Yes, but to give up Art! Art, which was the meaning of his life! Rosina’s life stood for nothing. It was out of all proportion to give up his for hers. Had he not suffered enough? Had he not already expiated his marriage, the hapless union he had entered into when distracted by illness and disgrace and hunger, when perhaps his whole future had hinged—such were the tragi-whimsical turns of life—on his reluctance to change his last two dollars?
He rose and walked about restlessly through the glistening streets. Everywhere restaurants, open-air tables, men, women. He wandered to Montmartre. More restaurants, more couples, cafés, cabarets, queer entertainments: Le Chat Noir, Le Rat Mort, the red sails of the famous Mill turning tirelessly, lights, gayety, women, always women, of all shades of prettiness and piquancy, with rosy cheeks and lips not always painted, and eyes that could shine without bismuth. He walked back through the Grand Boulevards—they were one flush of life.
But the reasoning was inexorable. He had sacrificed Rosina to his Art; Art had slipped through his fingers, but Rosina remained none the less sacrificed. Now his Art must be sacrificed to Rosina—the atonement was logical. That was not a surrender, he told himself angrily, to Ruth Hailey’s view of life—a view whose narrowness he and everybody around him had outgrown. He refused to recognize, in the face of this radiant Paris, that each human soul came into the world to sacrifice its happiness to other human souls. That seemed to him a preposterous paradox rather than a solution; a world of reciprocal whipping-boys was an absurdity, and, at any rate, if such were the scheme of creation, it did not work at all with the gross run of mankind, to say nothing of animals. The only reason for going back to Rosina must be honestly to fulfil his side of the bargain. She had done her part, he must do his. That his return to her meant the ruin of his life and his life-work was not her concern; these larger issues were too wide for her comprehension; she loved her husband and she desired him. That was enough. He owed himself to her, and to shirk his obligation was as dishonorable as to disown a debt. He had paid off the Stasborough store-keeper, although absolved by bankruptcy; he must be equally honorable with Rosina, though his life had been bankrupted. Practically his Art had always been sacrificed to her; it was her pettiness that had driven him to produce in haste for the market, so as to escape indebtedness to her; well, let the sacrifice be consummated.
He had come to the Place de la Concorde—it seemed a fairy-land of romantic lights, a dance of fire-flies; it wooed him towards the calm and solitude of the river. He leaned on the parapet and saw the sombre, fire-shot water stretching away in marvellously solemn beauty, hushed and lonely, its many-twinkling perspective of green and red and yellow gleams palpitating in the air dim with a yearning poetry. He felt the presence of Ruth Hailey at his side; she looked like the photograph now; he held her little hand and gazed into her candid eyes. Good God! This girl had loved him all those long years, and would be hopelessly faithful even unto death.
But if he went back to Rosina, what of Eleanor Wyndwood? Would he spoil her life, too? and more culpably than he had spoiled Ruth Hailey’s? He sighed wearily; it was impossible to do wrong and have the result simple. Life was so intercomplicated. But he had been honest with Eleanor, thank heaven; she knew the truth about his life; he would be honest with her to the end. He would tell her the truth now. The same noble, uncalculating simplicity that had accorded him friendship, that had been ready to give him love, would bear her triumphantly through the new trial. He remembered her brave words: “If I did not suffer I should think I had not grown.” Perhaps there would be consolation for both in the thought that she remained unsullied before the world.
He crossed the river, and his mood changed. He got towards the Latin Quarter, and wandered into the “Boule Miche” amid the students’ restaurants, where young humanity sat in its couples again, amorous and gay; every place was full within and without, and there was the gurgle of liquids with the sounds of singing and laughter; he was back again amid the blithe, insouciant, easy-going life of the eternal undergraduate, with the local variation of bocks; rakish young men danced through the restaurants arm in arm in tipsy merriment; poets with lack-lustre visages and tumbled hair imbibed vermouth, clinking glasses with their mistresses; the smoky air vibrated with irresponsible gayety; it was full of invitations to careless happiness, joyous levity, forgetfulness of an austere view of life. Puritanism seemed a form of dementia, asceticism a sunless folly. The atmosphere gained upon him. He tossed off a bock, then walked recklessly past Mrs. Wyndwood’s studio. The whole court-yard was in darkness, but he thought of to-morrow night, and it glowed as with bonfires of joy. He resolved to sup famously. He jumped into a victoria and drove to a fashionable restaurant. It was near midnight; the theatres had emptied, but the streets were only the fuller. He passed through rooms full of dazzling women in gorgeous evening costumes, sipping champagne; women, always women: the city blossomed with them like roses. He ordered some oysters and chablis, and forgot to eat; opposite him a self-conscious celebrity of the footlights, blazing with diamonds, held her court, surrounded by a bevy of dandies; behind him a black-eyed demi-mondaine in red playfully rapped her cavalier’s knuckles; at the next table the exuberant liveliness of a supper party diverted him; he drank, drank, listening greedily to the gay repartees. Life should be joy, joy, joy, he thought. That was what modern life lacked, gray with problems, wrinkled with thought. These people lived—lived in splendid insolence under the midnight sun. There was a touch of bigness that appealed to him in their arrogant vitality. Society was an organized insipidity, afraid of life.
