‘Scenery does not interest him much,’ Rameau went on, with an acquiescent nod; ‘but he has a good deal to say upon his impressions of the Spanish race in particular, and of all other races in general. The subject is not a new one, and Krowtosky is only really entertaining when he is talking of himself, or of his next-door neighbour in connection with himself.
‘“I am on the whole much disappointed in Madrid,” he continues further on, “not because it is a duller town than I had imagined, but because local colour and national individuality are almost extinct. It proves the disastrous tendencies of all races to amalgamation and imitation. Yet, after all, Rameau, what is the real value of local colour? It is more often than not a mere matter of imagination, and one of the illusions we fancy we enjoy. Any one with a lively imagination can invent a more vivid local colour for all the countries he has never visited than he is likely to find in any of them. Witness Merimée and his band. They duped their public like the vulgarest literary conjurors, and showed us that a trick will serve us instead of what we are pleased to call Nature. And the deception was but the result of our stupid hunger for the unusual. As if anything under the monotonous stars of an unchanging heaven can be unusual; and as if everything in this old and ugly world is not hideously familiar! The more varied our travels the more similar our experience. For, Rameau, our real ills are monotony and stupidity. Man resembles man, as rats resemble rats, only he is a good deal less interesting and more noxious. You have a fine head, and I have a misshapen one. Well, the same perplexities, needs, instincts, appetites, passions, and impulses agitate us, and explain our different actions, which, au fond, have no variety in them whatever. We change the symbols of our faiths, while these remain fundamentally the same, and we give our countries different names to represent the unchangeable miseries of humanity....”
‘Here you have the malady of youth in its crisis. A décadent poet could not chant more lugubriously, though perhaps less intelligibly. The sick youth laments in the same irritable tone the vulgarity of the madrileñas, the exaggerated prowess of the gentlemen of the arena, exalts the patient and noble bulls, rails at the puny byplay of the picadors and at the silly enthusiasm of the spectators. He rushes distractedly from an inexpensive inn, where a band of merry rascals joined him and over wine sang the praises of the Fair. Praise of the eternal feminine he cannot stand. Poor wretch! Had he been Adam in the Garden of Paradise, Eden would have ceased to be Eden upon the impertinent introduction of Eve. We find him complaining that he should have left a score of maundering youths in Paris doing dismal homage to the Sex, to drop upon a sillier band in Madrid hymning the everlasting subject. He protests the Spanish women, for all their eyes and arched feet, are untempting and insipid, like the rest. They are not the dolls of the North; they are the animals of the South. He confines his curiosity to Spanish literature, and is in pursuit of its apostle of Pessimism. “I am taking lessons in Spanish,” he writes from another inn. “I teach Russian to as poor a devil as myself, in exchange for his help in his own tongue. Between us we are making creditable progress. He is writing an article on the Russian novelists for a review that will pay him something like twopence a page. Yet he preserves his faith in literature! Mighty indeed is man’s capacity for cherishing illusions. I advised him to break stones for a lucrative change, but he seems to doubt the value of the advice since I do not follow it myself. This is one of the things that prove man a rational being. We read Castrès together. You have doubtless heard of Castrès, the poet of Spain, and said to be sufficiently sedative as regards the happy hopes of youth. Such is my Spaniard’s description in reply to a question of mine upon his tendencies. I have inserted the phrase as a concession to the perverse taste for local colouring. The phrase paints the man; he lives upon onions and bread into the bargain, and dreams with a cigarette between his lips. This morning I went to see Castrès.... I found the great man writing and smoking at the same time in a big sparsely furnished bedroom. He is low-sized and heavily built, with soft black eyes and a forest of hair round and about his sallow face. He looks as if he dined well and liked women. There is always something unctuous and fatuous about a man who likes women, which becomes intolerably accentuated if women should happen to like him too. The expression suggests a mixture of oil and sugar. We discussed the Décadents under their new name, and hardly appreciated the advantage of exchange, symbolism being no whit less empty and vapid; another demonstration of the worthlessness of novelty, since, however much we vary things, we end where we start, at the Unchangeable. Castrès agrees with me that Naturalism is dead; but what the devil, he asked, is going to take its place? Naturalism under a new name, I replied, which is only romance upside down. Whether we invent animals or angels, it matters little. It is romancing all the same, and only proves that one man likes eau sucrée and another likes absinthe. It is a concoction either way, and about as useful in one form as in the other.... Of Castrès the man I thought as indifferently as I did of Castrès the poet. I asked him how Pessimism stood in Spain, and who were its representatives. He shrugged, spat, and surveyed me dismissingly, and with his big soft eyes.... ‘Caramba! I can’t say I know much about it. But I believe it will never flourish here. We have too much sun, and life is, on the whole, easy enough for us. An hour of sunshine, a crust of bread, and a bunch of grapes, or the taste of an onion and a lifted wine-skin upon the roadside, and there you have a Spaniard built and ready for love-making. What more does he want? And in a land where women are fair and facile, wherefore should he whine, and see black where God made blue? I have here a volume of poems just published by