"There was formerly," persisted the editor, who knew quite well what he wanted, "a flavor of the fashionable world about your Parisian notes, which our readers miss. French art and Bohemia are overdone."
Gano sold some valuable books, and went over to London with the proceeds to have it out with the editor. The upshot of the interview was that he declined to furnish any more "Notes." The editor seemed perfectly resigned. However, after the struggle in Paris, Gano was convinced that London was the likelier place for him to find a footing. In the background of his mind he had already, when he sold his books, foreseen and accepted the result of the further discussion of his "Notes." He would at all events be on the spot in London, and would quickly find some opening. Talent was not the drug in the market here, he told himself, that it was in France.
CHAPTER XV
And day after day, week after week, while he sought an opening, he very nearly starved. In a couple of months he had arrived at the conclusion that the fight in London was more sordid and more dispiriting than the direst poverty in Paris. About this time he came in for a distasteful piece of hack journalism, that brought him a disproportionate loathing and an inadequate reward of five pounds. He was strongly tempted to invest a part of this sole capital in returning to France. A couple of days later a letter arrived through the London branch of the Paris bankers from Henri de Poincy, back in the South of France on a holiday. He asked for Ethan's private address, and said if he did not hear something satisfactory by return he would conclude the beastly English climate had made him ill; in which case he was straightway coming over to look Ethan up, and persuade him to return to his friends in Nice. If he did not hear by wire or letter in three days, De Poincy would come to London and see what was the matter. They were all anxious at his silence.
This determined the matter. Gano was not going to have his old friend find him in his present plight. Besides, he already owed him money, and had sworn to himself that he would not meet De Poincy again till he could go to him with the sum in his hands. Henri was far from well off, and, since his father's death the year before, had helped to support his sisters. Ethan wired: "Leaving London; quite well; remembrance to all; writing," and took the night-boat to Dieppe. He delayed further communication till he knew Henri would be back in Petersburg, and by that time he was able, by living on next to nothing, to return a part of the loan, and to represent himself as intensely glad to be in his old haunts again. These haunts were in reality very new, albeit in Paris; but he did not enter into details further than to say he was rediscovering the fact that he could write French much more easily and much better than he could English, and was doing some book-reviewing for the Lendemain.
He might have added, but did not, that he was getting at first-hand a very considerable knowledge of the darker side of life, but had no impulse to make artistic use of it. It did not stimulate, it did not even interest—it paralyzed him. "If I'd had the makings of a genuine poet in me," he admitted to Henri de Poincy afterwards, "those years might have buffeted some good work out of me. But my muse was a miserable time-server, like the rest of my fine acquaintance. She left me when I wanted bread. The fact was, I was feeling life too keenly to write about it. Poetizing in the face of such suffering as I saw and shared seemed a drivelling impertinence. Life was more terrible, more tremendous than anything any poet had said about it, or could say."
Gano was unconsciously making of himself an obscure example of the fact that a man's temperament will find him out upon the removal of the artificial ballast. This removal so seldom takes place that the vaguest notions abound as to any given person's specific gravity. We go through life unconsciously floated, balanced, by family, by inherited friends, inherited pursuits, inherited opinions, inherited money—by a thousand conditions not made by ourselves, but found ready-made to our hands, an expression of other people's energy, supporting or neutralizing our own. Gano's inclinations, not being volcanic or epoch-making, had been, up to the time of the break with his grandfather, dutifully filtered through environing circumstance. Even so, Mr. Tallmadge had had occasion to condemn his grandson's "queer tastes," his "visionary notions," his girlish compassion for suffering, his hypersensitiveness to blame, his even greater shrinking from hurting the feelings of others. The tough old New Englander's contempt for "sensitiveness" had at least done Ethan the service of giving him an exterior self-control, which seemed so far to deny the feelings it only masked, that he was able to pass comfortably in the crowd as a person more impassive, if anything, than the majority. But as soon as he was left to himself, and followed no longer by critical eyes, his natural bias announced itself. He felt less and less drawn to the insouciant artist life of the town; the happy-go-lucky ways lost their first fresh savor; the suppers, the orgies, the endless comment, quite as eager as any of the work and often more brilliant; the short, merry life of the happy little flies that buzz so busily about the flower-garden of art, and that vanish with the vanishing of day—they all ended by striking some note of discord in him, and making him feel out of place there. "Was he getting too old for this kind of thing?" he asked himself, with modern youth's morbid consciousness of the value certain people set upon one time of life to the exclusion of any other, forgetting that "to travel deliberately through one's ages is to get the heart out of a liberal education," and the heart out of enlightened satisfaction as well.
But Gano was, perhaps, only following the unwritten law that rules such haunts and their frequenters, for these gay Bohemians are all young—and very young indeed. No one knows where they go when their short hour is done. Their laughter lags a little behind the rest one day, and the next they are not there. A new face is in the old place, a younger voice is screaming theories and outlaughing the laughers who are left.