When he came back to consciousness of the revellers, they had formed a human amphitheatre, an inner circle lying on the ground, and the next squatting, and the next kneeling, and the next half standing, and the last but one erect, and the last of all surmounted by shouldered girls, and in the centre of this human amphitheatre a beautiful young nude model with ruddy brown hair struck graceful attitudes. The cold blue light of dawn fell through a semicircular window overhead and mingled weirdly with the yellowish electric light, lending a strange, wan, unearthly hue to all these painted, perspiring faces.
The atmosphere seemed unbearably mephitic. He sallied shamefacedly into the street. It was Sunday morning, stainless and fresh and blue. The sunrise brooded over the sleeping gray-etched city in sacred splendor. The sun was like a gigantic bowl of pure gold with a refracted cover separated from it by a rift of cloud. Around it the sky was dappled with lines and splashes and a ring or two of pale sulphur, ending to the south in a narrow gulf of green. And all this loveliness of color was spread on two amorphous islands of amber-gray in an ocean of pale-blue sky, across which a few fleecy clouds sailed swan-like.
He had a perception of the divine, speaking through the silence of beauty. And the world was asleep or at riot.
Ah! this should have been the message of his Art. Each morn the sunrise spoke its flaming word unheard; it was the artist’s function to stir the world to the perception of the sublimity and poetry that lay all around unheeded; to uplift its eyes to the loveliness of realities, realities solid as rocks, yet beautiful as dreams; visionary and tangible; the great verities of sun and sea and forest, of righteousness and high thinking; beautiful and elemental.
Too late! Too late! Art was over now. Not to his hand had the mission been given; once he had thought to feel the sacred fire in his bosom; but he knew now that the mission was not for him. He had failed.
The great streets stretched under the blue dawn bathed in sacred freshness. The stir of night was passing into the stir of morning. The sleepy yawn of returning revellers was met by the sleepy yawn of early-risen artisans. Two horrible hags of rag-pickers, first astir of Parisians, were resting their baskets on a bench; he heard them rapturously recalling the excellence of the soup they had made from the bones, picked clean by dogs, that they had gathered from the citizens’ ash-pans.
Ah, not all the world was gay. He had been surveying only the sparkling bubbles and froth of Paris. Below flowed the sober, orderly, industrious civic life, with its bottom dregs of misery. All the great cities were full of dolorous figures, every by-way and alley swarmed with sickly faces, pale fruits of a congested civilization. He had always kept his eye on those happier than he; now he was reminded of how much more than the man in the street he had drawn in the lottery of the fates. He remembered the saying of a street scavenger he had come across in his days of destitution. “I’m neither hungry nor dry, so what have I to grumble about, mate?” What, indeed, had he, Matthew Strang, to grumble about? There did not seem to be enough happiness to go round. Who was he, to be selected for a special helping? Who was he more than his mate the scavenger, more than any other of the human souls he had met in his diversified career, more than his fellow-lodgers in the slums of Holborn or Halifax, or his fellow-passengers on board The Enterprise, or the blind woman who caned chairs in the basement of the house of the Rotherhithe bird-stuffer? Why should he be happy?
It was like a new thought, luminous and arrestive. And then it flashed upon him that all this glitter of gayety that had dazzled his covetous eyes, even if it were not half an illusion, was infinitely subdivided; each person could only have a minute share in the overwhelming total, and even this quantum of joy must be alloyed with the inevitable miseries of the human lot. This was the fallacy that in London, too, had added the sting of envy to his unhappiness; he had lumped together all the pleasure and splendor and happiness of the capital, forgetting that though it could all be lacked by one man, it could not be possessed by one. And to look at life from the outside was childish—it was like reading paragraphs about people in the newspapers. How happy he himself loomed in biographical summaries! Poor Rosina! Poor Aunt Clara! Poor Billy! What happiness for these?
They were foolish, fretful creatures, all of them; in the jargon of the drawing-rooms, bourgeois, vulgar, impossible, too low even for the stigma of “suburban”; but their lives were as important to them as his life to him. Each soul was the centre of its own world. If he could understand them, and they could not understand him, the gain was to him. He was strong, therefore he must supplement their weakness; not because of any ethics or theology, simply because he was stronger. For sheer pity he must give up his life to theirs; sacrifice his Art to their happiness. He must adapt himself to their points of view, since they could not adapt themselves to his; if for Rosina the world turned on the price of beef, he must teach himself to be interested in the price of beef. He had found it easy enough on the day when they had gone a-marketing together at Halifax. He saw her as then, buoyant, youthful, gay, even pretty; was it not he who had made her shrewish, sorrowful, unlovely? How nobly reticent she had been about his neglect of her! Coble had died thinking her ideally happy, boastfully proud of his son-in-law. And after all, there was an excellent side to her economical instincts; she did not long for diamonds and dinner-parties like the wives of other artists; nay, wiser, perhaps, than he, she had known how to content herself with her own station. Even Tarmigan must have approved of her as an artist’s wife. Yes, he must go back to her and his children, not out of any deference to the marriage-tie, but as individual to individuals.
He arrived at his hotel. To his astonishment it was in full illumination; he heard the strains of dance-music from within. He peeped into the magnificent dining-room; it was become a ball-room, and sober couples were waltzing. Women, always women; irreproachable this time; elegant in shimmering silks. The world of fashion was dancing there—dancing on behalf of a charity.