a young girl—Señorita Pilar Villafranca y Nuño. I have glanced through the volume, and I don’t think you can ask for anything finer in the way of Pessimism. It is enough to make a sane man cut his throat, if he had not the good sense to pause beforehand, in distrust of the sincerity of the writer who could survive the proof-reading of such dismal stuff. It reminds me of what I have heard of Schopenhauer, who, after wrecking all our altars, could sit down and enjoy a heavy dinner. He despised none of the pleasures of life in practice, while decrying them all in theory. You’ll probably find that this young woman dines heartily, and employs her evenings over her wedding outfit, if she is not already married and nursing her first baby. I took the book away and read it with my poor devil that evening. You will not be surprised to learn that I found it very much superior to anything of Castrès’ I have read. He might well sneer at her in self-preservation, that being the weapon the strong have ever preferred to use against the weak. It is bad enough to find real talent in a young woman, but absolute unbelief, the doctrine of complete negation! To find in this land of To-morrow, a feminine apostle of the Nirvana....”’
‘Ah,’ interrupted Gaston, ‘I was wondering what had become of the word.’
‘“A feminine apostle of the Nirvana,”’ continued Rameau, with an expressive smile. ‘“Judge if masculine opinion in Spain would be indulgent. Even my poor devil, though no less struck than I with the poetry, found it much too strong for a woman. ‘But she is doubtless old, and then it matters less. The discontents and disappointments of old maidenhood have drifted her into deep learning and irreligion,’ he added, by way of consolation. ‘Old or young,’ I exclaimed, ‘it is all one to me. For me she is a thinker, not a woman. And I am going straight off to her publisher, from whom I’ll wrest her address, if need be, by reason of a thick stick.’
‘“The services of a stick were not required. My request was immediately complied with. I carried the lady’s book in my hand, and was no doubt mistaken for a recent purchaser. My poet lives on the fourth floor in a very shabby house, in a very shabby street at the other end of Madrid. I deemed it wise to defer my visit until after dinner. It was half-past eight when I climbed the four flights, and stood on the landing, anxiously asking myself if I had made up my mind to ring. Had it not the air of an invasion? While I was yet debating the door opened, and an untidy-looking maid shot out into the passage. I captured her before the twilight of the stairs had swallowed her, and demanded to see the Señorita Pilar Villafranca y Nuño. I understood that it would not serve me in her eyes to give evidence of uncertainty or bashfulness. ‘She is inside; knock at the middle door and you’ll find her,’ screamed the untidy maid, and in another moment she was whirling down the stairs, and I was left to shut the hall door and announce myself.
‘“The house was tidier than the maid. I crossed a scrupulously clean hall and knocked at the middle door, as I had been directed. A low, deep voice shouted, Come in! While turning the handle gingerly, I thought to myself, the poor devil was right; only a woman of massive proportions and very advanced years could bellow that order. The scene that met my eyes was prettier than absolute conformity to my ideas demanded. In a neat little sitting-room, lit by a shaded lamp, were seated three persons; a stout Spanish woman engaged with a basket of stockings, a pale, thin young girl with melancholy eyes of an unusual intensity of gaze, and a small lad sitting at her feet, and reading aloud from a book they held together. The child had the girl’s eyes, but while curiosity, belonging to his years, brightened their sombreness with the promise of surprise and laughter, hers held an expression of permanent sadness and soft untroubled gloom. It was superfluous information on the mother’s part, in response to my mention of the poet’s name, to indicate her daughter majestically, as if she wished it to be understood that she herself had no part in the production of matter so suspicious in a woman as poetry. I was on the brink of assuring her that nobody would ever deem her capable of such folly, and begging her to return to her stockings as occupation more appropriate than the entertainment of an admirer of the Muse she despised, when Pilar quietly said, ‘Be seated, sir.’ From that moment I took no further heed of the Señora Villafranca than if she had been the accommodating dueña of Spanish comedy and I the unvirtuous, or noble but thwarted, lover who had bribed her. In ten minutes Pilar and I were talking as freely as if we had known one another from infancy; far more freely, possibly, for in the latter case we should long ago have talked ourselves to silence. How do these young girls manage to get hold of books, Rameau, when all the forces of domestic law are exercised to keep them apart? There is not a living Spanish or French writer with whom this child, barely out of her teens, is not acquainted. Her judgment may often be at fault,—whose is not, if backed by anything like originality? But to hear her discuss Naturalism! Castrès, puffing his eternal cigarette, walks you through les lieux communs, but this girl takes flights that fairly dazzle you. And then her Pessimism! The queer thing is that she has found it for herself, and Schopenhauer has nothing to do with it. For that matter, nobody living or dead seems to have had anything to do with the forming of her. She is essentially primesautière. You French do manage to hit upon excellent words; primesautière perfectly describes this Spanish maid. She is all herself, first of the mould, fresh, though so burdened with the century’s malady. So young, and she believes in nothing—but nothing, Rameau! She hopes for nothing, for nothing! She plays with no emotions, feigns no poetic despairs, utters no paradoxes, and is simplicity itself in her gestures, expressions, and ideas. She calmly rejects all the pretty illusions of her sex, without a pang or regret, because, for her, truth is above personal happiness.