The figure of Ruth Hailey rose rebuking; he paid the bill and went out.
But his heart cried, ached for happiness. Ah, no! He could not give up so young; go into a living grave. He roved the Boulevards again. The beautiful city solicited him, rouged and perfumed, clad in shining garments, with star-gemmed hair. But the virginal figure of Ruth Hailey, with sweet shy eyes, stood against the city. Paris seemed garish beside her.
He was fluctuating again. It seemed as if the simple girl would draw him away from all the joys of life. Was there no means of ridding himself of her haunting presence? A grotesque mask looked out of a cab. Ah! the fancy ball! He had forgotten. That would lay the ghost of his disordered imagination. He felt in his pocket and found the ticket; he hastened to the scene of revelry. A clatter of cabs and a blaze of lights—he had arrived.
The first glimpse within was exhilarating, provoking, dazzling, overwhelming; he had a confused sense of a hall of a thousand lights and mirrors, reeking with scent and heat, reverberant with music and shrieks and laughter, white with the whirling gleam of semi-nude women, and motley with the rainbow hues and multiplied reflections of male masqueraders; a mad, joyous orgy, the diabolical medley of a glittering, tinselled pantomime and an opium-eater’s nightmare. Ah, here was oblivion of Ruth Hailey at last, and he eagerly took up a position on a raised platform that ran along the side of the gigantic ball-room, trying to catch the contagion of the scene, and ready to rush into the heart of the devil-may-care jollity. The gleeful, palpitating pageant—a twisted, tangled kaleidoscopic rally of riotous color and flesh tones—tore past him, dancing, leaping, shrieking, wantoning, clowning, kissing, uncouth as the gargoyles of Notre Dame and brilliant as the midnight Boulevard: Japanese figures and demons, gladiators in cuirasses and bathing drawers, Gallic warriors in skins, brawny barbarians in blankets, Amazons with brass breasts, a savage in a girdle of fig-leaves, a real Samoan girl with coal-black hair in the convoy of her Russian lover in a tall white hat, a boy as a German girl, and an elderly woman as a gendarme with orange blossoms in her hair; one man with a helmet crowned by a black cat, and another with a mock broken head, reddened bandages, and a hideous stream of blood on his shirt-front. And women—always women; a few masked, but most bare-faced, shining with flowers and flesh; models of all sorts and conditions, some with artistic dresses designed by their favorite students, some with tarnished gaudery; blondes, brunettes of every nationality—French, English, Greek, Italian, Creoles, Negresses, diversely dowered; frail anæmic women, fervid gypsy-like women, saucily splendid women, soft sleepy women with languorous black eyes, sweet lily-like women, big blowzy women, tall febrile women, little demoniac women, all content to take life as a flash of leaping flame flickering out to an early darkness. And as they danced and laughed and romped and shouted, the fun rose to hysterical frenzy; four masked men bore the queen of the models, sinuous in complete fleshings, niched in an outspread gigantic fan; before it a Druid and a Bacchante danced backward; behind it seethed a vast picturesque procession of women mounted on their cavaliers’ shoulders, smoking cigarettes and waving lighted red and green lanterns; at its sides girls pirouetted frantically, foot in mouth; the brazen orchestra clanged—the procession defiled, frolicking, round and round the hall, roaring a students’ marching chorus; a wave of hysteria ran through the assembly, mighty, magnetic, compulsive; and Matthew Strang waved his arms and shouted and sang with the best. Joy, joy, joy, this was your true artistic interpretation of life. Away with this modern morbidity! He was one in soul with all the great artists, all the Masters who had had their royal way in life. O royal Eleanor! O rare Eleanor! fit mate for a mighty artist! Then supper came, and he fought for some in the balconies, amid the roar of voices, and the rattle of knives, and the shouts for the maddened waiters, and the indescribable exhalations of food and wine and smoke and hot air and scented flesh. The half-deserted dancing floor was littered with champagne capsules, bits of lanterns, ends of cigarettes, fragments of dresses, spangles, morsels of fur. After supper the frolic grew more intoxicating, the gayety more reckless; sweet demure-looking girls gave themselves to high-kicking and lascivious movement; they obliged with the danse du ventre; in a corner a woman turned somersaults from sheer light-heeledness, a bashi-bazouk trundled a hoop through the centre of the room, a band of fifty dancers with joined hands ran amuck among the yelling crowd. Matthew Strang’s senses ached with the riot of color and the rollick of figures and the efflorescence of femininity, and the tohu-bohu of this witches’ sabbath. And then a strange ancient thought struck him afresh—the same grotesque thought that after his father’s death had weighed upon his childhood: very soon all these scintillating, whirling figures would lie still and cold, frozen in death. They suddenly became nothing but marionettes in a clock-work mechanism destined to run down. And then the girlish form that had hovered mistily in his neighborhood throughout all the tumultuous hours grew clear again, and against this pandemoniac background the inexorable figure of Ruth Hailey rose, simple and virginal, with sweet shy eyes.