that holds me in travail. And the more I perspire over my periods the more self-exacting I seem to become. There will arrive a time, I fear, when my ideal of expression will be so high I will not be able to express myself at all. I wonder if it is something in the air of this Paris that calls to all that is fine and high in the soul?

After supper Anastasia remarks in some surprise: “Why! you do not smoke zis hevening?”

“No, I’m taking a rest. It’s good to leave off sometimes.”

She seems about to say something further, but checks herself. Oh, how I do miss that after-dinner pipe! Life suddenly seems hollow and empty. I had always sworn that the best part of a meal was the smoke after; I had always vowed that tobacco added twenty per cent. to my enjoyment of life, and now—

“Little Thing,” I say presently, “let’s go out on the boulevard. I can’t work to-night. It’s Christmas eve.”

She responds happily. It is always a joy to her to go out with me.

“You’d better put on your fur. It’s awfully cold.”

“No, I don’t sink so this hevening, if you don’t mind. I have not cold, not one bit.”

As we emerge from the gloom of the rue Mazarin the river leaps at us in a blaze of glory. Under a sky of rosy cloud it is a triumph of jewelled vivacity. Exultantly it seems to mirror all the radiance of the city, and the better to display its jewels it undulates in infinite unrest. Here the play of light is like the fluttering of a thousand argent-winged moths, there a weaving of silver foliage, traversed by wriggling emerald snakes. Yonder it is a wimpling of purest platinum; afar, a billowing of beaten bronze. Bridge beyond bridge is jewel-hung, and coruscates with shifting fires. The little steamers drag their chains of trembling gold, their trains of rippling ruby; even the black quays seem to be supported on undulant pillars of amber.

Over yonder on the right bank the great Magasins overspill their radiance. They are like huge honey-combs of light, nearly all window, and each window a square of molten gold. The roaring streets flame in fiery dust, and flakes of gold seem to quiver skyward. Oh, how it stirs me, this Paris! It moves me to delight and despair. To think that I can feel so intensely its wonder and beauty yet to be powerless to express it. I can imagine how too much beauty drives to madness; how the Chinese poet was drowned trying to clasp the silver reflexion of the moon.

And so we walk along, I fathoms deep in dream, and the little grey figure by my side trying to keep pace with me. She, too, has that appreciation of beauty and art that seems innate in every Parisienne, yet she cannot understand how I can stare at a scene ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. However, she is very patient, and effaces herself most happily.

Never have I seen the Boul’ Mich’ so gay, and nearly all are carrying parcels. A million messengers of Santa Claus are hastening to fill with delight the eyes of innocence. The Petit Jésus they call him here, these charming Parisian children. Their precious letters to him, placed so carefully in the chimney, are often wept over by mothers in estranging after years. What joy when there comes an answer to their tiny petitions! When there is none: “Ah! it is because you have not been wise, Clairette. The Little Jesus is not pleased with you.” But the Gift-bringer always relents, and the little shoes, brushed by each tot till not a speck of dulness remains, are found in the morning overspilling with glorious things.

All along the outer edge of the pavement stalls have been set up, tenanted by portly, red-faced women, who are padded against the cold till their black-braided jackets fit tight as a drum. There are booths of brilliant confectionery, of marvellous mechanical toys, of perfumery and patent medicines, of appliances for the kitchen and knick-knacks for the boudoir, of music, of magnifying glasses, of hair restorer, of boot polish.

And the street hawkers haranguing the crowd! There are vendors of holly and mistletoe; men carrying umbrellas all stuck over with imitation snails to ‘bring the good luck’; others with switches to spank one’s mother-in-law; others with grotesque spiders on wire to make the girls scream.

It is nearly midnight when we reach our apartment. The cafés are a glitter of light and a storm of revelry. The supper that is the prelude to further merriment is just beginning, and thousands of happy, careless people are drinking champagne, shouting, singing, laughing. But the rue Mazarin is very dark and quiet, and the girl is very tired.

Then when I am sure that she is asleep I steal to my suitcase and taking out the precious muff lay it at the foot of her bed. Bending over her, as she sleeps like a child, I kiss her. So I too fall asleep.

I am awakened by her scream of delight. She is sitting up, fondling the new muff.

“Oh, I am so please. You don’t know how I am please, darleen.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. Only I thought it would go nicely with your other fur.”

Her face changes oddly. Then she rises and brings me the mysterious parcel.

“It’s your Christmas. I’m sorry I could not geeve you anysing bettaire. Oh, how I love my muff.”

If it had been plucked beaver she could not have been more pleased. I open my parcel eagerly, and a fragrant odour greets me. It is a silver-mounted tobacco jar, full of my favourite amber flake.

Over our petit déjeûner of coffee and croissants we are both very gay. I decide not to work that day; we will go for a walk.

“Geeve me your pipe, darleen. I feel it for you.”

“I don’t seem to be able to find it,” I answer, searching my pockets elaborately.

“You have not lost it?”

“Oh, no, just mislaid it. Never mind, it will turn up all right. Are you ready?”

“Yes, all ready.” She holds the precious muff up to her chin, peering at me over it.

“But your wrap! Aren’t you going to put that on too?”

Then in fear and trembling she confesses. She has taken her fur to the Mont de Piété that she might have ten francs to buy the tobacco jar.

“Why!” I cry, “I sold my pipe so that I might have enough to buy your muff.”

Then I laugh loudly, and after a little she joins me; and there we are both laughing till we are tired; which is not the worst way of beginning Christmas Day, is it?

CHAPTER III
THE CITY OF LIGHT

“Little Thing,” I say severely, “you must never say ‘Damn.’”

“But you say it, darleen.”

“Yes, but men may do and say things women must not even think of. Say ‘Dash’ if you want to say anything.”

“Oh, you are funny. You tell me I must not say certeen words in English, yet in France everybody say ‘Mon Dieu.’”

“Yes, it’s not good form to say those words in English; just as you tell me in France in polite society one never refers to a thousand sacred pigs. Profanity is to some extent a matter of geography.”

But if I succeed in prohibiting the profanity of my country, I cannot prevent her picking up its slang. For instance, “Sure Mike” is often on her lips. She has heard me use it, and it resembles so much her own “Surement” that she naturally and innocently adopts it. I tremble now when she speaks English before any punctilious stranger, in case, to some polite inquiry, she answers with an enthusiastic: “Sure Mike.”

I have insisted on her recovering her fur from the Mont de Piété, and she in her turn has made me buy a long, black brigandish cape that has previously been worn by some budding Baudelaire or some embryo Verlaine.

“Seems to me,” I grumble, “now I have this thing I might as well get one of those bat-winged ties, and a hat with a six-inch brim.”

“Oh, you will be lovely like that,” she assures me with enthusiasm. “And you must let your hair grow long like hartist. Oh, how chic you will be!”

“Perhaps you’d also like me to cultivate an Assyrian beard and curl my hair into ringlets like that man we sat next to at the café du Dome last night.”

“No, no; I do not want that you hide your so nice mouth, darleen. I am prefair American way now.”

“You prefer Americans to Frenchmen, then.”

“All French girls prefer American and English to Frenchmans. They are so frank, so honest. One can trust them.”

“So you would rather be married to an Englishman than a Frenchman?”

“Mon Dieu! yes, The Frenchmans deceive the womans very much, but the Englishman is always comme-il-faut. If ever I have leetle girl I want she shall marry Englishmans. Ah! she shall be like her fazzer, that leetle girl, wiz blue eyes, and colour so fresh; and I want she have the lovely blond hair like all English children.”

“What if you have a boy?”

“Ah no! I no want boy. I know I am selfeesh. The boys have the best sings in the life, and it is often hard for the womans. But if I have girl, I keep her love always. If I have boy soon I lose heem. He get marry, and zen it is feenish. But leetle girl, in trooble she always come back to her mosser.”

“And suppose you don’t have either?”

“Oh, I sink zat would be very, very sad.”

Often have I marvelled at the passion for maternity that burns in Anastasia. Her eyes shine so tenderly on children, and she will stop to caress some little one so yearningly.

“By the way, have you ever noticed the child on the ground floor apartment?—a little one with hair the colour of honey.”

“Oh yes; she’s good friend of me. She is adorable. Oh how I love have childs like zat. She’s call Solonge. She’s belong Frosine.”

“Who’s Frosine?”

“She’s girl what sew all day. She work for the Bon Marché. It’s awfool how she have to work hard.”

“Poor woman!”

“Oh no; she’s very ’appy like that. She’s free, and she have Solonge. She sing all day when she sew. Oh, she have much of courage, much of merit, that girl.”

“But,” I say, “would you like to have a child like that?”

“Why not, if I can care well for it and it make me ’appy?”

“But—it wouldn’t be moral.”

“No, but it would be natural.”

“Yes, but sometimes isn’t it wicked to be natural?”

“I do not understand. I do not sink Frosine is wicked. She’s so kind and gently. She adore Solonge. She’s brave. All day she work and sing. You do not sink she is all bad because she have childs?”

I did not immediately reply. I am wondering....

Have social conditions reached a very lofty status even yet when the finest, truest instincts implanted in humankind are often denied? Does not life mean effort, progress, human triumph? Can we not look forward to a better time when present manifestly imperfect conditions will be perfected?

“Yes, Anastasia,” I conclude; “the greatest man that ever lived should take off his hat to the humblest mother, for she has accomplished something he never could if he lived to be a thousand. But come! Let’s go out on the Grand Boulevard. I’ve been working too hard; I’m fagged, I’m stale, there’s a fog about my brain.”

Very proudly she dons her furs of electric rabbit, and rather ruefully I wreathe myself in my conspiratorial cloak; then together we go down into the city.

The City of Light! Is there another, I wonder, that flaunts so superbly the triumph of man over darkness? From the Mount of Parnassus to the Mount of the Martyrs all is a valley of light. The starry sky is mocked by the starry city, its milky way, a river gleaming with gold, shimmering with silver, spangled with green and garnet. The Place de la Concorde is a very lily garden of light; up the jewelled sweep of the Champs Elysee the lights are like sheeny pearls with here and there the exquisite intrusion of a ruby; beneath a tremulous radiance of opals the trees are bathed in milky light, while amid the twinkling groves the night restaurants are sketched in fairy gold. The Grand Boulevards are fiery-walled canyons down which roar tumultuous rivers of light; the Place de l’Opera is a great eddy, flashing and myriad-gemmed; the magasins are blazing furnaces erupting light at every point: They are festooned with flame; they are crammed with golden lustre; they blaze their victorious refulgence in signs of light against the sky. And so night after night this city of sovereign splendour hurls in flashing light its gauntlet of defiance to the Dark.

The pavements are packed with people, moving slowly in opposing streams. Most are garbed in ceremonial best; and many carry flowers, for this is the sacred day of family gathering. The pavement edge is lined with tiny booths and shrill with importunate clamour.

We stop to gaze at some of the mechanical toys. Here are aeroplanes that whirl around, peacocks that strut and scream, rabbits that hop and squeak, shoe-blacks, barbers, acrobats, jugglers, all engaged in their various ways. But what amuses us most is a little servant maid who walks forward in a great hurry carrying a pile of plates, trips, sends them scattering, then herself falls sprawling. How I laugh! Yet I am at the same time laughing at myself for laughing. Am I going back to my second childhood? No! for see; all those bearded Frenchmen are laughing too, just like so many grown-up children.

“Come,” I suggest, after we have ranged along a mile or so of these tiny booths, “let’s sit down in front of one of the cafés.”

With difficulty we find a place, and ordering two cafés créme watch the dense procession. The honest bourgeois are going to New Year’s Dinner, and their smiles are very happy. Soon they will frankly abandon themselves to the pleasures of the table, discussing each dish with rapture and eating till they can eat no more.

“What a race of gluttons are the French,” I remark severely to Anastasia. “Food and dress is about all they seem to think of. The other day I read in the paper that a celebrated costumier had received the cross of the Legion of Honour, and this morning I see that a well-known restaurateur has also been deemed worthy of the decoration. There you are! Reward your tailors and your cooks while your poets and your painters go buttonless. Oh, if there’s a people I despise, it’s one that makes a god of its stomach! By the way, what have we got for dinner?”

“Oh, I got chickens.”

“A good fat one, I hope.”

“Yes, nice fat chickens. I pay five franc for it. You are not sorry?”

“No, that’s all right. We can make it do two evenings, and we allow ourselves five francs a day for grub. I fancy we don’t spend even that, on an average?”

“No, about four and half franc.”

Every week she brought her expense book to me, and very solemnly I wrote beneath it: Examined and found correct. Another habit was to present for my approval a menu of all our meals for the coming week beneath which I would, in the same serious spirit, write: Approved. To these impressive occasions she contributed a proper dignity; yet at a hint of praise for her house-keeping nothing could exceed her delight.

Presently we rise and continue our walk. Everywhere is the same holiday spirit, the same easily amused crowd. There are song writers hawking their ditties, poor artists peddling their paintings, a “canvas for a crust.” Every needy art is gleaning on the streets.

“Stop!” she cries suddenly. Drawing me in the direction of a small crowd; “let’s watch the silhouette man.”

He is young, glib, good-looking. He has audacious eyes and a rapscallion smile. This smile is sometimes positively impish in its mockery; yet otherwise he is rather like a cherub. His complexion is pinkish, his manner mercurial, his figure shapely and slim. He is dressed in the cloak, broad-brimmed hat, and voluminous velveteen trousers of the rapin. I stare at him. Something vaguely familiar in him startles me.

In one hand he holds a double sheet of black paper, in the other a pair of scissors. For a moment he looks keenly at his subject, then getting the best angle for the profile, proceeds without any more ado to cut the silhouette. It is a very deft, delicate performance and all over in a minute.

“Just watch him, Anastasia,” I say after a pause; “I think there’s something interesting going to happen.” Then in a drawling voice I remark:

“Well, if that’s not a dead ringer for Livewire Lorrimer!”

He hears me, looks up like a flash, scrutinises me in a puzzled way.

“I haven’t heard that name for fifteen years. Of all the—why, if it isn’t Jimmy Madden, Mad Madden, Blackbeard the pirate, Red Hand the scout, friend of my boyhood! I say! there’s a dozen people waiting and this is my busy day. Ask your friend to stand up to the light and I’ll make a silhouette of her while we talk.”

“My wife.”

“Bless us! Married too! Well, congratulations. Charmed to meet Madame. There! Just stand so.”

With great dexterity he proceeds to cut Anastasia’s delicate features on the black paper.

“Great Scott! I haven’t heard a word about you since I left home. But then I’ve lost track of all the crowd. Well, what in the world are you doing here?”

“I’m trying to break into the writing game. And you?”

“For ten years I’ve been trying to become an artist. Occasionally I get enough to eat. I have to work for a living, as you see at present; but when I get a little ahead I go back to my art. Where do you live?”

I tell him.