‘“We talked, we talked—talked till far into the night, while the fat mother slumbered noisily in her chair, and the little boy slept curled up at his sister’s feet. Can you guess what first put it into my head to go? The smell of the lamp as the wick flickeringly lowered. ‘Dios mio!’ cried Pilar, ‘it is close on two o’clock, and we have been chattering while my mother sleeps comfortlessly in her chair, and my little brother is dreaming on the carpet instead of in his bed. Good-night, sir; I must leave you and carry my baby to bed.’ She stooped and lifted the sleeping boy with her arms. Such bodily strength in one so frail much astonished me. I would have offered her help, but the little lad had already found a comfortable spot in the hollow of her neck, and with a cordial nod to me she disappeared into the inner room. I had not expected this evidence of womanly tenderness from her, and the picture haunted me on my way down the dark staircase and through the dim starlit streets.”
‘The extracts from the next letters are singularly characteristic,’ said Rameau, well pleased by our profound attention. ‘Krowtosky, upon his return to Paris, has taken a third-class ticket from Madrid to Bayonne. To the poet he has said his last farewell, and probably wears upon his heart her precious autograph. Not that Krowtosky is ostensibly sentimental. He rejects the notion of such folly, and if by chance he dropped into pretty fooling, be sure he would find a philosophical way out of the disgrace deservedly attached to such weakness. “I am travelling to Bayonne,” he writes, “and I will reach it to-morrow afternoon, but I am convinced that once there I shall straightway take the train back to Madrid. Odd, is it not? Yet I feel that I shall be compelled to return to that young girl. And this is not love, mark you, Rameau; not in the least. I know all about that. Did I not study it in the case of that young girl I met at Toulouse? Well, nothing I feel for Pilar in any way resembles the foolish sentiment her gestures and looks expressed. I am quite master of myself, and do not hang on any one’s lips or glances; but I must see Pilar again. Do you know why I hesitated outside her door that first evening I called upon her? I had a presentiment, as I climbed up those stairs, that I should marry her. We may reject a faith in presentiments, but they shake us nevertheless. How slowly this train goes! The landscape, across which we speed in the leisurely movement of Spanish steam, is flat and ugly, an interminable view of cornfields. There is a wide-hatted priest in front of me with an open breviary in his hand. Perhaps I shall find myself craving service of one of his brothers some day. What an odd fellow I am, to be sure! I intend, oh certainly I intend to take the Paris train to-morrow night from Bayonne, and as certainly I know I shall find myself on my way back to Madrid! And it cannot be for the pleasure of passing a couple of days and nights in a beastly third-class carriage, which is nothing better here than a cattle-pen....”
‘Of his reception by the poet, of his sentiments and wooing, he writes very sparingly. His great terror is that I should detect the lover where he insists there is only a philosopher. Philosophy took him from Madrid, and Philosophy brought him back within forty-eight hours. Philosophy sued, wooed, and won the Muse, and led him to his wedding-morn. While engaged in its service, he writes in this jocose strain the very evening of his marriage: “This morning in a dark little church, in a dark little street of Madrid, we were married. Though neither of us believes in anything, we agreed to make the usual concession to conventional feeling and social law, and were married in the most legal and Christianlike fashion. Nothing was lacking,—neither rings nor signatures, nor church-bells nor church-fees, nor yet the excellent and venerable fat priest, a degree uglier than myself, who obligingly made us one. While this ceremony was being performed, I could not forget the inconvenient fact that neither of us brought the other much in the shape of promise of future subsistence, not even hope, of which there is not a spark between us. This preoccupation distracted me while the priest mumbled and sermonised, and a wicked little French couplet kept running through my head: