“Monsieur is no sportsman?” asked Fifine’s soft voice behind us. A child of the fraternal Republic, she had no thought of that reserve with strangers which marks our insular prejudices; yet, I confess, regarding her social traditions, this unaffected bonhomie of hers surprised me a little. Monsieur whipped round with a start and his eyes alight. He bowed, posed, stuck one arm akimbo and flourished the other.
“As Apollo was a sportsman, Mademoiselle,” he said, “so am I—to capture music as it flies, not, like that murdering caitiff, to destroy it for the indulgence of a base material appetite. Alas, the pretty, pretty becs-fins! See them marshalled on a dish, each corpse a rapturous song, to be lost in the stifling entrails of some pampered glutton. Think next, Monsieur, when you eat a lark, what melody has perished in you.”
“It sings in me, Monsieur; I know that,” I said. “I will take what comfort I can of the thought.”
He turned his shoulder to me, with a disdainful “pouf.” “Mademoiselle,” he said, “will comprehend.”
“Is Monsieur a bird-catcher?” said Fifine.
I thought he would have exploded. He rose on his toes, smacked his chest once, turned, walked away, and came back again.
“I,” he said, stabbing his diaphragm with his forefinger, “am Carabas Cabarus!”
A rather painful silence ensued, during which he scanned our embarrassed faces for rapture; even for intelligence. Then, failing the expected response, he condescended, with an audible sigh, to a patient repudiation of the slander.
“No, Mademoiselle, I am not a bird-catcher. You will hear of me—perhaps—where you are going; you will hear of me—possibly. The ideal I follow has no material form—at least so it has seemed to me until this moment.” (Fifine might here accept the obvious inference which his eyes expressed.) “It descends to me from voices in the clouds; it rises in the scent of flowers; I see far away, against a sky of milky agate, a low moon hung under a branch, pale and yellow as a citron fruit, and, as I advance to seize it, it eludes me, rising like a golden bubble. Sometimes it is the song of birds; sometimes the fall of water; sometimes I see it browsing on inaccessible shelves of rock, the shining goat, the chêvre d’or of our old, old haunted land. But, whence or wherever, it is not for me—that illusive ideal, that spirit of abstract beauty, which, pursuing for ever, I shall find at last only in the grave.”
His voice broke a little. Adding—“Unless I am for once mistaken, how divinely, as to the human inaccessibility of my goal!” he put an artistic period to his rhapsody, and, bowing to Fifine, turned away and vanished into his compartment, from which he did not again issue.