“Oh, I know, garden and statuary in the court. I lived in that street myself for a time, but my landlord and I did not agree. He had ridiculous ideas on the subject of rent. My idea of rent is money you owe. He was so prejudiced that one night I lowered all my effects to a waiting friend with a voiture à bras, and since then rue Mazarin has seen little of me. But I’d like to come and see you. We’ll talk over old days.”

“Yes, I do wish you would come.”

“I will. Ah, Madame, here is your charming profile. I only regret that my clumsy scissors fail to do you justice. Yes, Madden, I’ll come. And now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a dozen people waiting. I must make my harvest while the sun shines. Good-bye, just now. Expect me soon.”

He waves us an airy farewell, and a moment after, with the same intent gaze, he is following the features of a fat Frenchwoman, who laughs immoderately at his pleasantries.

We walk home almost without speaking. Anastasia has got into the way of respecting my thoughts. To her I am Balzac, Hugo and Zola rolled into one, and labelled James Horace Madden. Who is she that should break in on the dreams of this great author? Rather let her foster them by sympathetic silence. Yet on this occasion she looks up in my face and sighs wistfully:

“What are you sinking of, darleen?”

Now, here’s what I think she thinks I am thinking:

“Oh, this fiery, fervid Paris, how can my pen proclaim its sovereignty over cities, its call to high endeavour, its immemorial grace? How can I paint its folly and its faith, its laughter and its tears, its streets where tragedy and farce walk arm in arm, where parody hobnobs with pride, and beauty bends to ridicule! Oh, exquisite Paris! so old and yet so eternally young, so peerless, yet ever prinking and preening to make more exorbitant demands on our admiration....” And so on.

Here’s what I am really thinking:

“Funny I should run into Livewire like that. To think of it! We swapped the same dime novels, robbed the same cherry-trees. Together we competed for the bottom place in the class. (I think I generally won.) By pedagogic standards we were certainly impossible. And yet at some studies how precocious! How I remember that novel I wrote, The Corsair’s Crime, or the Hound of the Hellispont, illustrated by Livewire on every page. Oh, I’d give a hundred dollars to have that manuscript to-day!” and so on.

Here’s what I say I am thinking:

“I was wondering, Anastasia, if when you bought that chicken, you let them clean it in the shop. Because if you do they just take it away and bring you back an inferior one. You can’t trust them. You should clean it yourself. Be sure you roast it gently, so as to have it nicely browned all over....” And so on.

It is night now and I am working on my articles while she sews steadily. It has been a long silent evening, a fire of boulets throws out a gentle heat, and she sits on one side, I on the other. About ten o’clock she complains of feeling tired, and decides to go to bed. After our habit I lie down on my own bed, to wait with her till she goes to sleep; for she is just like a child in some ways. I am reading, and the better to see, I lie with my head where my feet should be.

As she is dropping off to sleep, suddenly she says:

“Will you let me hold your foot, darleen?”

“Yes, it’s there. But if you want to look for holes in the sock, you won’t find any.”

“No, it’s not zat. I just want to pretend it’s leetle bébé.”

“So she holds it close to her breast, and ever since then she will not sleep unless she is holding what she calls ‘her poupée.’”

CHAPTER IV
THE CITY OF LAUGHTER

The last few weeks have passed so swiftly I scarce can credit it. In the mornings my vitalising walks; in the afternoons my lapidary work in prose. I have begun a series of articles on Paris, and have just finished the first two, bestowing on them a world of loving care. Never have I known such a steady glow of inspiration. A pure delight in form and colour thrills in me. I begin to see beauty in the commonest things, to find a joy in the simplest moments of living.

It is rather curious, this. For instance, I gaze in rapture at a shop where vegetables are for sale, charmed with its oasis of fresh colouring in the grey street, the globular gold of turnips, the rich ruby of radishes, the ivory white of parsnips. Then a fish shop charms me, and I turn from the burning orange of the dories to the olive and pearl of the merlin; from the jewelled mail of the mackerel, to the silver cuirass of the herring. And every day seems fresh to me. I hail it with a newborn joy. I seem to have regained all the wonder and vital interest of the child point of view. In my work, especially, do I find such a delight that I shall be sorry to die chiefly because it will end my labour. “So much to do,” I sigh, “and only one little lifetime to do it in.”

Then there are long, serene evenings by the fire, where I ponder over my prose, while Anastasia sits absorbed in her work. What a passion she has for her needle! She plies it as an artist, delighting in difficulties, in intricate lacework, in elaborate embroidery. In little squares of fine net she works scenes from Fontaine; or else over a great frame on which a sheet of satin is tightly stretched, she makes wonderful designs in silks of delicate colouring. At such times she will forget everything else, and sit for hours tranquilly happy. So I write and dream; while she plies that exquisite needle, and perhaps dreams too.

“Oh, how good it is to be poor!” I said last night. “What a new interest life takes on when one has to fight for one’s bread! How much better to have nothing and want everything, than to have everything and want nothing! Just think, Little Thing, how pleased we are at the end of the week if we’ve spent five francs less than we thought! Here’s a month gone now and I’ve done four articles and a story, and we still have three hundred francs left.”

“When it will be that you will send them to the journals?”

“Oh, no hurry, I want to stack up a dozen, and then I’ll start shooting them in.”

“We have saved four francs and half last week.”

“The deuce we have! Then let’s go to Bullier to-night. We both want a touch of gay life. Come! we’ll watch Paris laugh.”

So we climbed the Boul’ Mich’, till at its head in a crescent of light we saw the name of the famous old dance-hall. Threading our way amid the little green tables, past the bowling alley and the bar, we found a place in the side-gallery.

We were looking down on a scene of the maddest gaiety. The great floor was dense with dancers and kaleidoscopic in colouring. In the wildest of spirits five hundred men and girls were capering, shuffling, jigging and contorting their bodies in time to tumultuous music. Some danced limb to limb, others were bent out like a bow; some sidled like a crab, others wriggled like an eel; some walked, some leaped, some slid, some merely kicked sideways: it was dancing in delirium, Bedlam in the ball-room.

And what conflicting colours! Here a girl in lobster pink galloped with another whose costume was like mayonnaise. There a negress in brilliant scarlet with a corsage of silver darted through the crowd like a flame. A hideous negro was dancing with a pretty grisette who with fluffy hair and flushed cheeks looked at him adoringly as he pawed her with his rubber-blue palms. An American girl in shirt waist and bicycle skirt zig-zagged in and out with a dashing Spaniard. A tall, bashful Englishman pranced awkwardly around with a midinette in citron and cerise, while a gentleman from China solemnly gyrated with a mannequin in pistachio and chocolate. Pretty girls nearly all; and where they lacked in looks, full of that sparkling Parisian charm.

“There’s your friend, Monsieur Livwir,” said Anastasia suddenly. Sure enough, there in that maelstrom of merriment I saw Lorrimer dancing with a girl of dazzling prettiness. Presently I caught his eye and after the dance he joined us.

“You haven’t been to see me yet,” I remarked.

“No, been too busy,—working every moment of my time.” Then realising that the present moment rather belied him he shrugged his shoulders.

To tell the truth I have been feeling a little hurt. We sentimentalists are so prone to measure others by our own standards. Our meeting, so interesting to me, had probably never given him another thought. Now I saw that while I was an egoist, Lorrimer was an egotist; but with one of his boyish smiles he banished my resentment.

“Let me introduce you to Rougette,” he said airily; “she’s my model.”

He beckoned to the tall blonde. Rarely have I seen a girl of more distracting prettiness. Her hair was of ashen gold; Parma violets might have borrowed their colour from her eyes; Nice roses might have copied their tint from her cheeks, and her tall figure was of a willowy grace. Her manner had all the winning charm of frank simplicity. She was indeed over pretty, one of those girls who draw eyes like a magnet, so that the poor devil who adores them has little peace.

“The belle of all Brittany,” said Lorrimer proudly. “I discovered her when I was sketching at Pont Aven last summer. I’m going to win the Prix de Rome with a picture of that girl. I’m the envy of the Quarter. Several Academicians have tried to get her away from me; but she’s loyal,—as good as she looks.”

I did not find it easy to talk to Rougette. Her French was the argot of the Quarter, grafted on to the patois of the Breton peasant; mine, of the school primer. Our conversation consisted chiefly of smiles, and circumspect ones at that, as Anastasia had her eye on me.

“After another dance,” suggested Lorrimer, “let’s go over to the Lilas. We’ll probably see Helstern there. I’d like you to meet him. Besides it’s the night the Parnassian crowd get together. Perhaps you’ll be amused.”

“Delighted.”

“All right.”

Off they went with their arms around each other’s necks, and I watched them swiftly mingle with the dancers. What a pretty couple they made!—Lorrimer so dashing and debonair, with his face of a sophisticated cherub, and his auburn hair that looked as if it might have been enamelled on his head, so smooth was it; Rougette with the mien of a goddess and the simple soul of a Breton fishwife.

But it was hard to follow them now, for the throng on the floor had doubled. In ranks that reached to the side galleries the spectators hemmed them in. The variety of costume grew more and more bewildering. Men were dressed as women, women as men. Four monks entered arm in arm with four devils; Death danced with Spring, an Incroyable with a stone-age man, an Apache with a Salomé. More and more négligé grew the costumes as models, mannequins, milliners, threw aside encumbering garments. Every one was getting wound up. Yells and shrieks punctuated the hilarity; then the great orchestra burst into a popular melody and every one took up the chorus:

“Down in Mozambique, Mozambique, Mozambique,

It’s so chic, oh so chic;

No need to bother over furs and frills.

No need to worry over tailor’s bills;

Down in Mozambique, Mozambique, Mozambique,

You may wear fig-leaves there

When you go a-mashing in the open air

In Mo-zam-bique.”

As they finished men tossed their partners in the air and carried them off the floor. Every one was hot and dishevelled; the air reeked of pachouli and perspiration, and seeing Lorrimer signalling to us we made our escape.

I remember how deliciously pure seemed the outside air. The long tree-clad Avenue de l’Observatoire was blanched with hoar frost and gleamed whitely. The face of the sky was pitted with stars, and the crescent moon seemed to scratch it like the manicured nail-tip of a lovely woman. Across the street amid the trees beaconed the lights of a large corner café, and to this we made our way.

A long room, lined with tables, dim with tobacco smoke, clamorous with conversation. We found a vacant table, and Lorrimer, after consulting us, ordered “ham sandveeches et grog American.” In the meantime I was busy gazing at the human oddities around me. It seemed as if all the freaks of the Quarter had gathered here. Nearly all wore their hair of eccentric length. Some had it thrown back from the brow and falling over the collar in a cascade. Others parted it in the middle and let it stream down on either side, hiding their ears. Some had it cut square to the neck, and coming round in two flaps; with others again it was fuzzy and stood up like a nimbus. Many of the women, on the other hand, had it cut squarely in the Egyptian manner; so that it was difficult to tell them at a distance from their male companions.

“It’s really a fact,” said Lorrimer, “that long hair is an aid to inspiration. Every time I cut mine it’s good-bye work till it grows again. And as I really hate it long my work suffers horribly.”

The centre of attraction seemed to be a tall man whose sallow face was framed in inky hair that detached itself in snaky locks. As if to accentuate the ravenish effect he wore an immense black silk stock, and his pince-nez dangled by a black riband. This was Paul Ford, the Prince of the Poets, the heritor of the mantle of Verlaine.

“There’s a futurist poet,” said Lorrimer, pointing to a man in a corner who had evidently let his comb fall behind the bureau and been too lazy to go after it. He had a peaked face overwhelmed by stringy hair, with which his beard and whiskers made such an intimate connection that all you could see was a wedge of nose and two pale-blue eyes gleaming through the tangle.

“See that man to the right,” went on my informer; “that’s the cubist sculptor, a Russian Jew.”

The sculptor looked indeed like a mujic, with coarse, spiky hair growing down over his forehead, eyebrows that made one arch over his fierce little eyes, up-turned nose, a beard and moustache, which, divided by his mouth, looked exactly like a scrubbing-brush the centre of which has been rubbed away by long usage.

“Look! There’s an Imagist releasing some of his inspirations.”

This was a meagre little man in evening dress, with a bony skull concealed by the usual mop of hair. He had a curiously elongated face, something like a horse, the eyes of a seraph, the shell-like colour of a consumptive, large, vividly-red lips, and an ineffable smile which exposed a small cemetery of decayed teeth.

“Ah!” said Lorrimer suddenly; “see that chap sitting lonely in the corner with his arms folded and a sort of Strindberg-Nietzsche-Ibsen expression? Well, that’s Helstern.”

I saw a tall, youngish-oldish sort of man with a face of distinguished taciturnity. His mouth was grimly clinched; two vertical lines were written between his eyebrows, and a very high forehead was further heightened by upstanding iron-grey hair. On the other hand his brown eyes were soft, velvety and shy. He was dressed in dead black, with a contrast of very white linen. Close to his elbow stood a great stein of beer, while he puffed slowly from a big wooden pipe carved into a fantastic Turk’s head.

“Poor old Helstern!” said Lorrimer; “he takes life so seriously. Take life seriously and you’re going to get it in the neck: laugh at it and it can never hurt you.”

This was his gay philosophy, as indeed it was of the careless and merry Quarter he seemed to epitomise. Treat everything in a cynical and mocking spirit, and you yourself are beyond the reach of irony. It is so much easier to destroy than to build up. Yet there was something tart and stimulating in his scorn of things as they are.

“Too bad to drag him from sublime heights of abstraction down to our common level. Doesn’t he look like a seer trying to discern through the anarchy of the present some hope for the future? Well, I’ll go over and see if he’ll join us. He’s shy with women.”

So the Cynic descended on the Seer, and the Seer listened, drank, smoked thoughtfully, looked covertly at the two girls, then rose and approached us. With a shock of pity I saw that one of his legs was shorter than the other, and terminated in a club foot. Otherwise he was splendidly developed, and had one of the deepest bass voices I have ever heard.

“Well, old man, alone as usual.”

Somewhat self-conscious and embarrassed, Helstern spoke rather stiffly.

“My dear Lorrimer, much as I appreciate your charming society there are moments when I prefer to be alone.”

“Oh, I understand. Great thoughts incubated in silence. Own up now, weren’t you thinking in nations?”

“As it happens,” answered the Seer in his grave, penetrating tones, “I was thinking in nations. As a matter of fact I was listening to the conversation of two Englishmen near me.”

He paused to light his pipe carefully, then went on in that deep, deliberate voice.

“They were talking of International Peace—fools!”

“Oh, come now! You believe in International Peace?”

He stared gloomily into the bowl of his pipe.

“Bah! a chimera! futile babble! No, no; there are too many old scores to settle, too many wrongs to right, too many blood feuds to be fought to a finish. But there will be International War such as the world has never seen. And why not? We are becoming a race of egotists, civilisation’s mollycoddles; we set far too high a value on our lives. Oh, I will hate to see the day when grand old war will cease, when we will have the hearts of women, and the splendid spirit of revenge will have passed away!”

“Don’t listen to him,” said Lorrimer; “he isn’t so bloodthirsty as he sounds. He wouldn’t harm a fly. He’s actually a vegetarian. What work are you doing now, you old fraud?”

