A sense of weariness was upon Dr. Vermont the December night I write of, as he walked toward the Café Lander. Most of the lads were dispersed by the Christmas vacation. But he knew precisely those who were expecting him. Anatole Buzeval, his favourite, a charming young fellow, with healthy Norman blood in his veins, and in spite of the disastrous environment of Paris fin de siècle, with something throbbing under his coat that suspiciously resembled a boy’s free heart. He came from a Norman fishing town, near the beat of the channel, washed by a friendly old river and wooded by still friendlier trees. In boyhood, he had walked in the woods, he had fished in the river, he had known the delights of amateur seafaring, and rode, and shot live things, and was first awakened by love to the melody of the birds, and to heroism by the genial spirit of endurance of the fishermen. These influences kept him partially sheltered from the century-worn cynicism and exhausted emotions prevailing. It accounted for the ring of sincerity in his laughter, for the zest of his ephemeral enthusiasms and the courageous freedom of his blue eyes. But he was nevertheless bitten by the disease of the hour, and his speech was tainted with the cheap fin de siècle indifference and dejection. He was the youngest of the party, the most intelligent and the brightest. Beside him sat Gaston Favre, a youth who would have been an artist if the death-throes of the century left him any room to believe in art. Nothing any longer interested him, but he was still capable of remarking upon sight of a bad picture—
‘Now, if it were worth the trouble, or really mattered, there is food for indignation in that picture.’
Whereupon he would survey it in the spirit of ostentatious tolerance, without a wince or a critical flash of eye.
The third, Julien Renaud, was a little older than these two, and professed a dead interest in politics. Time was when Lander’s echoed with the noble flow of his eloquence. Time was when it was confidently believed that he was destined, not only in his own imagination, to reach the tribune, and thunder effectively against the abuses of government. But that was in M. Constans’ hour, and M. Constans was notoriously Julien’s pet aversion. In those remote days, he was antagonistic toward what he called ‘the whole shop of the Elysian Fields,’ and relished M. Carnot as little as he had ever relished ‘old Father Grévy.’ But these were now half-forgotten ebullitions of youth, and like his beloved France, he was battered and bruised by the defeats of life into complete indifference. Nothing mattered. In reply to everything, he had but one response, a quiet shrug, a weariedly lifted eyebrow, and a murmured cui bono upon a long-drawn sigh. On this evening the chosen drink was punch, which resulted in more boisterous converse, and showed Anatole in almost a lyric mood. The first mention of the insipidly recurrent phrase of the hour—‘end of the century’—inspired him to fall upon mirthful reminiscences, just as Dr. Vermont entered the café.
‘M. le docteur désire?’ said the waiter, helping him off with his overcoat.
The doctor named his drink as he took a seat, and blandly scrutinised each flushed and smiling face.
‘We were talking, Doctor,’ Anatole cried, ‘of ways of ending the year. Do you remember, two years ago, when I first joined you, coming straight from Barbizon, where I chummed with a queer and amusing Scotch artist? how I taught you all to sing what I conceived to be a Scotch melody—Les Temps Jadis—and we drank at midnight an execrable decoction called in Scotland a tod-dy, standing, and gave an English shake-hands all round, which I am told is the way in Scotland of toasting the departing year?’
The Doctor paused in the act of lifting his glass, and nodded, as he threw out a couple of absent names in signification of his keen remembrance of the evening.
Followed good-natured and regretful words for each absent face. Les temps jadis were not such bad times after all, though the melancholy Scotch might chant them with more melody than the vivacious sons of Gaul. Jean this was an excellent heart; Henri that, a capital good fellow, the pity was he stuttered so. Frédéric, poor fool, had settled down, and married a dot and a squint, and the squint, alas! was so marked, that the dowry was a totally inadequate compensation. Upon which, Julien made cynical mention of the greater security of marital rights when backed by aid so powerful as a squint.
‘But, since women are only happy in virtue of their lovers and not in virtue of their husbands,’ shouted Anatole, with a charming look of rouerie, ‘what a dismal future for Frédéric’s wife! I declare I could find it in my heart to rush off and console her. I should be so blinded by my own burning eloquence, as I flung myself at her feet, that I would have no eyes left for the squint.’