French, following his glance, saw that it rested on a tall and extremely elegant young woman who was just settling herself in a deck-chair with the assistance of an attentive maid and a hovering steward. A young man, of equal height and almost superior elegance, strolled up to tuck a rug over her shining boot-tips before seating himself at her side; and French had to own that, at least as a moment’s ornament, the lady was worth all the trouble spent on her. She seemed, in truth, framed by nature to bloom from one of Monsieur Jolyesse’s canvases, so completely did she embody the kind of beauty it was his mission to immortalize. It was annoying that eyes like forest-pools and a mouth like a tropical flower should so fit into that particular type; but then the object of Monsieur Jolyesse’s admiration had the air of wearing her features, like her clothes, simply because they were the latest fashion, and not because they were a part of her being. Her inner state was probably a much less complicated affair than her lovely exterior: it was a state, French guessed, of easy apathetic good-humour, galvanized by the occasional need of a cigarette, and by a gentle enjoyment of her companion’s conversation. French had wondered, since his childhood, what the Olympian lovers in fashion-plates found to say to each other. Now he knew. They said (he strolled nearer to the couple to catch it): “Did you wire about reserving a compartment?”; and “I haven’t seen my golf-clubs since we came on board”: and “I do hope Marshall’s brought enough of that new stuff for my face,”—and lastly, after a dreamy pause: “I know Gwen gave me a book to read when we started, but I can’t think where on earth I’ve put it.”
It was odd too that, handsome and young as they still were (both well on the warm side of forty), this striking couple were curiously undefinably old-fashioned—in just the same way as Jolyesse’s art. They belonged, for all their up-to-date attire, to a period before the triumph of the slack and the slouching: it was as if their elegance had pined too long in the bud, and its belated flowering had a tinge of staleness.
French mused on these things while he listened to Jolyesse’s guesses as to the class and nationality of the couple, and finally, in answer to the insistent question: “But where do you think they come from?” replied a little impatiently: “Oh, from the rue de la Paix, of course!” He was tired of the subject, and of his companion, and wanted to get back to his thoughts of Horace Fingall.
“Ah, I hope so—then I may run across them yet!” Jolyesse, as he gathered up his bags, shot a last glance at the beauty. “I’ll haunt the dressmakers till I find her—she looks as if she spent most of her time with them. And the young man evidently refuses her nothing. You’ll see, I’ll have her in the next Salon!” He turned back to add: “She might be a compatriot of yours. Women who look as if they came out of the depths of history usually turn out to be from your newest Territory. If you run across her, do say a good word for me. My full lengths are fifty thousand francs now—to Americans.”
III
All that first evening in Paris the vision of his book grew and grew in French’s mind. Much as he loved the great city, nothing it could give him was comparable, at that particular hour, to the rapture of his complete withdrawal from it into the sanctuary of his own thoughts. The very next day he was to see Horace Fingall’s widow, and perhaps to put his finger on the clue to the labyrinth: that mysterious tormenting question of the relation between the creative artist’s personal experience and its ideal expression. He was to try to guess how much of Mrs. Fingall, beside her features, had passed into her husband’s painting; and merely to ponder on that opportunity was to plunge himself into the heart of his subject. Fingall’s art had at last received recognition, genuine from the few, but mainly, no doubt, inspired by the motives to which Jolyesse had sneeringly alluded; and, intolerable as it was to French to think that snobbishness and cupidity were the chief elements in the general acclamation of his idol, he could not forget that he owed to these baser ingredients the chance to utter his own panegyric. It was because the vulgar herd at last wanted to know what to say when it heard Fingall mentioned that Willis French was to be allowed to tell them; such was the base rubble the Temple of Fame was built of! Yes, but future generations would enrich its face with lasting marbles; and it was to be French’s privilege to put the first slab in place.
The young man, thus brooding, lost himself in the alluring and perplexing alternatives of his plan. The particular way of dealing with a man’s art depended, of course, so much on its relation to his private life, and on the chance of a real insight into that. Fingall’s life had been obdurately closed and aloof; would it be his widow’s wish that it should remain so? Or would she understand that any serious attempt to analyse so complex and individual an art must be preceded by a reverent scrutiny of the artist’s personality? Would she, above all, understand how reverent French’s scrutiny would be, and consent, for the sake of her husband’s glory, to guide and enlighten it? Her attitude, of course, as he was nervously aware, would greatly depend on his: on his finding the right words and the convincing tone. He could almost have prayed for guidance, for some supernatural light on what to say to her! It was late that night when, turning from his open window above the throbbing city, he murmured to himself: “I wonder what on earth we shall begin by saying to each other?”
Her sitting-room at the Nouveau Luxe was empty when he was shown into it the next day, though a friendly note had assured him that she would be in by five. But he was not sorry she was late, for the room had its secrets to reveal. The most conspicuous of these was a large photograph of a handsome young man, in a frame which French instantly recognized as the mate of the one he had noticed on Mrs. Morland’s writing-table. Well—it was natural, and rather charming, that the happy couple should choose the same frame for each other’s portraits, and there was nothing offensive to Fingall’s memory in the fact of Donald Paul’s picture being the most prominent object in his wife’s drawing-room.
Only—if this were indeed Donald Paul, where had French seen him already? He was still questioning the lines of the pleasant oft-repeated face when his answer entered the room in the shape of a splendidly draped and feathered lady.
“I’m so sorry! The dressmakers are such beasts—they’ve been sticking pins in me ever since two o’clock.” She held out her hand with a click of bracelets slipping down to the slim wrist. “Donald! Do come—it’s Mr. French,” she called back over her shoulder; and the gentleman of the photograph came in after her.