Helstern looked round in that shy self-conscious way of his:

“I’m working on an allegorical group for the Salon.”

“What’s the subject?”

“Well, if I must confess it, it’s International Peace. Of course, it’s absurd; but the only consolation for living in this execrable world is that one can dream of a better one. To dream of beauty and to create according to his dream, that is the divine privilege of the artist.”

“Yes, what dreamers are we artists!” said Lorrimer thoughtfully. “You, Helstern, dream of leaving the world a little better than you find it; I dream of Fame, of doing work that will win me applause; and you, Madden—what do you dream of?”

“Oh, I don’t take myself quite so grandiosely,” I said with a laugh. “I dream of making enough money to take me back to the States, to show them I’m not a failure.”

“Failure!” said Lorrimer with some feeling; “it’s those who stay at home that are the failures. Look at them—small country ministers, provincial lawyers, flourishing shopkeepers; such are the shining lights of our school-boy days. Tax-payers, pillars of respectability, good honest souls, but—failures all.”

“A few are drummers,” I said. “The rest are humdrummers.”

“Yes,” said Lorrimer. “By way of example, let me relate the true history of James and John.”

“James was the model boy. He studied his lessons, was conscientious and persevering. He held the top of the class so often that he came to consider he had an option on it. He nearly wore his books out with study, and on prize-giving days he was the star actor on the programme. Brilliant future prophesied for James.

“Twin brother John, on the other hand, as consistently held down the bottom of the class. He was lazy, unambitious, irreverent. He preferred play to study, and was the idol of the unregenerate. Direst failure prophesied for John.

“James went into the hardware store and commenced to save his earnings. Soon he was promoted to be salesman. He began to teach in the Sunday School. He was eager to work overtime, and spent his evenings studying the problems of the business.

“John began to take the downward path right away. He attended race-courses, boldly entered saloons, haunted low music-halls. The prophets looked wiser than ever. He lost his job and took to singing at smoking concerts. He spent his time trying to give comic imitations of his decent neighbours, and practising buck-and-wing dances till his legs seemed double-jointed.

“James at this period wore glossy clothes, and refused to recognise John on the street. John merely grinned.

“James stayed with the home town, married respectably, and had six children in rapid succession as every respectable married man should. He owned the house he lived in and at last became head of the hardware store.

“John one day disappeared; said the village was too small for him; wanted to get to a City where he could have scope for his talents. Said the prophets: ‘I told you so.’

“And to-day James, my friends, is a school trustee, an alderman, a deacon of the church. He is pointed out to the rising generation as a model of industry and success. But John—where is John?

“Alas! John is, I regret to say, at present touring in the Frobert & Schumann Vaudeville Circuit. He is a headliner, and makes five hundred dollars a week. All he does for it is to sing some half a dozen songs every night, in which he takes off his native townsmen, and to dance some eccentric steps of his own invention. He has a limousine, a house on Riverside Drive, and a box of securities in the Safety Deposit Vault that makes the clerk stagger every time he takes it out. He talks of buying up his native village some day and the prophets have gone out of business.

“And now, friends, let’s pry out the unmoral moral. Honest merit may cinch the boss job in the hardware store, but idle ignorance often cops the electric sign on Broadway. The lazy man spends his time scheming how to get the easy money—and often gets it. The ignorant man, unwarped by tradition, develops on original lines that make for fortune. Even laziness and ignorance can be factors of success. All of which isn’t according to the Sunday School story book, but it’s the world we live in. And now as I see Madam is tired, let’s bring the session to a close.”

That night, as I was going home, with Anastasia clinging on my arm, I said:

“And what is it you dream of, Little Thing?”

“Me! Oh, I dream all time I make good wife for the Beautiful One I have.”

CHAPTER V
THE CITY OF LOVE

This morning in the course of my walk I was passing Cook’s corner in the Place de l’Opera, when I was accosted from behind by an alcoholic voice:

“Want to see the Crystal Palace to-day, sir?”

Now the Crystal Palace is one of these traps for the stranger with which Paris is baited. Your Parisian knows these places as part of the city’s life which is not there for the Frenchman but for the tourist and stranger. These people look for these things as a part of the life of Paris, your Parisian says, and in consequence they are there.

I was going on, then, when something familiar in the voice made me turn sharply. Lo and behold!—O’Flather.

“Hullo, Professor!” I said, with a grin. “Gone out of the flea-taming business?”

For a moment he stared at me.

“Hullo! young man. Yep. Met with a dirty deal. One of my helpers doped the troupe. Them as wasn’t stiff and cold was no more good for work. Busted me up.”

“Too bad. What are you doing now?”

“Working as a guide.”

“But you don’t know Paris!”

“’Tain’t necessary. Mighty few Paris guides know Paris. Don’t have to.”

“Well, I wish you luck,” I said, and left him. He looked after me curiously. His eyes were bloodshot from excessive drinking, and his dewlaps were blotched and sagging. “Vindictive brute!” I thought. “If he only knew wouldn’t he be mad! What a ripping villain he’d make if this was only fiction instead of real life!”

It was this morning, too, I made the acquaintance of Frosine. Passing through the mildewed court I saw peering through the window of a basement room the wistful face of little Solonge. Against the dark interior her head of silky gold was like that of a cherub painted on a panel. Struck with a sudden idea, I knocked at their door.

Solonge opened it, turning the handle, after several attempts, with both hands, and very proud of the feat. She welcomed me shyly, and a clear voice invited me to enter. If the appearance of the child had formerly surprised me, I was still more astonished when I saw the mother. She was almost as dark as the little one was fair. The contrast was so extreme that one almost doubted their relationship.

Scarcely did she pause in her work as I entered. She seemed, indeed, a human sewing machine. With lightning quickness she fed the material to the point of her needle, and every time she drew it through a score of stitches would be made. Already the bed was heaped with work she had finished, and a small table was also piled with stuff. A wardrobe, a stove, and two chairs completed the furniture of the room.

But if I felt inclined to pity Frosine the feeling vanished on looking into her face. It was so brave, so frank, so cheerful. There was no beauty, but a piquant quality that almost made up for its lack. Character, variety, appeal she had, and a peculiar fascinating quality of redemption. Thus the beautiful teeth redeemed the rather large mouth; the wide-set hazel eyes redeemed the short, irregular nose; the broad well-shaped brow redeemed the somewhat soft chin. Her skin was of a fine delicacy, one of those skins that seem to be too tightly stretched; and constant smiling had made fine wrinkles round her mouth and eyes.

“A female with an active sense of humour,” I thought. Anastasia’s sense of humour was passive, Rougette’s somewhat atrophied. So Mademoiselle Frosine smiled, and her smile was irresistible. It brought into play all these fine wrinkles; it was so whole-hearted, so free from reservations. That tonic smile would have made a pessimist burn his Schopenhauer, and take to reading Elbert Hubbard.

“Mademoiselle,” I began in my fumbling French, “I have come to beg a favour of you. You would be a thousand times amiable if you could spare Solonge for an hour or two in the afternoon, to go with us to the Luxembourg Gardens. There she may play in the sunshine, and it will give my wife infinite gladness to watch her.”

Frosine almost dropped her needle with pleasure. “Oh, you are so good. It will be such a joy for my little one, and will make me so happy. Madame loves children, does she not?”

“It is truly foolish how she loves them. She will be ravished if you will permit us to have your treasure for a little while.”

“Ah, monsieur, you are entirely too amiable.”

“Not at all. It is well heard, then?”

“But, yes, certainly. You make me too happy.”

“Ah, well! this afternoon at three o’clock?”

“At three o’clock.”

So I broke the news to Anastasia. “Little Thing, I’ve borrowed a baby for you this afternoon. Solonge is coming with us to the gardens.”

(Really, if I had given her a new hat she could not have been more enchanted.)

“Oh, that will be lovely! Then will I have my two childrens with me. You don’t know how I am glad.”

So we gaily descended the timeworn stairs, and found the youngster eagerly awaiting us. In her navy blue coat and hat her wealth of long hair looked fairer and silkier than ever. For a child of four and a half she was very tall and graceful. Then we bade the mother au revoir, and with the youngster chattering excitedly as she held the hand of Anastasia, and me puffing at the cheap briar I had bought in the place of the ill-fated meerschaum, we started out.

“I suppose if it hadn’t been for Solonge,” I observed, “Frosine would have thrown up the sponge long ago. How awful to be alone day after day, sewing against time, so to speak; and that for all one’s life!”

“Oh, no. There is many girl like that in Paris. They work till they die. They are brought up in the couvent. That make them very serious.”

Anastasia had certainly the deepest faith in her religion.

After its long winter relâche the glorious old garden was awakening to the symphony of Spring. The soft breeze that stirred the opening buds came to us laden with fragrance, arousing that so exquisite feeling of sweet confused memory that only the Spring-birth can evoke. The basin of the Fontaine de Médicis was stained a delicate green by peeping leaves, and a flock of fat sparrows with fluttering feathers and joyous cries were making much ado. We sat down on one of the stone benches, because the pennies for the chairs might buy many needful things.

That dear, dear garden of the Luxembourg, what, I wonder, is the secret of its charm? Is it that it is haunted by the sentiment and romance of ages dead and forgotten? Beautiful it is, yet other gardens are also beautiful, and—oh, how different! Surely it should be sacred, sacred to children, artists and lovers. There, under the green and laughing leaf, where statues glimmer in marble or gloom in bronze, and the fountain throws to the tender sky its exquisite aigrette of gold—there the children play, the artists dream, and the lovers exchange sweet kisses. Oh, Mimi and Musette, where the bust of Murger lies buried in the verdure, listening to the protestations of your Eugene and Marcel!—do you not dream that in this self-same spot your mothers in their hours listened to the voice of love, nay, even their mothers in their hours. So over succeeding generations will the old garden cast its spell, and under the branches of the old trees lovers in days to come will whisper their vows. Yea, I think it is haunted, that dear, dear garden of the Luxembourg.

Solonge, whom I had decided to call “The Môme,” had a top which she kept going with a little whip. To start it she would wind the lash of the whip around its point, then standing it upright in the soft ground, give it a sharp jerk. But after a little she tired of this, and began to ask questions about fairies. Never have I seen a child so imaginative. Her world is peopled with fairies, with whom she holds constant communion. There are tree fairies, water fairies, fairies that live in the ground, fairies that lurk in the flowers—she can tell you all about them. Her faith in them is touching, and brutal would he be who tried to shatter it.

“You that make so many stories,” said Anastasia, as she listened to the prattle of the Môme, “have you no stories for children? Can you not make one for little Solonge?”

“Yes, of course, I might; but you will have to put it in French for her.”

“All right. I try.”

So I thought a little, then I began:

Once upon a time there was a little boy who was very much alone and who dreamed greatly. In his father’s garden he had a tiny corner of his own, and in this corner grew a large pumpkin. The boy, who had never seen a pumpkin so big, thought that it might take a prize at the yearly show in the village, and so every day he fed it with milk, and always with the milk of the brindled cow, which was richest of all.

So the pumpkin grew and grew, and the little boy became so wrapt up in it he thought of little else. At last it grew to such a size that other people began to look at it, and say it would surely take a prize. The little boy became more proud of it than ever, and fed it more and more of the milk of the brindled cow, and took to rubbing it till it shone—with his big brother’s silk handkerchief.

Then one night as he lay in bed he heard a great to-do in the garden, and ran out in his night-dress. There was a patch of ground where grew the pumpkins, and another where grew the squashes, and both seemed greatly disturbed. Fearing for his favourite he hurried forward. No, there it was, great and glossy in the moonlight. He kissed it, and even as he did so it seemed as if he heard from within it a tiny, tinny voice calling his name. In surprise he stepped back, and the next moment a door opened in the side of the pumpkin and a fairy stepped forth.

“I am the Pumpkin King,” said the fairy, “and in the name of the Pumpkin People I bid you welcome.”

Then the boy saw that the inside of the great gourd was hollow, and was lit with a wondrous chandelier of glow-worms. It was furnished like a little chamber, with a bed, table, chairs—such a room as you may see in a house for dolls. The boy wished greatly that he might enter, and even as he wished he found that he had grown very small, as small, indeed, as his own finger.

“Will you not enter?” asked the King with a smile of welcome.

So the boy and the King became great friends, and each night when every one else was a-bed he would steal forth and sit in the chamber of the Pumpkin King. The King thanked him for his care of the royal residence, and told him many things of the vegetable world. But chiefly he talked of the endless feud between the pumpkins and their hereditary enemies, the squashes. Whenever the two came together there was warfare, and when the squashes were more numerous the pumpkins were often defeated. Yonder by the gate dwelt the Squash King, a terrible fellow, of whom the Pumpkin King lived in fear.

“Can I not kill him for you?” said the little boy.

“No, no,” answered the King. “No mortal can destroy a fairy. Things must take their course.”

At this the little boy was very sad, and began to dread all kinds of dangers for his friend the King. Then one day he was taken ill with a cold, and the window was closed at night so that he could not steal out as usual. And as he lay tossing in his bed he heard a great noise in the garden. At once he knew that a terrible battle was raging between the squash and the pumpkin tribes. Alas! he could do nothing to help his friends, so he cried bitterly.

And next morning his father came to his bedside and told him that all the pumpkins had been destroyed, including his big one.

“It was that breechy brindled cow,” said the father. “It must have broken into the garden in the night.”

But the little boy knew better.

As I finished a deep, strongly vibrating voice greeted us.

“What a pretty domestic scene. Didn’t know you had a youngster, Madden. Must congratulate you.”

Looking up I saw Helstern. He was leaning on a stout stick, carved like a gargoyle. All in black, with that mane of iron-grey hair and his keen, stern face he made quite a striking figure. There is something unconsciously dramatic about Helstern; I, on the other hand, am consciously dramatic; while Lorrimer is absolutely natural.

“Sorry,” I said, “she doesn’t belong to us. We’ve just borrowed her for the afternoon.”

“I see. What a beautiful type! English, I should imagine?”

“No, that’s what makes her so different—French.”

He looked at her as if fascinated.

“I’d like awfully to make a sketch of her, if you can get her to stand still.”

At that moment there was no difficulty, for the Môme was gazing in round-eyed awe at the ferocious Turk’s head pipe in the sculptor’s mouth. So Helstern took a chair, whipped out his sketch-book, and before the fascinated child could recover he had completed a graceful little sketch.

“Splendid!” I said.

Anastasia, too, was enthusiastic; but when the Môme, who was now nestling in her arms, saw it she uttered a scream of delight.

“If you just sit still a little,” said Helstern eagerly, “while I do another one for myself, I’ll give you this one to take home to your mother.”

The Môme was very timid; but we posed her sitting on the end of the stone seat, with one slim leg bent under her and the other dangling down, while she scattered some crumbs for the fat sparrows at her feet. Against the background of a lilac bush she made a charming picture, and Helstern worked with an enthusiasm that made his eyes gleam, and his stern face relax. This time he used a fine pencil of sepia tint, working with the broad of it so as to get soft effects of shadow. True, he idealised almost beyond resemblance; but what a delicate, graceful picture he made!

“It isn’t such a good likeness as the first one,” I remarked, after I had murmured my admiration.

“Ah!” he said, with the pitying superiority of the artist. “But you don’t see her as I see her.”

There, I thought, is Art in a nutshell; the individual vision, the divination of the soul of things, hidden inexorably from the common eye. To see differently; a greener colour in the grass, a deeper blue in the sky, a madonna in a woman of the street, an angel in a child, God in all things—oh, enchanted Vision! they who have thee should be happier than kings.

“There, little one!” said the sculptor, giving her the first sketch; “take that to your mother and say I said she should be very proud of you. Heavens, I wish I could do a clay figure of her. I wish—”

He looked at her in a sort of ecstasy, sighed deeply, then stumped away looking very thoughtful.

“Is he not distinguished,” I said, “in spite of that foot of his?”

“Ah! that is so sad, I sink. But perhaps it is for the best he have foot like that. It make him more serious; it make him great artist.”

Trust Anastasia to find some compensation in all misfortune!

Frosine was plying that lightning needle when we returned. She looked up joyfully as the little one rushed to her with the sketch.

“Who did this? It is my little pigeon—truly, it is her very self.”

“It was a friend of ours,” said Anastasia, “who is a great sculptor, or, at least, who is going to be. He has fallen in love with your daughter, as indeed we all have.”

“Oh, it is so good of you to take her out. Already I see a difference in her. I would not have her grow up like the children of the streets, and it is so hard when one is poor and has to work every moment of one’s time. As for this picture, thank the Monsieur. Say I will treasure it.”

We promised to do so, and left her singing gaily by the open window as she resumed her everlasting toil.

So it has come about that nearly every afternoon we sit in the Luxembourg enjoying the mellow sunshine, with the little girl playing around us. We know many people by sight, for the same ones come day after day. There by the terrace of the Queens we watch the toy yachts careening in the basin, the boys playing diabolo, the sauntering students with their sweethearts. Anastasia works industriously on some Spanish embroidery, I read for the twentieth time one of my manuscripts, while the Môme leaps and laughs as she keeps a shuttlecock bounding in the air. Her eyes are very bright now, and her delicate cheeks have a rosy stain. Then, when over the great trees the Western sky is aglow, when the fountain turns to flame, and a charmed light lingers in the groves, slowly we go home. Days of grateful memory, for in them do I come to divine the deepest soul of Paris, that which is Youth and Love.

CHAPTER VI
GETTING DOWN TO CASES

“Anastasia,” I said with a sigh, “did I ever tell you of Gwendolin?”

“No; what is it?” she asked, and her face had rather an anxious expression.

“Gwendolin was a girl, a very nice girl, a trained nurse; and we were engaged.”

“What you mean? She was your fiancée?”

“Yes, she was one of my fiancées.”

“What! You have more than one?” The poor girl was really horrified.

“Oh, several. I don’t just remember how many. I quarrelled with one because we couldn’t agree over the name we would give the first baby. I broke it off with another because her stomach made such funny noises every time I tried to squeeze her. It made me nervous. But Gwendolin—I must tell you about her. I was very ill with diphtheria in a lonely house by the sea, and she had come to nurse me. She would let no one else come near me, and she waited on me night and day.”

(Anastasia suspended operations on the heel of my sock she was darning.)

“She was a nervous, high-strung girl, and she watched over me with an agony of care. There was a doctor, too, who came twice a day, yet, in spite of all, I hourly grew more weak. My dreary moans seemed to be echoed by the hollow moans of the sea.”

(Anastasia seemed divided between resentment of Gwendolin and pity for me.)

“Well, the poor girl was almost worn to a shadow, and one night, as she sat by me, pale and hollow-eyed, I saw a sudden change come over her.

“‘I can stand it no longer,’ she cried. ‘His every moan pierces me to the heart. I must do something, something.’

“Then she rose, and I was conscious of her great, pitiful eyes. Suddenly I thrilled with horror, for I realised that they were the eyes of a mad woman. The strain of nursing had unhinged her mind.

“‘The doctor tells me there is no hope,’ she went on. ‘Oh, I cannot bear to hear him suffer so; I must give him peace;—but how?’

“On a table near by there was a small pair of scissors. She took them up thoughtfully.

“‘Dearest,’ she said to me, ‘your sufferings will soon be over. I am going to cut your poor throat, that gives you such pain.’

“I struggled, twisting my head this way and that, but she held me like a vice, and over my throat I felt two edges of cold steel.”

(Anastasia was gazing in horror.)

“Steadily they closed, tighter, tighter. Now I could feel them bite the flesh and the blood spout. Then I, who for days had been unable to utter a word, suddenly found my voice.

“‘Don’t butcher me,’ I whispered hoarsely. ‘Cut my accursed throat by all means, but do it neatly. Your scissors are far too blunt.’

“‘But how may I sharpen them, darling?’ she cried piteously.

“I remembered how I had seen other women do it.

“‘Try to cut on the neck of a bottle.’

“‘Will that do?’

“‘Yes, yes. Keep cutting on the smooth round glass. It’s astonishing the difference it makes.’

“‘What kind of a bottle, sweetheart?’

“‘An ink-bottle’s best. You’ll find one downstairs on the dining-room mantelpiece. Hurry.’

“‘All right, I’ll get it.’

“She flew downstairs. Now was my chance. With my remaining strength I crawled to the door and locked it. When I recovered from a faint her struggles to force it had ceased, and at the same moment I heard the honk of the doctor’s auto. Going to the window, I bellowed like a bull. Then I was conscious of a strange thing: by the pressure on my throat, by my struggles, the malignant growth had broken. I was saved.”

Anastasia shuddered. “And that Gwendolin?” she queried.

“Was taken to an asylum, where she died,” I said sadly.

“Poor sing,” said Anastasia.

To tell the truth, the whole thing had happened to me the night before in a very vivid dream. Often, indeed, I get ideas in this way, so I promptly made a story of Nurse Gwendolin.

I was putting the finishing touches to it when a knock came to the door. It was Helstern, panting, perspiring.

“Heavens! but it’s hard climbing that stairway of yours with a game leg. Sorry to disturb you, Madden, but where does the mother of your little girl live? You don’t know how that youngster inspires me. I feel that if I could do a full-length of her it would get me into the Salon. See! here’s a sketch. Spring, it’s called. Of course, I mean to follow up with the other seasons, but I want a child for my Spring.”

He showed me a tender fillette in a state of nature, trying to avoid tripping over a tame lamb as she scattered abroad an armful of flowers.

“Stunning!” I said. “So original! Let’s go down and interview the mother.”

Into his brown eyes came a look of distress. “I’m a bit awkward with women, you know. Would you mind doing the talking?”

“Right O! Follow me.”

So we descended the narrow, crumbling stairs, from each stage of which came a smell of cookery. Thus we passed through a stratum of ham and eggs, another of corned beef and cabbage, a third of beefsteak and onions, down to the fried fish stratum of the entresol.

Frosine was in the midst of dinner. The Môme regarded us over a spoonful of milk soup, and as he wiped the perspiration from his brow, Helstern looked at her almost devouringly. But in the presence of Frosine he seemed almost tongue-tied. To me, who have never known what shyness was, it seemed pitiable. However I explained our mission, and even showed the sketch at a flattering angle. Frosine listened politely, seemed to want to laugh, then turned to the sculptor with that frank, kindly smile that seemed to radiate good fellowship.

“You do me too great honour, Monsieur. I am sure your work would be very beautiful. But alas! Solonge is very shy and very modest. One could never get her to pose for the figure. I am sorry, but believe me, the thing is impossible.”

“Thank you, Madam. I am sorry too,” he said humbly. He stumped away crestfallen, and with a final, sorrowful look at the Môme.

Anastasia was keeping supper hot for me. “Poor Helstern,” I remarked over my second chop, “I’m afraid he’ll have to look out for another vernal infant. But talking of Spring reminds me, time is passing, and we’re not getting any richer. How’s the family treasury?”

An examination of the tea-canister that contained our capital revealed the sum of twenty-seven francs. I looked at it ruefully.

“I never dreamed we were so low as that. With care we can live for a week on twenty-seven francs—but what then?”

“You must try and sell some of your work, darleen; and I—I can sell some hem-broderie.”

“Never! I can’t let you sell those things. They’re lovely. I want to keep them.”

“But I easily do some more. It is pleasure for me.”

“No, no; at least, hold on a bit. I’ll make some money from my work. I’m going to send it off to-morrow.”

Yes, we were surely “getting down to cases.” But what matter! Of course my work will be accepted at once, and paid for on the spot. True, I have no experience in this kind of peddling. My stuff has always appeared virgin in a book. Not that I think I am prostituting it by sending it to a magazine, but that no sooner do I see it in print than my interest in it dies. It belongs to the public then.

Next day I bought a box of big envelopes, a quantity of French and English stamps, and a manuscript book in which I entered the titles of the different items. I also ruled columns: Where Sent: When Sent; even When Returned, though I thought the latter superfluous. Here then was my list:

The Psychology of Sea-sickness.
An Amateur Lazzarone.
A Detail of Two Cities.
The Microbe.
How to be a Successful Wife.
Nurse Gwendolin.
The City of Light.
The City of Laughter.
The City of Love.
and
Three Fairy Stories.

Twelve items in all. So I prepared them for despatch; but where? That was the question. However, after examining the windows of several English book-shops, I took a chance shot, posted them to twelve different destinations, and sat down to await results.

Since then, with a fine sense of freedom, I have been indulging in my mania for old houses. I do not mean houses of historic interest, but ramshackle ruins tucked away in seductive slums. To gaze at an old home and imagine its romance is to me more fascinating than trying to realise romance you know occurred there. I examine doors studded with iron, search mouldering walls for inscriptions, peer into curious courtyards. I commune with the spirit of Old Paris, I step in the footprints of Voltaire and Verlaine, of Rousseau and Racine, of Mirabeau and Molière.

One day I visit the room where an English Lord of Letters died more deaths than one. A gloomy, gruesome hotel, with an electric night-sign that goes in and out like some semaphore of sin. A cadaverous, miserable-looking man tells me that the room is at present occupied. I return. A cadaverous, miserable-looking woman whines to a dejected looking valet-de-chambre that I may go up.

It is on the first floor and overlooks a court. There is the bed of varnished pine in which he died; the usual French hotel wardrobe, the usual plush armchair, but not, I note, the usual clock of chocolate marble. Everything so commonplace, so sordid; yet for a moment I could see that fallen demi-god, as with eyes despairful as death in their tear-corroded sockets, he stared and stared into that drab, rain-sodden court.

For who can tell to what red Hell

His sightless soul may stray.

And so in sweet, haphazard wanderings amid the Paris of the Past time sped ever so swiftly. I forgot my manuscripts, my position, everything in my sheer delight of freedom; and how long my dream would have continued I know not if I had not had a sudden awakening. It was on my return from one of my rambles when I drew up with a start in front of a shop that showed all kinds of woman’s work for sale.

“Heavens! Surely that isn’t Anastasia’s cushion?”

I was staring at a piece of exquisite silk embroidery, an imitation of ancient tapestry. No, I could not be mistaken. Too well I remembered every detail of it; how I had watched it take on beauty under her patient fingers; how hour after hour I could hear the crisp snap as the needle broke through the taut silk. Over a week had she toiled on it, rising with the first dawn, so that she might have more daylight in which to blend her colours. And there it was, imbedded in that mass of cheap stuff, and marked with a smudgy paper, “Forty-five francs.” Yes, I felt sick.

How careless I had been! I had never given the financial situation another thought, yet we had wanted for nothing. There was that excellent dinner we had had the night before; why, she must have sold this to buy it! Even now I was living on the proceeds of her work.

“What a silly girl! She wouldn’t say a word, in case I should be worried. Just like women; they take a fiendish delight in humiliating a man by sacrificing themselves for him. But I can’t let her support me. Let’s see.... There’s my watch and chain. What’s a chain but a useless gaud, a handhold for a pick-pocket. Maybe this very afternoon I’ll have the whole thing snatched. I’ll take no chances; it’s a fine, heavy chain, and cost over a hundred dollars; maybe the Mont de Pietists will give me fifty for it.”

They wouldn’t. Twenty-five was their limit, so I took it meekly. Then, returning hastily to the embroidery shop, I bought the cushion cover, carried it home under my coat, and locked it safely away in the alligator-skin suitcase.

Though her greeting was bravely bright, it seemed to me that Anastasia had been crying, and of the nice omelette she had provided for my lunch she would scarcely taste.

“What’s the trouble, Little Thing; out with it.”

She hesitated; looked anxious, miserable, apologetic.

“I don’t like trouble you, darleen, but the concierge have come for the rent tree time, and I don’t know what I must say.”

“The rent! I quite forgot that. Why, yes, we pay rent, don’t we? How much is it?”

“Don’t you remember? One ’undred twenty-five franc.”

“Well, there’s only one thing to do—pay it. But to do so I must put my ticker up the spout.”

“Oh, my poor darleen, I’m so sorry. I sink it is me bring you so much trouble. If it was not for me you have plenty of money, I sink.”

“Don’t say that. If it wasn’t for your economies I’d be rustling for crusts in the gutter. And anyway, what’s the good of a watch when I can see the time in every shop I pass? Besides, I might lose it; so here goes.”

It is quite in tune with the cheerful philosophy of the French to find a virtue in misfortune. Whether they break a glass, spill red wine, or step in dirt, it’s all the same: “Ah! but it will carry the good luck.”

For my gold watch I received two hundred francs, though it had cost over a thousand; and with this I returned. Much the shape and colour of a bloated spider, the concierge emerged from her den, and to her I paid the rent. Then, leaping upstairs, I poured the balance remaining from both transactions into Anastasia’s lap.

“There! That ought to keep away the wolf for a month. A hundred and fifty francs and the rent paid for another quarter. Aren’t we the lucky things? The roof’s overhead; the soup’s in the pot; let’s sing. Now do I know why the very wastrels in the street are not so much to be pitied after all; a warm corner and a full belly, that’s happiness to them. Wealth’s only a matter of wants. Well, we’re wealthy, let’s go to the cinema.”

“No, darleen, that would not be serious. I must guard your money now. When you sink you begeen work once more?”

“I don’t know. I’m having one of my bad spells. Funny how it takes one. Times ideas come in a perfect spate, and I miss half grabbing for the others. At present the divine afflatus is on a vacation. I’m trying to start a novel and I haven’t got the Idea. You see this short story and article stuff is all very well to boil the marmite, but a novel’s my real chance. A successful novel would put me on my feet. Pray, Little Thing, I get the idea for a novel.”

“Yes, I will, I will indeed,” she answered me quite seriously.

And indeed she did: for one day I strolled into Notre Dame, and there by one of those hard, high-backed chairs before the mighty altar I discovered her imploring (I have no doubt) the “bon Dieu” that the idea might come.

For simple, shining faith I’m willing to bet my last dollar on Anastasia.

CHAPTER VII
THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY

May 1st.

This morning in the course of my walk I saw a hungry child trying to sell violets, a girl gazing fearfully at the Maternity Hospital, an old woman picking, as if they were gold, coals from the gutter. At times what a world of poignant drama these common sights reveal! It is like getting one’s eye to a telescope that is focussed on a world of interesting misery. I want to write of these things, but I must not. First of all I must write for money; that gained, I may write for art.

So far I haven’t hit on my novel motif, though I’ve lain awake at nights racking my poor brains. What makes me fret so is that never have I felt such confidence, such power, such hunger to create. I think it must be Paris and the Springtime. The combination makes me dithyrambic with delight. I thrill, I burn, I see life with eyes anointed. Yesterday in the Luxembourg I wrote some verses that weren’t half bad; but writing verses does not make the thorns crackle under the pot, far less supply the savoury soup. Oh, the Idea, the Idea!

To my little band of manuscripts I have never given another thought. But that is my way. I am like a mother cat—when my kittens are young I love them; when they grow to be cats I spit at them. My work finished, I never want to see it again.

One day as I fumed and fussed abominably Lorrimer called.

“Look here, Madden, I don’t know what kind of writing you do, but I suppose you’re not any too beastly rich; you’re not above making an honest dollar. Now, I’m one of the future gold medallists of the Spring Salon, cela va sans dire, but in the meantime I’m not above doing this.”

“This” was a paper covered booklet of a flaming type. I took it with some disfavour. The paper was muddy, the type disreputable, the illustrations lurid. Turning it over I read:

THE MARVELLOUS PENNYWORTH LIBRARY
OF WORLD ADVENTURE.

“Pretty rotten, isn’t it?” said Lorrimer. “Well, you wouldn’t believe it, some of these things sell to nearly quarter of a million. They give the best value for the money in their line. Fifty pages of straight adventure and a dozen spirited illustrations for a humble copper; could you beat it?”

“Well, what’s it got to do with me?”

“It’s like this: I’ve been guilty of the illustrations of two of these masterpieces. They were Wild West stories. Being an American, though I’ve never lived out of Connecticut, I’m supposed to know all about Colorado. Well, it’s the firm of Shortcake & Hammer that publish them, and I happened to meet young Percy Shortcake when he was on a jamboree in Paris. Over the wassail we got free, so he promised to put some work my way. Soon after I got a commission to illustrate Sureshot, or the Scout’s Revenge; then some months after I adorned the pages of Redhand the Nightrider, or the Prowler of the Prairies.”

“I see. What’s the idea now?”

“The idea is that you write one of these things and I illustrate it.”

“My dear fellow, you have too high an opinion of my powers.”

“Oh, come now, Madden, try. You won’t throw me down, old man. I need the money. Supposing we place it we’ll get a ten pound note for it; that will be seven for you and three for me. Three pounds, man, that will keep me for a month, give me time to finish my prize picture for the Salon. Just think what it means to me, what a crisis in my fortunes. Fame there ready to crown me, and for the want of a measly three quid, biff! there she chucks her crown back in the laurel bin for another year. Oh, Madden, try. I’m sure you could rise to the occasion.”

Thus approached, how could a kind-hearted Irishman refuse? Already I saw Lorrimer gold-medalled, glorified; then the reverse of the picture, Lorrimer writhing in the clutches of dissipation and despair. Could I desert him? I yielded.

“Good!” whooped Lorrimer; “we’ll make a best-seller in Penny-dreadfuldom. Take Sureshot here as a model. Here, too, are your illustrations.”

“My what?”

“The pictures. Oh, yes, I did them first. It doesn’t make any difference, you can make them fit in. It’s often done that way. Half the books published for Christmas sale are written up to illustrations that the publishers have on hand.”

“All right. The illustrations may suggest the story.”

Lorrimer went away exultant. After all, I thought, seven pounds won’t be bad for a week’s work. So I read Sureshot with some care. It was divided into twenty chapters of about a thousand words each, and every chapter finished on a situation of suspense. The sentences were jerkily short; each was full of pith and punch, and often had a paragraph all to itself. For example:

By one hand Sureshot clung to that creaking bough. Below him was empty space. Above him leered his foe, Poisoned Pup, black hate in his face.

The branch cracked ominously.

With a shudder the Lone Scout looked down to the bottom of the abyss. No way of escape there. He looked up once more, and even as he looked Poisoned Pup raised his tomahawk to sever the frail branch.

“Perish! Paleface,” he hissed; “go down to the Gulf of the Lost Ones, and let the wolves pick clean your bones.”

Sureshot felt that his last hour had come.

“Accursed Redskin,” he cried, “do your worst. But beware, for I will be avenged. And now, O son of a dog, strike, strike!”

And there with gleaming eyes the intrepid scout waited for that glittering axe to fall.

End of chapter; the next of which artfully switches, and takes up another thread of the story.

The result of my effort was that in six days I produced Daredeath Dick, or the Scourge of the Sierras. Lorrimer was enthusiastic.

“Didn’t think you had it in you, old man. I’ll get it off to Shortcake & Hammer at once. It will likely be some weeks before we can hear from them.”

Since then I have been seeing quite a lot of Lorrimer. After all, our little apartment is cosiness itself, and beer at four sous a litre is ambrosia within reach of the most modest purse. He talks vastly of his work (with a capital W). He arrives with the announcement that he has just dropped in for a quiet pipe; in an hour he must be back at his Work. Then: “Well, old man, just another short pipe, and I must really be off.” But in the end he takes his departure about two in the morning, sometimes talking me asleep.

How he lives is a mystery. Any evening you can see him in the Café d’Harcourt, or the Soufflet, and generally accompanied by Rougette. When he is in funds he spends recklessly. Once he gained a prize for a Moulin Rouge poster, and celebrated his success in a supper that cost him three times the value of his prize. Sometimes he contributes a very naughty drawing to Pages Folles, and I know that he does aquarelles for the long-haired genius who sells them on the boulevards, and who, though he can draw little else than a cork from a bottle, in appearance out-rapins the rapins.

One afternoon I heard Helstern painfully toiling upstairs.

“I’ve got an idea,” he began. “You know as soon as I set eyes on the mother of your little Solonge I saw she was just the type I’ve been looking for for my group, Maternity. That woman’s a born mother, a mother by destiny. See, here’s a sketch of my group.”

Helstern’s statues, I notice, seldom get beyond the sketch stage. This one showed a mother suckling an infant and gazing fondly at another little girl, who in her turn was looking maternally at the baby.

“That’s all very well,” I objected banally; “but Frosine hasn’t got a baby.”

“Pooh! a mere trifle. I’ll soon supply the baby. Already I see my group crowned in the Salon. The thing’s as good as done. It only remains for you to go down and get the consent of Madam.”

“Me!”

“Why, yes. You know I’m no good at talking to women. It takes an Irishman to be persuasive. Go on, there’s a good fellow.”

Was I ever able to resist an appeal to my vanity? But pretty soon I returned rather crestfallen.

“It’s no use, old man. Can’t make anything of the lady. I showed her your sketch; I offered to provide the infant; I pointed out the sensation it would make in the Salon; no use. She positively refuses to pose; prefers to sew lingerie. If she would be serious I might be able to wheedle her; but she only laughs, and when a woman laughs I’ve got to laugh with her. But I can’t help thinking there’s something at the back of her refusal.”

“Well, well,” sighed the big sculptor, “I give her up. And already I could see the crowds admiring my group as it stood under the dome of the Grand Palace; already I could hear their plaudits ringing in my ears; already....”

Once more he sighed deeply, and went away.

May 15th.

It is so hot to-day that I think Summer must have taken the wrong cue. On the Boul’ Mich’ the marronniers sicken in the stale air composed equally of asphalt, petrol and escaping gas. Assyrian bearded students and Aubrey Beardsley cocottes are sitting over opaline glasses in front of the stifling cafés, and the dolphins in the fountains of the Observatory spout enthusiastically. Now is the time to loll on a shaded bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, and refrain from doing anything strenuous.

So I sit there dreaming, and note in a careless way that I am becoming conspicuously shabby. Because the necessary franc for the barber cannot well be spared, I have allowed my hair to accumulate æsthetically. Anastasia loves it like that—says it makes me look like the great man of letters I am; and with a piece of silk she has made me a Lavallière tie. More than ever I feel like a character in a French farce.

My boots, I particularly note, need heeling. Every morning I conscientiously brush them before I go out, but invariably I am called back.

“Show me your feet.”

I bow before this domestic tyrant.

“Oh, what a dirty boy it is. What shame for me to have husbands go out like that.”

“But look!” I protest; “they’re clean. They shine like a mirror. Why, you can see your face in them—if you look hard enough.”

“But the heels! Look at the heels. Why you have not brush them. Oh, I nevaire see child like that. You just brush in front.”

“Well, how can I see the heels? I’m no contortionist.”

“Oh, mon Dieu! He brush his boots after he puts them on. Oh, what a cabbage head I have for husband!”

“Well, isn’t that the right way?”

“Nom d’un chien! Give me your patte.”

Then what a storm if I try to go out with a hole in my socks!

“Oh, dear! I nevaire see man like that. Suppose you get keel in the street, and some one take off your boots, sink how you are shamed. What shame for me, too, if I have husbands keel wiz hole in his sock!”

In addition to her other duties I have made her my Secretary. Alas! I must confess some of my valiant manuscripts have come sneaking back with unflattering promptitude. It is a new experience and a bitter one. Yet I think my chief concern is that Anastasia’s faith in me should be shattered. After the first unbelieving moment I threw the things aside in disgust.

“They’re no good. I’ll never send them out again.”

“Oh, don’t say that, darleen. You geeve to me and I send away some more.”

“Do what you like,” I answered savagely. “But don’t let me see the beastly things again. And don’t,” I added thoughtfully, “send them twice to the same place.”

So what is happening I know not, though the expense for stamps is a grievous one. She has a list of periodicals and is posting the things somewhere. Perhaps she may blunder luckily. Anyway, I don’t care. I’m sick of them.

May 30th.

Some days ago I was sitting by the gate of the Luxembourg that fronts the bust of St. Beuve. That fine, shrewd face seemed to smile at me with pawky kindliness, as if to say: “Don’t despair, young men; seek, seek, for the luminous idea will come.”

But just then it was more pleasant to dream than to seek. A slim pine threw on the sun-flooded lawn its purple pool of shadow; in the warm breeze a thickset yew heaved gently; a lively acacia twinkled and fluttered; a silver-stemmed birch tossed enthusiastic plumes. Over a bank of golden lilies bright-winged butterflies were hovering, and in a glade beyond there was a patch of creamy hyacinths. Against the ivy that mantled an old oak, the white dress of a girl out-gleamed, and her hat, scarlet as a geranium, made a sparkling note of colour.

Then, as she drew near I saw it was Anastasia, and she was much excited. I wondered why. Is there anything in this world, I asked myself, worth while getting excited about? Just then I was inclined to think not; so I smoked on imperturbably. The vacuum in my life made by the lack of tobacco had been more than I could bear, and I had taken to those cheap packets of Caporal, cigarettes bleues, whose luxuriant whiskers I surreptitiously trimmed with Anastasia’s embroidery scissors. Never shall I be one of those kill-joys who recommend young men not to smoke—in the meantime filling up their own pipes with particular gusto.

“Hullo, Little Thing! Why this unexpected pleasure?”

“Oh, I search you everywhere. See! There’s letter from editor.”

“So it is; and judging by your excitement it must contain at least twenty pounds. Already I wallow in the sands of Pactolus.... Yes, you’re right: A cheque. How long it seems since I’ve seen a cheque! Let’s see—why! it’s for a whole guinea.”

Her eyes gleamed with pleasure, and she clapped her hands.

“In payment,” I went on, “of the article How to be a Successful Wife, from the editor of Baby’s Own a weekly Magazine specially devoted to the Nursery.”

“Yes, yes. I send heem zere. I sink it’s so chic, that magazine.”

“Well, I congratulate you on your first success as a literary agent. You deserve your ten per cent. commission. It isn’t the Eldorado of our dreams, but it will enable us to carry out some needed sartorial reforms. For example, I may now get my boots persuaded to a new lease of life, while you can buy some stuff for a blouse. How much can we do on twenty-six francs?”

Between Necessary Expenditure and Cash in Hand the difference was appalling, but after elaborate debate the money was duly appropriated. From this time on Anastasia became more energetic than ever in her consumption of postage. It was about this time, too, I noticed she ate very sparingly. On my taxing her, she declared she was dieting. She was afraid, she said, of getting fat. On which I decided I also was getting fat: I, too, must diet. Every one, we agreed, ate too much. I for one (I vowed) could do better work on a mess of pottage than on all the fleshpots of Egypt. So the expenses of our ménage began to take a very low figure indeed.

At the same time “Soup of the Onion” began to make its appearance with a monotonous frequency. It is made by frying the fragments of one of these vegetables till it is nearly black. You then add hot water, boil a little, strain. The result is a warm, yellowish liquor of onionish suggestion, which an ardent imagination may transform into a delicate and nourishing soup—and which costs about one sou.

A sudden reversion, however, to a more generous cuisine aroused my suspicion, and, on visiting the little embroidery shop, again I saw some of her work. I made a rapid calculation. Of my personal possessions there only remained to me my gold signet ring, and the seal that had hung at the end of my chain. For the first I got fifty francs, for the second, twenty. So for thirty francs I bought her work, and locked it away with the cushion cover.

I am really beginning to despair, to think I shall have to give in. Oh, the bitterness of surrender! All that is mulish in me revolts at the thought. For myself rather would I starve than be beaten, but there is the girl, she must not be allowed to suffer.

May 31st.

This has been a happy day, such a happy day as never before have I known. This morning Lorrimer burst into my apartment flourishing a cheque for The Scourge of the Sierras. Shortcake & Hammer expressed themselves as well pleased, and sent—not ten pounds but twelve.

“I tell you what!” cried the artist excitedly, “we’ve got to celebrate your success as a popular author. We’ll spend the extra two pounds on a dinner. We’ll ask Rougette and Helstern, and we’ll have it to-night in the Café d’Harcourt.”

He is one of these human steam-rollers who crush down all opposition; so that night we five met in the merriest café in the Boul’ Mich’. Below its bizarre frescoes of student life we had our table, and considering that four of us did not know where the next month’s rent was coming from we were a notably gay party.

Oh, you unfortunates who dine well every day of your lives, little do you guess the gastronomic bliss of those whose lives are one long Lent! Never could you have vanquished, as we, that host of insidious hors-d’œuvres; never beset as we that bouillon with the brown bread drowned in it. How the crisp fried soles shrank in their shrimp sauce at the spectacle of our devouring rage, and the filet mignon hid in fear under its juicy mushrooms! The salad of chicken and haricots verts seemed to turn still greener with terror, and, as it vanished in total rout, after it we hurled a bomb of Neapolitan ice cream. And the wine! How splendid to have all the Beaune one wants after a course of “Château La Pompe!” And those two bottles of sunshine and laughter from the vaults of Rheims—not more radiantly did they overflow than did our spirits! And so sipping our cafés filtre, we watched the crowd and all the world looked glorious.

The place had filled with the usual mob of students, models and filles-de-joie, and the scene was of more than the usual gaiety. The country had just been swept by a wave of military enthusiasm; patriotism was rampant; the female orchestra perspired in its efforts to be heard. Every one seemed to be thumping on tables with bocks, and two hundred voices were singing:

“Encore un petit verre de vin pour nous mettre en route;

Encore un petit verre de vin pour nous mettre en train.”

Some one started Fragson’s En avant, mes petits Gars, and there was more stamping, shouting and banging of bocks. Then the orchestra broke into the melody for which all were longing:

“Allons, enfants de la Patrie,

Le jour de gloire est arrivé.”

All were up on their seats now, and the song finished in a furore of enthusiasm.

The generous wine had affected us three men differently. Lorrimer was loquacious, Helstern gloomy, while I was inclined to sleep.

“Bah!” Helstern was saying: “This fire and fury, what is it? A mask to hide a desperate uneasiness. Poor France! There she is like some overfat ewe; there is the Prussian Wolf waiting; but look! between them the paw of the Lion.”[A]

He represented the fat ewe with the sugar bowl, the Wolf with the cream jug, and laid his big hand in between.

“Poor France!” broke in the girls; Rougette was more brilliantly pretty than ever, and her eyes flashed with indignation. Even the gentle Anastasia was roused to mild resentment.

“Yes,” went on Helstern, “you’re a great race, but you’re too old. You’ve got to go as they all went, Greece, Rome, Italy, Spain. England will follow, then Germany, last of all Russia.”

“For Heaven’s sake!” broke in Lorrimer noisily, “don’t let him get on the subject of International Destinies. What does it matter to us? To-day’s the only time worth considering. Let’s think of our own destinies: mine as the coming Gérôme, Helstern’s as the coming Rodin, and Madden’s as the coming Sylvanus Cobb.”

But I did not heed him. Drowsy content had possession of me. “Seven pounds,” I was thinking; “that means the sinews of war for another month. Oh, if I could only get some kind of an idea for that novel! What is Lorrimer babbling about now?”

“Marriage,” he was saying; “I don’t believe in marriage. The first year people are married they are happy, the second contented, the third resigned. There should be a new deal every three years. Why, if a general dispensation of divorce were to be granted, half of the married couples would break away so quick it would make your head swim.”

“Oh, Monsieur, you are shocking,” said Anastasia.

“What shocks to-day is a commonplace to-morrow. There will come a time when the custom that condemns a couple to bore one another for life will be considered a barbaric one. Why penalise people eternally for the aberration of a season? Three year marriages would give life back its colour, its passion, its romance. People so soon grow physically indifferent to each other. Flavoured with domesticity kisses lose their rapture.”

“You have the sentiments épouventable,” said Anastasia. “Wait till you have marry.”

“Me! You’ll never see me in the valley of the shadow of matrimony. Would you spoil a good lover by making an indifferent husband of him? No, we never care for the things we have, and we always want those we haven’t. If I were married to Helen of Troy I’d be sneaking side glances at some little Mimi Pinson across the way. And by the same token, Madam, keep your eye on that husband of yours, for even now he’s looking pretty hard at some one else.”

And indeed I was, for there across the room was the girl from Naples, Lucrezia Poppolini.

CHAPTER VIII
“TOM, DICK AND HARRY”

The partner who managed the forwarding department of the firm of Madden & Company reported to the partner who represented its manufacturing end that the editor of the Babbler had accepted his story The Microbe, for one of his weekly Tabloid Tales. A cheque was enclosed for three guineas.

The manufacturing partner looked up in a dazed way from his manuscript, tapped his mighty brain to quicken recollection of the story in question, signified his approval, and bent again to his labours. Being in the heart of a novel he dreaded distraction. These necessary recognitions of every day existence made it harder for him to lift himself back again into his world of dream.

However, in his sustained fits of abstraction he had a worthy ally in the forwarding partner. Things came to his hand in the most magical way, and his every wish seemed anticipated. It was as if the whole scheme of life conspired to favour the flow of inspiration. Thus, when he was quietly told that lunch was ready, and instead of eating would gaze vacantly at the butter, there was no suggestion of his impending insanity; neither, when he poured tea into the sugar basin instead of into his cup, was there any demonstration of alarm.

On the other hand the forwarding partner might often have been seen turning over the English magazines displayed in front of the booksellers, and noting their office addresses. She was wonderfully persistent, but wofully unfortunate. Even the New York-London article, which the manufacturing partner had told her to send to the Gotham Gleaner, had been returned. The editor was a personal friend of his, and had the article been signed in his own name would probably have taken it. As it was it did not get beyond a sub-editor.

“Throw the thing into the fire,” he said savagely when she told him; but she promptly sent it to the Sunday Magazine section of the New York Monitor. After that she was silent on the subject of returned manuscripts.

---

I have forbidden Anastasia to sell any more embroidery, so that she no longer spends long and late hours over her needle. Instead she hovers about me anxiously, doing her work with the least possible commotion.

I have given her the forty francs remaining from the sale of my seal and ring, and that, with the three guineas from the Babbler, is enough to carry us on for another month. It is extraordinary how we just manage to scrape along.

I wish to avoid all financial worry just now. My story has taken hold of me and is writing itself at the rate of three thousand words a day. No time now to spend on meticulous considerations of style; as I try to put down my teeming thoughts my pencil cannot travel fast enough. It is the same frenzy of narration with which I rattled off The Haunted Taxicab and its fellow culprits. If at times that newborn conscience of mine gives me qualms, I dull them with the thought that it is just a tale told to amuse and—oh, how I need the money!

And now to come to my novel, Tom, Dick and Harry.

Three cockney clerks on a ten days’ vacation, are tramping over a desolate moor in Wales. Tom is a dreamer with a turn for literature; Dick an adventurer who hates his desk; Harry an entertainer, with remote designs on the stage.

The scenery is wild and rugged. The road winds between great boulders that suggest a prehistoric race. The wind of the moor brings a glow to their cheeks, and their pipes are in full blast. Suddenly outspeaks Tom:

“Wouldn’t it be funny, you fellows, if a man clad in skins were suddenly to dodge out from behind one of these rocks, and we were to find that we were back in the world of a thousand years ago—just as we are now, you know, with all our knowledge of things?”

“It wouldn’t be funny at all,” said Dick. “How could we make use of our knowledge? What would we do for a living?”

“Well,” said Tom thoughtfully, “I think I would go in for the prophecy business. I could foretell things that were going to happen, and—yes, I think I’d try my hand at literary plagiarism. With all my reading I could rehash enough modern yarns to put all the tribal story-tellers out of business. I’d become the greatest yarn-spinner in the world. What would you do, Hal?”

“Oh, I don’t think I’d have any trouble,” said Harry. “I’d become the King’s harper. I think I could vamp on the harp all right. I’d revive all the popular songs of the last ten years, all the minstrel songs, all the sentimental ballads, all the national airs, and I’d set them to topical words. I’d become the greatest minstrel in the world. Now, Dick, it’s your turn.”

Dick considered for so long that they fancied he was at a loss. At last he drew a deep breath.

“I know—I’d discover America.”

They thought no more about it, and next day went gaily a-climbing a local mountain. But Tom, who was a poor climber, lagged behind his companions, and began to slip. Clawing frantically at the rough rock over the edge of the bluff he went, and fell to the bottom with a crash.

When he opened his eyes his head ached horribly. Putting up his hand he found his scalp clotted with blood. The heavy mist shut off everything but a small circle all round him. As he lay wondering what had become of his companions, suddenly he became aware of strange people regarding him. Gradually they came nearer and he saw that they were clad in skins.

Well, they take him prisoner and carry him off to their village, where their head-man questions him in an uncouth dialect. Then they send for a sage who also questions him, and is much mystified at his replies. “This wise greybeard,” thinks Tom, “seems to know less than an average school-boy.”

Then comes the news that two more of the strange creatures have been captured. Once again the trio are united.

“It’s a rum go,” said Dick. “Seems we’ve slipped back a thousand years.”

“What particular period of history have we climbed off at?” demanded Harry.

“It looks to me,” said Tom, “as if we were in Saxon England, just before the Norman Invasion. From what the old gentleman tells me Harold is the big chief.”

“What will we do?”

“Seems to me we’ll be all right. With a thousand years or so of experience ahead of those fellows we ought to become great men in this land. We were mighty small fry in old London. I wish I was an engineer, I’d invent gunpowder or something.”

“We’d better carry out our original plans,” said Dick.

By and by came messengers from the king, who wished to see these strange beings descended on his earth from a star. And, indeed, it seemed to the three friends as if they had really dropped on some planet a thousand years less advanced than ours (for given similar beginnings and conditions, will not history go on repeating itself?). In any case, the king received them with wonder and respect, and straightway they were attached to the royal household.

Gradually they adapted themselves to mediæval ways, became accustomed to sleeping on straw, and to eating like pigs; but even to the last they did not cease to deplore the absence of small-tooth combs in the toilet equipment of the royal family.

The book goes on to trace the fortunes of each of its three heroes. It tells how Harry captivated the court with a buck-and-wing dance, set them turkey-trotting to the strains of “Hitchy Koo,” and bunny-hugging to the melody of “Down the Mississippi.” He even opened a private class for lessons in the Tango, and initiated Tango Teas in which mead replaced the fragrant orange pekoe. He invented the first banjo, demoralised the court with the first ragtime. You should have heard King Harold joining in the chorus of “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee,” or singing as a solo “You Made Me Love You.” Decidedly Harry bid fair to be the most popular man in the kingdom.

But Tom was running him a pretty close race. He had become the Royal Story-teller, and nightly held them breathless while he thrilled them with such marvels as horseless chariots, men who fly with wings, and lightning harnessed till it makes the night like day. Yet when he hinted that such things may even come to pass, what a howl of derision went up!

“Ah, no!” cried King Harold, “these be not the deeds of men but of the very gods.” And all the wise men of the land wagged their grey beards in approval.

So after that he gave Truth the cold shoulder, and found fiction more grateful. He reconstructed all the stock plots of to-day, giving them a Saxon setting; and the characters that had taken the strongest hold on the popular imagination he rehabilitated in Saxon guise. The most childish tales would suffice. Night after night would he rivet their attention with “Aladdin” or “Bluebeard,” or “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Just as Harry had made all the minstrels rend their harp-strings, in despair, so Tom made all the story-tellers blush with shame, and take to the Hinterlands.

Poor Dick, however, was having a harder time of it. Like a man inspired he was raving of a wonderful land many days sail beyond the sea. But the stolid Saxons refused to believe him. “Fancy believing one who says the world is round! Surely the man is mad.”

At last he fell in with some Danes who, seeing an opportunity for piracy, agreed to let him be their pilot to this golden land. They fitted out a vessel, and sailed away to the West. But they were storm-driven for many days, and finally their boat was wrecked on the Arran Islands.

In the meantime, William the Conqueror came on the scene, and King Harold, refusing to listen to the warning of Tom, gave fight to the Norman. Then Tom and Harry beheld with their modern eyes that epoch-making battle.

“Oh, for a hundred men armed with modern rifles!” said Tom. “Then we could conquer the whole world.”

But with the subjugation of the Saxon, dark days follow for the three friends. Harry, trying to get a footing in the new court, and struggling with the new language, is stabbed by a jealous court jester. Dick, having escaped from the irate Danes, marries an Irish princess and becomes one of the Irish kings. Tom, continuing to indulge in his gift for prophecy, incurs the dislike of the Church and is thrown into prison. Then one bright morning he is led to be executed. He lays his head on the block. The executioner raises his axe. There is sudden blankness....

“Yes, very interesting case,” he hears the doctor saying. “Fell thirty feet. Came nasty whack on the rocks. We’ve trepanned ... expect him to recover consciousness quite soon....”

---

One morning, about the beginning of July, I was leading Dick through a whirl of adventure in the wilds of darkest Ireland, when Anastasia entered. I looked at her blankly.

“Hullo! What’s wrong now?”

“Oh! I am desolate. Please excuse me for trouble you, darleen, but there is no help for it. We have forget the rent, and once more it is necessary to be paid.”

“Oh, the rent, the awful, inevitable rent! What a cursed institution it is! Well, Little Thing, I’ve no money.”

“What we do, darleen?”

“It’s very unfortunate. I’m getting on so nicely with my novel, and here I have to break off and worry over matters of sordid finance.”

“I’m so sorry. Let me sell some of my hem-broderie. I sink I catch some money for that.”

“No, I hate to let you do that. Stop! We’ll compromise. Give me what you have and I’ll put it ‘up the spout.’ It will be only for a little while.”

So she gave me a cushion cover, two centre pieces, and some little mats.

“How much money is left?” I asked.

“Only about eleven franc.”

“Hum! That won’t help us much. All right. Leave it to me, and whatever you do, don’t worry. I’ll raise the wind somehow.”

So I took the suitcase, with the pieces of embroidery I had previously bought, and carried the whole thing to the Mont de Piété. I realised seventy francs for the whole thing.

“There you are,” I said on my return. “With the eleven francs you have, that makes eighty-one. You’d better pay the rent for one month only. Then we will have forty francs left. We can struggle along on that for two weeks. By that time something else will be sure to turn up.”

Something did turn up—the very next day. The editor of a cheap Weekly who had already begun to make plans for his special Christmas number, wrote and offered to take my diphtheria story if I would give it a Christmas setting. I growled, and used shocking language, but in the end I laid aside my novel and rechristening the story My Terrible Christmas, I made the necessary changes. Result: another cheque for a guinea.

How she managed to last out the balance of the month on an average of two francs a day I never knew. I discontinued my morning walks, giving all my time to my novel, and thinking of nothing else. I was dimly conscious that once more we were in the “Soup of the Onion” zone, but as I sat down dazed to my meals I scarce knew what I ate. I was all keyed up, with my eyes on the goal. I would compose whole chapters in my dreams, and sleeping or waking, my mind was never off my work.

Then came an evil week when the power of production completely left me. How I cursed and fretted. I was sick of the whole trade of writing. What a sorry craft! And my work was rotten. I hated it. A fog overhung my brain. I saw the whole world with distempered eyes. I started out on long walks around the fortifications, and as I walked everything seemed to lose all sense of my identity. Yet the fresh air was good to me, and the weaving of green leaves had a strange sweetness. The river, too, soothed me; then one day all my interest in the world came back.

At six o’clock that evening I began to work, and all night through I wrote like a madman. As I finished covering a sheet I would throw it on the floor and grab a fresh one. I was conscious that my wrist ached infernally. The dawn came and found me still writing, my face drawn, my eyes staring vaguely. Then at eleven in the morning I had finished. I was islanded in a sea of sheets, over twelve thousand words.

