It is certain he meant very seriously that if he ever came into his kingdom, Godelinette should be queen. The song had been printed, but, so far as I knew, had never had much vogue; and it seemed an odd chance that this evening, in a French seaport town where I was passing a single night, I should stray by hazard into a sailors' pothouse and hear it again.
Edmund Pair lived in the Latin Quarter when I did, but he was no longer a mere student. He had published a good many songs; articles had been written about them in the newspapers; and at his rooms you would meet the men who had 'arrived'—actors, painters, musicians, authors, and now and then a politician—who thus recognised him as more or less one of themselves. Everybody liked him; everybody said, 'He is splendidly gifted; he will go far.' A few of us already addressed him, half-playfully perhaps, as cher maître.
He was three or four years older than I—eight- or nine-and-twenty to my twenty-five—and I was still in the schools; but for all that we were great chums. Quite apart from his special talent, he was a remarkable man—amusing in talk, good-looking, generous, affectionate. He had read; he had travelled; he had hob-and-nobbed with all sorts and conditions of people. He had wit, imagination, humour, and a voice that made whatever he said a cordial to the ear. For myself, I admired him, enjoyed him, loved him, with equal fervour; he had all of my hero-worship, and the lion's share of my friendship; perhaps I was vain as well as glad to be distinguished by his intimacy. We used to spend two or three evenings a week together, at his place or at mine, or over the table of a café, talking till the small hours—Elysian sessions, at which we smoked more cigarettes and emptied more bocks than I should care to count. On Sundays and holidays we would take long walks arm-in-arm in the Bois, or, accompanied by Godelinette, go to Viroflay or Fontainebleau, lunch in the open, bedeck our hats with wildflowers, and romp like children. He was tall and slender, with dark waving hair, a delicate aquiline profile, a clear brown skin, and grey eyes, alert, intelligent, kindly. I fancy the Boulevard St. Michel, flooded with sunshine, broken here and there by long crisp shadows; trams and omnibuses toiling up the hill, tooting their horns; students and étudiantes sauntering gaily backwards and forwards on the trottoir; an odour of asphalte, of caporal tobacco; myself one of the multitude on the terrace of a café; and Edmund and Godelinette coming to join me—he with his swinging stride, a gesture of salutation, a laughing face; she in the freshest of bright-coloured spring toilets: I fancy this, and it seems an adventure of the golden age. Then we would drink our apéritifs, our Turin bitter, perhaps our absinthe, and go off to dine together in the garden at Lavenue's.
Godelinette was a child of the people, but Pair had done wonders by way of civilising her. She had learned English, and prattled it with an accent so quaint and sprightly as to give point to her otherwise perhaps somewhat commonplace observations. She was fond of reading; she could play a little; she was an excellent housewife, and generally a very good-natured and quite presentable little person. She was Parisian and adaptable. To meet her, you would never have suspected her origin; you would have found it hard to believe that she had been the wife of a drunken tailor, who used to beat her. One January night, four or five years before, Pair had surprised this gentleman publicly pummelling her in the Rue Gay-Lussac. He hastened to remonstrate; and the husband went off, hiccoughing of his outraged rights, and calling the universe to witness that he would have the law of the meddling stranger. Pair picked the girl up (she was scarcely eighteen then, and had only been married a sixmonth), he picked her up from where she had fallen, half fainting, on the pavement, carried her to his lodgings, which were at hand, and sent for a doctor. In his manuscript-littered study, for rather more than nine weeks, she lay on a bed of fever, the consequence of blows, exhaustion, and exposure. When she got well there was no talk of her leaving. Pair couldn't let her go back to her tailor; he couldn't turn her into the streets. Besides, during the months that he had nursed her, he had somehow conceived a great tenderness for her; it made his heart burn with grief and anger to think of what she had suffered in the past, and he yearned to sustain and protect and comfort her for the future. This perhaps was no more than natural; but, what rather upset the calculations of his friends, she, towards whom he had established himself in the relation of a benefactor, bore him, instead of a grudge therefor, a passionate gratitude and affection. So, Pair said, they were only waiting till her tailor should drink himself to death, to get married; and meanwhile, he exacted for her all the respect that would have been due to his wife; and everybody called her by his name. She was a pretty little thing, very daintily formed, with tiny hands and feet, and big gipsyish brown eyes; and very delicate, very fragile—she looked as if anything might carry her off. Her name, Godeleine, seeming much too grand and mediæval for so small and actual a person, Pair had turned it into Godelinette.
We all said, 'He is splendidly gifted; he will do great things.' He had studied at Cambridge and at Leipsic before coming to Paris. He was learned, enlightened, and extremely modern; he was a hard worker. We said he would do great things; but I thought in those days, and indeed I still think—and, what is more to the purpose, men who were themselves musicians and composers, men whose names are known, were before me in thinking—that he had already done great things, that the songs he had already published were achievements. They seemed to us original in conception, accomplished and felicitous in treatment; they were full of melody and movement, full of harmonic surprises; they had style and they had 'go.' One would have imagined they must please at once the cultivated and the general public. I could never understand why they weren't popular. They would be printed; they would be praised at length, and under distinguished signatures, in the reviews; they would enjoy an unusual success of approbation; but—they wouldn't sell, and they wouldn't get themselves sung at concerts. If they had been too good, if they had been over the heads of people—but they weren't. Plenty of work quite as good, quite as modern, yet no whit more tuneful or interesting, was making its authors rich. We couldn't understand it, we had to conclude it was a fluke, a question of chance, of accident. Pair was still a very young man; he must go on knocking, and some day—to-morrow, next week, next year, but some day certainly—the door of public favour would be opened to him. Meanwhile his position was by no means an unenviable one, goodness knows. To have your orbit in the art world of Paris, and to be recognised there as a star; to be written about in the Revue des Deux-Mondes; to possess the friendship of the masters, to know that they believe in you, to hear them prophesy, 'He will do great things'—all that is something, even if your wares don't 'take on' in the market-place.
'It's a good job, though, that I haven't got to live by them,' Pair said; and there indeed he touched a salient point. His people were dead; his father had been a younger son; he had no money of his own. But his father's elder brother, a squire in Hampshire, made him rather a liberal allowance,—something like six hundred a year, I believe, which was opulence in the Latin Quarter. Now, the squire had been aware of Pair's relation with Godelinette from its inception, and had not disapproved. On his visits to Paris he had dined with them, given them dinners, and treated her with the utmost complaisance. But when, one fine morning, her tailor died, and my quixotic friend announced his intention of marrying her, dans les délais légaux, the squire protested. I think I read the whole correspondence, and I remember that in the beginning the elder man took the tone of paradox and banter. 'Behave dishonourably, my dear fellow. I have winked at your mistress heretofore, because boys will be boys; but it is the man who marries. And, anyhow, a woman is so much more interesting in a false position.' But he soon became serious, presently furious, and, when the marriage was an accomplished fact, cut off the funds.
'Never mind, my dear,' said Pair. 'We will go to London and seek our fortune. We will write the songs of the people, and let who will make the laws. We will grow rich and famous, and
"When I am king, diddle-diddle,
You shall be queen!"'