“Please pick them up for me,” I asked her. “I’m afraid it’s awful stuff, but I just had to go on. Everything seemed so plain, and I just wanted to get it down and out of my mind. Well, it’s done, my novel’s done. See, I’ve written the sweetest of all words: Finis. But I’m so tired. No, I don’t want any lunch. I’ll just lie down a bit.”

With a feeling of happiness that was like a flood of sunshine I crept into bed, and there I slept till eight of the following morning. Next day all I did was to loaf around the Luxembourg in the joyance of leaf and flower. I was still fagged, but so happy. As I smoked a tranquil pipe I watched the children on the merry-go-round. They were given little spears, with which to tilt at rings hung round the course, and if they bagged a certain number they were entitled to a seat for the next round. To watch the rosy and eager faces of these youthful knights on their fiery steeds, as they rode with lances couched, was a gentle specific for the soul.

Yes, everything seemed so good, so bright, so beneficent. I loved that picture full of freshness, gaiety and youth. Anastasia and the Môme joined me, and we listened to the band under the marronniers. Then we lingered on the Terrace of the Queen’s to watch the sky behind the Tower Eiffel kindle to a glow of amber, and a wondrous golden tide o’erflooding the groves till each leaf seemed radiant and the fountain exulted in a spray of flame.

Suddenly the Môme gave a cry of delight. Listen! In the distance we could hear a noise like a hum of bees. It is the little soldier, who every evening at closing time, parades the garden with his drum, warning every one it is time to go. This to the children is the crown of all the happy day. Hasten Sylvere and Yvonne—it is the little soldier. Fall in line, Francois and Odette, we must march to the music. Gather round Cyprille, Maurice, Victoire: follow to the rattle of the drum. Here he comes, the little blue and red soldier. How sturdily he beats! With what imperturbable dignity he marches amid that scampering, jostling, laughing, shouting mob of merry-hearted children!

“After all,” I observe, “struggle, poverty and hard work give us moments of joy such as the rich never know. I want to put it on record, that though we are nearly at the end of our resources, this has been one of the happiest days of my life.”

“I weesh you let me go to work, darleen. I make some money for help. I sew for dressmaker if you let me.”

“Never. How near are we to the end?”

“I have enough for to-morrow only.”

“That’s bad.” I didn’t say any more. A gloom fell on my spirits.

“A letter for Monsieur,” said the concierge, as with heavy hearts and slow steps we mounted to our rooms. I handed it to Anastasia.

“Open it, Little Thing; it’s in your department.”

She did so; she gave a little scream of delight.

“Look! It’s for that article I send to New York Monitor. He geeve you cheque. Let me see.... Oh, mon Dieu! one hundred franc! good, good, now we are save!”

I took it quickly.

“One hundred francs nothing,” I said. “Young woman, you’ve got to get next to our monetary system. That’s not one hundred francs; that’s one hundred dollars—five hundred francs. Why, what’s the matter?”

For Anastasia had promptly fainted.

CHAPTER IX
AN UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENT

I ascribed Anastasia’s fainting spell to the somewhat sketchy meals we had been having; so for the next few weeks I fed her up anxiously. That same evening we held a special meeting of the Finance Committee to consider our improved position.

“Be under no illusion,” I observed as Chairman, “with reference to our recent success. It is not, as you might imagine, the turn of the tide. There are three reasons why this particular article was accepted: First, it was snappy and up-to-date; second, it compared Manhattan and Modern Babylon in a way favourable to the former; third, and chief reason, the editor happened to have some very good cuts that he could work in to make an attractive spread. Given these inducements, and a temporary lack of more exciting matter, any offering can dispense with such a detail as literary merit.”

Here I regarded some jottings I had made on an envelope.

“Let us now see how we stand. We started with twelve manuscripts, of which we have sold four. There remain five more articles, and three fairy stories. The articles I regard as time wasted. People won’t read straight descriptive stuff; even in novels one has to sneak it in.”

Here the Secretary regarded ruefully some manuscripts rather the worse for postal transit.

“Go on wasting stamps on them if you like,” I continued; “but, candidly, they’re the wrong thing. As for the fairy stories, where are they now?”

“I have sent them to the Pickadeely Magazine.”

“They might have some chance there. The editor devotes a certain space to children that aren’t grown up. Now as to funds.”

The Secretary sat down, and the Treasurer rose in her place. She stated that there were five hundred francs in the treasury, of which a hundred would be needed to pay the rent up to the end of September. Two hundred francs would have to be allowed for current expenses; that would leave a hundred for contingencies.

“Very good,” I said; “I move that the money be expended as suggested. And now—two blissful months of freedom from worry in which to re-write my novel. Thank Heaven!”

With that I plunged into my work as strenuously as before. I must confess I re-read it with a tremor. It was bad, but—not too bad. Unconsciously I had reverted to my yarn-spinning style, yet often in the white heat of inspiration I had hit on the master-word just as surely as if I had pondered half a day. However, the result as a whole I regarded with disfavour. The work was lacking in distinction, in reserve, in the fine art of understatement. Instead of keeping my story well in hand I had let it gallop away with me. Truly I was incorrigible.

“Anastasia,” I said one day, as I was about half through with my revision, “you’re always asking if there’s no way you can help me. I can suggest one.”

“Oh, good! What is it?”

“Well, I know where I can hire a typewriter for a month very cheaply. You might try your hand at punching out this wonderful work of fiction on it.”

“Oh, that please me very much.”

“All right. I’ll fetch the instrument of torture.”

It was a very old machine, of eccentric mechanism and uncouth appearance. With fumbling hesitation she began. About a word a minute was her average, and that word a mistake; but rapidly she progressed. Sometimes I would hear a vigorous: “Nom d’un Chien!” and would find that she had gone over the same line twice. Then again, she would get her carbon paper wrong, and the duplicate would come out on the back of the original. At other times it was only that she had run over the edge of the paper.

The typewriter, too, was somewhat lethargic in action. It seemed to say: “I’m so old in service, and my joints are so stiff—surely I might be allowed to take my own time. If you try to hurry me I’ll get my fingers tangled, or I’ll jam my riband, or I’ll make all kinds of mistakes. Really, it’s time I was superannuated.” No beginner, even in a Business School, ever tackled a more decrepit and cantankerous machine, and it said much for her patience that she turned out such good copy.

So passed August and most of September—day after day of grinding work in sweltering heat; I, pruning, piecing, chopping, changing; she pounding patiently at that malcontent machine. Then at last, after a long, hard day it was done. The sunshine was mellow on the roofs as I watched her write the closing words. She handed the page to me, and, regarding the sunlight almost sorrowfully, she folded her tired hands.

Two tears stole down her pale cheeks.

All at once I saw how worn and weary she was. Thin, gentle, sad—more than ever like a child she looked, with her exquisite profile, and the heaped-up masses of her dark hair; more than ever like a child with her shrinking figure and her delicate pallor: yet she would soon be nineteen. The idea came to me that in my passion of creative egotism I had given little thought to her.

“Why, what’s the matter, Little Thing? Are you sick?”

She looked at me piteously.

“Have you not see? Have you not guess?”

“No, what?” I demanded in a tone of alarm.

“Pretty soon you are going to be a fazzer.”

“My God!”

I could only gasp and stare at her.

“Well, are you not going to kees me, and say you are not sorry?”

“Yes, yes. There, Little Thing ... I—I’m glad.”

But there was no conviction in my tone, and I sat gazing into vacancy. In my intense preoccupation never had such a thing occurred to me. It came as a shock, as something improper, as one of those brutal realities that break in so wofully on the serenities of life. There was a ridiculous side to it, too. I saw myself sheepishly wheeling a baby carriage, and I muttered with set teeth: “Never!”

“Confound it all! It’s so embarrassing,” I thought distressfully. “It upsets my whole programme. It makes life more complex, and I am trying to make it more simple. It gives me new responsibilities, and my every effort is to avoid them. Worst of all, it seems to sound the death-knell of my youth. To feel like a boy has always been my ideal of well-being, and how can one feel like a boy with a rising son to remind one of maturity?”

Perhaps, however, it would be a daughter. Somehow that didn’t seem so bad. So to change the subject I suggested that we take a walk along the river. As we went through the Tuileries all of the western city seemed to wallow in flame. The sky rolled up in tawny orange, and the twin towers of the Trocadero were like arms raised in distress amid a conflagration. The river was a welter of lilac fire, while above the portal of the Grand Palace the chariot driver held his rearing horses in a blaze of glory. To the east all was light and enchantment, as a thousand windows burned like imperial gems, and tower and spire and dome shimmered in a delicate dust of gold.

“What a city, this Paris!” I murmured. “Add but three letters to it and you have Paradise.”

“Where you are, darleen, to me it is always Paradise,” said Anastasia.

In the tranquil moods of matrimony, how is it that one shrinks so from sentiment? On the Barbary Coasts of Love we excel in it. In books, on the stage, we revel in it; but when it comes to the hallowed humdrum of the home it suits us better to be curtly commonplace. This is so hard for the Latin races to understand. They are so emotional, so unconscious in their affection. Doubtless Anastasia put down my reserve to coldness, but I could not help it.

“Look here, Little Thing,” I said, as we walked home, “you mustn’t work any more. Let’s go to the country for a week or two. Let’s go to Fontainebleau.”

“How we get money?”

“We’ll use that extra hundred francs.”

“Yes, but when that is spend?”

“Oh, don’t worry. Something will turn up. Let’s go.”

“If you like it. I shall love it, the rest, the good air. Just one week.”

“And let’s take the Môme with us. Frosine will let her go. It will be such a treat for her. Perhaps, too, Helstern will spare a few days and join us.”

“Ah, it will all be so nice.”

So next day I bundled up Tom, Dick and Harry, and under the name of Silenus Starset, I sent it off to the publishers of my other novels.

“I’ve been thinking, Little Thing,” I said, “that when we come back we’d better give up the apartment and take a room. We can save over twenty francs a month like that. It won’t be for long. When the novel’s accepted, there will be an end of our troubles.”

“Just as you like it. I’ve been very happy.”

Helstern promised to meet us in the forest, so that afternoon with the Môme and a hundred francs we took the train to Barbizon. If we had not both been avid for it, that holiday would have been worth while only to see the rapture of the Môme. It was her first sight of the real country, and she was delirious with delight. Anastasia had a busy time answering her questions, trying to check her excitement, gently restraining her jerking arms and legs. Her eyes shone, her tongue rattled, her head pivoted eagerly, and many on the train watched her with amusement.

As we rolled through the country of Millet, the westering sun slanted across the level fields, catching the edges of the furrows, and launching long shadows across the orchards. We took rooms in a cottage in Barbizon. From the sun-baked street a step, and we were in the thick of the forest, drowned in leafy twilight and pine-scented solitude. And with every turn, under that canopy of laughing leaves, the way grew wilder and more luring. The molten sunshine dripped through branches, flooding with gold the ferny hollows, dappling with amber the russet pathway. Down, through the cool green aisles it led in twilights of translucent green, mid pillering oak and yielding carpets of fine-powdered cones. And ever the rocks grew more grotesque, taking the shapes of griffins and primordial beasts, all mottled with that splendid moss of crimson, green, and gold. Then it grew on one that wood nymphs were about, that fawns were peeping from the lightning-splintered oaks, and that the spell of the forest was folding one around.

On the second day Helstern joined us. He was gloomily enthusiastic, pointing out to me beauties of form and colour I would have idly passed. He made me really feel ashamed of my crassness. What a gifted, acute chap! But, oh, how atrabilious!

“For Heaven’s sake, old man,” I said one day, “don’t be so pessimistic.”

“How can a man be other than pessimistic,” he answered, “with a foot like mine. Just think what it means. Look here.”

Rolling up his sleeve he showed me an arm a sculptor might have raved over.

“If I’d been all right, what an athlete I’d have made. Look at my torso, my other leg. And my whole heart is for action, for energy, for deeds. Just think how much that makes life worth while is barred to me. And I shrink from society, especially where there are women. I’m always thinking they pity me. Oh, that’s gall and wormwood—to be pitied! I should have a wife, children, a home, yet here I am a lonely, brooding misanthrope; and I’m only forty-six.”

Yet he cheered up when the Môme was near. The two were the greatest of friends now, and it was a notable sight to see the big man with his Forbes Robertson type of face and his iron-grey mane, leading by the hand the little girl of five with the slender limbs, the pansy-blue eyes, and the honey-yellow hair.

And what exciting tales the Môme would have to tell on her return: how they had surprised a deer nibbling at the short grass; how a wild boar with tushes gleaming had glared at them out of the brake; how an eagle had arisen from a lonely gorge! Then there were lizards crawling on the silver-grey rocks, and the ceaseless calling of cuckoos, and scolding squirrels, and drumming woodpeckers. Oh, that was the happy child! Yet sometimes I wondered if the man was not as happy in his own way.

He was a queer chap, was Helstern. I remember one time we all sat together on a fallen log, and the sky seen through the black bars of the pines was like a fire of glowing coals. Long, serene and mellow the evening lengthened to a close.

“You know,” said the sculptor, as he pulled steadily at the Turk’s head pipe, and regarded the Môme thoughtfully, “I believe that all children should be reared and educated by the State. Then there would be no unfair handicapping of the poor: each child would find its proper place in the world.”

“What would you do with the home?”

“I would surely destroy the millions of unworthy homes, stupid homes, needy homes, bigoted homes, sordid homes. I would replace these with a great glorious Home, run by a beneficent State, where from the very cradle children would be developed and trained on scientific principles, where they would be taught that the noblest effort of man is the service of man; the most ignoble, the seeking of money. I would teach them to live for the spiritual, not the sensual benefits of life. Many private homes do not teach these things. Their influence is pernicious. How many men can look back on such homes and not declare them bungling makeshifts, either stupidly narrow, or actually unhappy?”

“You would destroy the love ties of parent and child?”

“Not at all. I would strengthen them. As it is, how many children are educated away from their homes, in convents, boarding-schools, Lycees? Do they love their parents any the less? No; the more, for they do not see so much that is weak and contemptible in them. But if mothers wish, let them enter the State nurseries and nurse their own little ones—not according to our bungling, ignorant methods, but according to the methods of science. Then the youngsters would not be exposed to the anxieties that darken the average home; they would not pick up and perpetuate the vulgarities of their parents. The child of the pauper would be just as refined as the child of the peer. Think what that would mean; a breaking down of all class distinction. The word ‘gentleman’ would come into its true significance, and in a few years we would have a new race, with new ideals, new ambitions, new ways of thought.”

“You would educate them, too?”

“They would have all the education they wanted, but not in the present way. They would be taught to examine, to reason: not to accept blindly the beliefs of their fathers; to sift, to analyse: not to let themselves be crammed with ready-made ideas. I would not try to turn them all out in one mould, as the pedagogues do; I would try to develop their originality. Question and challenge would be their attitude. I would establish ‘Chairs of Inquiry.’ I would teach them that the circle is not round, and that two and two do not make four. Up the great stairway of Truth would I lead them, so that standing on its highest point they might hew still higher steps in the rock of knowledge.”

“And how would you pay for this national nursery nonsense?”

“By making money uninheritable. I believe the hope of the future, the triumph of democracy, the very salvation of the race lies in the State education of the children. The greatest enemies of the young are the old. Instead of the child honouring the parents, the parents should honour the child; for if there’s any virtue in evolution the son ought to be an improvement on the father.”

In the growing darkness I could see the bowl of his pipe glow and fade. I was not paying much attention to what he was saying, but there in that scented pine-gloom it was a pleasure to listen to that rich, vibrating voice.

“I want to be fair, I want to be just, I want to see every man do his share of the world’s work. Let him earn as much money as he likes, but at his death let it revert to the State for the general education of the race, not to pamper and spoil his own particular progeny. Let the girls be taught the glory of motherhood, and the men military duty; then, fully equipped for the struggle, let all go forth. How simple it is! How sane! Yet we’re blind, so blind.”

“Solonge is sleeping in my arms,” said Anastasia. “I sink it is time we must go home.”

CHAPTER X
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF DOROTHY MADDEN

The time was drawing near when I would become a father. Yet as the hour of my trial approached I realised that I was glad, glad. I hoped it would be a girl; nay, I was sure it would be a girl; a little, dark, old-fashioned girl, whose hand I would hold on my rambles, and whose innocent mind I would watch unfolding like a flower. And I would call her ... yes, I would call her Dorothy.

Dorothy! How sweet the name sounded! But no sweeter than my little daughter—of that I was sure. I could feel her hand, small as a rose leaf, nestling in mine; see her innocent, tarn-brown eyes gazing upward into my face. Then as she ran and eagerly plucked a vagrant blossom I would weave about it some charming legend. I would people the glade with fairies for her, and the rocks with gnomes. In her I would live over again my own wonderful childhood. She, too, would be a dreamer, sharing that wonderful kingdom of mine, understanding me as no other had ever done.

Then when she grew up, what a wonderful woman she would be! How proud she would be of me! How, in old age, when my hair grew white, and my footsteps faltered, she would take my arm, and together we would walk round the old garden in the hush of eventide.

“Wonderful destiny!” I cried, inspired by the sentimental pictures unfolding themselves before me. “I can see myself older yet, an octogenarian. My back is bent, my hair is snowy white, I have a venerable beard, and kindly eyes that shine through gold-rimmed spectacles. A tartan shawl is round my shoulders, and my hands, as they rest on my silver-headed cane, are glazed and crinkly. But, crowning glory! Greater than that array of children of my mind for which men give me honour, are the children of my flesh who play around my knee, my grandchildren. There will be such a merry swarm of them, and in their joyous laughter I will grow young again. Oh, blessed destiny! To be a father is much; but to be a grandfather so infinitely nobler—and less trouble.”

The more I thought over it, the more I became impressed. My imminent paternity became almost an obsession with me. My marriage had surprised me. No time had I to embroider it with the flowers of fancy, but this was different. So engrossed did I become with a sense of my own importance that you would have thought no one had ever become a father before. In my enthusiasm I told Lorrimer of my interesting condition, but the faun-like young man rather damped my ardour.

“Marriage,” he observed, in his usual cynical manner, “is a lottery, in which the prizes are white elephants. But Fatherhood, that’s the sorriest of gambles. True, as you suggest, your daughter may marry the President of the United States, but on the other hand she may turn out to be another Brinvilliers. She may be a Madame de Staël and she may be a Pompadour. Then again, you may have a family of a dozen.”

“But I won’t,” I protested indignantly.

“Well, just suppose. You may have a dozen ordinary respectable tax-payers and one rotter. Don’t you think the black sheep will discount all your successful efforts? Really, old man, you’re taking an awful chance. Then after all it’s an ungrateful business. The girls get married and enter the families of their husbands; the boys either settle far away, or get wives you don’t approve of. Anyway, you lose them. At the worst you beget a criminal, at the best an ingrate. It’s a poor business. However, cheer up, old man: we’ll hope for the best.”

Helstern, on the other hand, took a different view of it. The sculptor was sombrely enthusiastic.

“You must let me do a group of it, Madden. I’ll call it the First-born. I’m sure I could take a gold medal with it.”

He led me to a café and in his tragic tones ordered beer in which we drank to the health of the First-born.

“Just think of it,” he rolled magnificently, his visionary instincts aroused; “just think of that little human soul waiting to be born, and it’s you that give it the chance to enter this world. Oh, happy man! Just think of all the others, the countless hosts of the unborn waiting their turn. Why, it’s an inspiring sight, these wistful legions, countless as the sands of the sea. And it’s for us to welcome them, to be the means of opening the door to as many as possible, to give them beautiful bodies to enter into, and to make the world more pleasant for them to dwell in. Now, there’s a glorious ambition for us all. Let parenthood be the crowning honour of life. Let it be the duty of the race to so improve conditions that there will be the right kind of welcome waiting for them—that they will be fit and worthy in body and soul to live the life that is awaiting them.”

He drank deeply from his big stein, and wiped some foam from his lips.

“Why, it’s more than an ambition: it’s a religion. The Japanese worship the Dead; let us worship the Unborn, the great races who are to come, the people we are going to help to make great. For on us it all depends, on us to-day. Every action of ours is like a pebble thrown in a still sea, the waves of which go rippling down eternity. Yes, let us realise our responsibility to the Unborn, and govern our lives accordingly in grace and goodliness. There! that goes to the very heart of all morality—to live our best, not because we are expecting to be rewarded, but because we are making for generations to come better bodies, better homes, better lives. And they in their turn will realise their duty to the others that are crowding on, and make the world still worthier for their occupation.”

He filled his Turk’s head pipe thoughtfully.

“I want to go further,” he went on, “but the rest is more fanciful. I believe that the armies of the Unborn know that it all depends on us here to-day what kind of deal they are going to get, and in their vast, blind way they are trying to influence us. I like to think that that is the great impulse towards good we all feel, the power that in spite of selfishness, is gradually lifting us onward and upward. It is the multitude to come, trying in their blind, pitiful way to influence us, to make us better. There they wait, the soldiers of the future, ready to take up the great fight, to carry the banner of freedom, happiness, and mutual love to the golden goal of universal brotherhood. Truly I worship the Unborn.”

He lit his pipe solemnly.

“Then, let me congratulate you, Madden. You are a very lucky man.”

Much cheered I thanked him and, absorbed in my dreams of paternity, continued to tramp the streets. All the time I was seeing that slim little girl of mine, with her long dark hair, her hazel eyes, her quaint, old-fashioned ways. And as the day drew near she grew more and more real to me. I could feel her caressing arms around my neck, and her rosebud mouth pressed to mine. Truly she was the most adorable child that ever lived.

One piece of luck we had at this period: The fairy stories were accepted by the Piccadilly Magazine and we got ten pounds for them, thus saving the situation once again.

When the time came that we should obtain a new lodging I had taken a room in the rue D’Assas, but I was immediately sorry, for I discovered that it overlooked the Maternity Hospital Tarnier. The very first morning I saw a young woman coming out with a new baby. She was a mere girl, hatless and all alone, and she cried very bitterly.

Then that night, as I was preparing to ascend the stairs, I heard terrible shrieks coming from the great, gloomy building as if some woman within were being painfully murdered. For a moment I paused, stricken with horror. There was a cab drawn up close by, and the cocher was pacing beside it. He was the typical Parisian cab-driver, corpulent and rubicund, the product of open air, no brain worry, and generous living. He indicated the direction of the appalling cries: “The world’s not coming to an end just yet,” he observed with a great rosy grin.

Nor was the view from our window conducive of more cheerful thoughts. I could look right down into one of the wards, a great, barn-like place, mathematically monotonous, painfully clean. There were the white enamelled beds, each with its face of pain on the pillow, its tumbled bedding, agony-twisted or still in apathy. Then in the night I suddenly started, for once again I heard those awful sounds. They began as long, half-stifled moans ... then screams, each piercing, sharp-edged with agony, holding a strange note of terror ... then shriek upon shriek till the ultimate expression of human agony seemed to be reached ... then sudden silence.

At least twice during the night this would happen, and often in the morning there would be a dismal little funeral cortége standing outside the gates: a man dabbing red eyes with a handkerchief would herd some blubbering children into a carriage, and drive after a hearse in which lay a coffin. It was all very melancholy, and preyed on my spirits. I wondered how people could live here always; but no doubt they got hardened. No doubt this was why we got our room so cheaply.

Then at last the day came when Little Thing held me very tightly, gave me a long, hard kiss and left me, to pass through that portal of pain. Back I went to the room again. How empty it seemed now! I was miserable beyond all words. I had dinner at the Lilas, and for two hours sat moodily brooding over my coffee. What amazed me was that other men could go through this trial time after time and take it with such calmness. The long-haired poets, the garçons with their tight, white aprons—were they fathers too? A girl came and sat by me, a girl with high cheek-bones, snake-like eyes, and a mouth like a red scar. I rose with dignity, sought my room and my bed.

There I fell into a troubled doze in which I dreamed of Dorothy. She had grown up and had made her début as an operatic star with overwhelming success. How proud I was of her! Then suddenly as I gazed, she changed to the young woman of the café, who had looked at me so meaningly. I awoke with a crushing sense of distress.

Hark! Was that a scream? It seemed to cleave my very heart. But then it might be some one else. There was no distinguishing quality in these screams. Trull or princess they were all alike, just plain mothers crying in their agony. No, I could not tell ... but it was too terrible. I dressed hurriedly and went out into the streets.

At three in the morning Paris is a city of weird fascination. It turns to us a new side, sinister, dark, mysterious. Even as the rats gather in its gutters, so do the human rats take possession of its pavements. Every one you meet seems on evil bent, and in the dim half-light you speculate on their pursuits. Here come two sauntering demireps with complexions of vivid certainty; there a rake-hell reels homeward from the night dens of Montmartre; now it is a wretched gatherer of cigarette stubs, peering hawk-eyed as he shambles along; then two dark, sallow youths, with narrow faces, glinting eyes, and unlit cigarettes in their cynical mouths—the sinister Apache.

Coming up the Boul’ Mich’ were a stream of tumbrels from the Halles, and following their trail I came on a scene bewildering in its movement and clamour. The carts that had been arriving since the previous night had gorged the ten pavilions that form the great Paris Market till they overflowed far into the outlying streets. The pavements were blocked with heaps of cabbages and cauliflowers, carrots and turnips, celery and asparagus, while a dozen different kinds of salad gleamed under the arc-lights with a strange unnatural viridity. In other parts of the market crates of chickens and rabbits were being dumped on the pavements; fresh fish from the coast were being unloaded in dripping, salty boxes; and a regiment of butchers in white smocks were staggering under enough sides of beef to feed an army.

What an orgy of colour it was! You might pass from the corals and ivorys of the vegetable market to the fierce crimsons of the meat pavilion; from the silver greys of the section devoted to fish, to the golden yellows of the hall dedicated to butter, and cheese. There were a dozen shades of green alone—from the light, glossy green of the lettuce to the dull green of the cress; a dozen shades of red—from the pale pink of the radish to the dark crimson of the beet.

Through this tumult of confusion I pushed my way. Hurrying porters in red night-caps, with great racks of osier strapped on their backs, rushed to and fro, panting, and dripping with sweat. Strapping red-faced women with the manner of men ordered them about. A self-reliant race, these women of the Halles, accustomed to hold their own in the fierce struggle of competition, to eat and drink enormously, to be exposed to the weather in all seasons. Their voices are raucous, their eyes sharp, their substantial frames swathed in many layers of clothes. Their world is the market; they were born in its atmosphere, they will die with its clamour in their ears.

And from the surrounding slums what a sea of misery seemed to wash up! At this time you may see human flotsam that is elsewhen invisible. In the bustling confusion of the dawn the human rats slink out of their holes to gain a few sous; not much—just four sous for soup and bread, four sous for a corner in the dosshouse, and a few sous for cognac. Here flourish all the métiers of misery. I saw five old women whose combined ages must have made up four hundred years, huddled together for warmth, and all sunk in twitching, shuddering sleep. I saw outcast men with livid faces and rat-chewed beards, whose clothes rotted on their rickety frames. I saw others dazed from a debauch, goggle-eyed, blue-lipped pictures of wretchedness. And the drinking dens in the narrow streets vomited forth more wanton women, and malevolent men, till it seemed to me that never does misery seem so pitiable, never vice so repulsive, as when it swirls round those teeming pavilions at four o’clock of a raw, rainy morning.

Suddenly I stopped to look at a female of unusual height and robust rotundity. A woman merchant of the markets, seemingly of substance no less than of flesh. Her voice was deep and hoarse, her eyes hard and grim, and the firmness of her mouth was accentuated by a deliberate moustache. A masculine woman. A truculent, overbearing woman. A very virago of a woman. Her complexion was of such a hard redness, her Roman nose so belligerent. On her bosom, which outstood like the seat of a fauteuil, reposed a heavy gold chain and locket. On her great, red wrists were bracelets of gold; and on her hands, which looked as if they could deliver a sledge-hammer blow, sparkled many rings. Beside this magnificent termagant her perspiring porters looked pusillanimous. “Here,” thought I, “is the very Queen of the Halles.”

She was enthroned amid a pile of wicker crates containing large grey shells. As I looked closer I saw that the grey shells contained grey snails, and that those on the top of the heap were peering forth and shooting out tentative grey horns. Some of them were even crawling up the basket work. Then as I watched them curiously a label on the crate caught my eye and I read:

Madame Séraphine Guinoval
Marchande d’Escargots
Les Halles, Paris.

“Guinoval,” I thought: “that’s odd. Surely I’ve heard that name before. Why, it’s the maiden name of Anastasia. The name of this enormous woman, then, is Guinoval. Sudden idea! Might it not be that there is some relationship between them?” But the contrast between my slight, shrinking Anastasia with her child-like face and this dragoon of a woman was so great that I dismissed the idea as absurd.

I was very tired when I reached home. I had been afoot four hours, and dropping on my bed I fell asleep. About eleven o’clock I awoke with a vague sense of fear. Something had happened, I felt. Hurrying down, I entered the hospital.

“Yes,” they told me; “my wife had been confined during the night. She was very weak, but doing well.”

“And the child,” I asked, trying to conceal my eagerness. “Was it a boy or a girl?”

“The child, Monsieur, was a girl” (how my heart leapt); “but unfortunately it—had not lived.”

“Dead!” I stammered; then after a stunned moment:

“Can I see her? Can I see my child?”

So they took me to something that lay swathed in linen. I started with a curious emotion of pain. That! so grotesque, so pitiful,—that, the gracious girl who was going to be so much to me, the sweet companion who was going to understand me as no one else could, the precious comfort of my declining years! Oh, the bitter mockery of it!

And so next day, alone in a single cab I took to the cemetery all that was mortal of Dorothy Madden.

END OF BOOK II