He had just come away from the press view of a one-man show of his own drawings. The rooms were crowded to suffocation. The success of the exhibition was already assured, promising to be prodigious, to amount to a veritable sensation. He was aware of this, yet his mood remained an unhappy one. As usual the critics showed themselves a herd of imbeciles. They praised the wrong things, or, more exasperating still, praising the right ones praised them wrongly, extolling their weak points rather than their fine ones, misinterpreting their message and inner meaning. Had Adrian Savage been there—unluckily he was still in England—some sense might have been spoken. Adrian was an austere critic, but always an intelligent and discriminating one. As for the rest of the confraternity—René gazed mournfully at the flaming sunset splendor—they got upon his nerves, they nauseated him.
And it all went deeper than that. For those many square yards of wall, plastered with his mordant verdict upon the human species, got upon his nerves, too, and nauseated him. He recoiled, as he had often recoiled before—taking it thus wholesale—from his own merciless exposure of the follies, vulgarities, the mental and physical deformities and distortions of his fellow-creatures; recoiled from the reek of his own Rabelaisian humor, of his own extravagant ribaldry and ingenious grossness. It was his vocation, as that of other and more famous satirists, to wreak a vindictive vengeance thus upon humanity. Only, in his care, reaction invariably followed. The devil of unsanctified laughter for the time satiated and cast out of him, he wandered—as this evening—a very sad and plaintive little being, firmly resolving—as how often before!—once and for all to throw away his rather horrible pencil, and betake himself exclusively to the construction of those delicate lyrics and rondels from which, whatever minor perversions of sentiment they might exhibit, the witty bestiality common to his caricatures was conspicuously absent.
He wanted to forget the hot, close rooms, packed with admirers, male, and, though happily in a minority, female also. By René Dax that minority was held in particularly small respect. The woman who relished, or affected to relish, his art ought to be ashamed of herself—such at least was his opinion. His art was meant for men, not for women; and the women who couldn't arrive at that conclusion by instinct, unaided, were women for whom, especially in his existing mood, he had no use whatever, didn't want in the very least. That which he did want, under the head of things feminine, was something conspicuously different—a far-removed, stately, inaccessible type of womanhood. And, still more, he wanted the child who should grow into such womanhood—a tender, elusive, sprite-like, spotlessly innocent and unsoiled creature, to whom moral and physical ugliness were equally unknown and equally, saving the paradox, abhorrent.
Well, were not the tall, old-fashioned houses of the Quai Malaquais across the river there just opposite, and was it not still early enough to pay a visit? But then, as he rather fretfully remembered, Madame St. Leger had been pertinaciously invisible of late. He had called several times, only to be told she was not receiving or that she was out. He had never succeeded in seeing her and little Bette; never, now that he came to think of it, since the day of the great snow, the day when Adrian, whose absence he had just been deploring, left for England.
The bringing of these two facts into any relation of cause and effect had not previously occurred to him. It did not do so seriously even now. Yet unquestionably the names of Madame St. Leger and Adrian Savage took up a position side by side in his mind, thereby subtly coloring his reflections. He had no friend upon whom he depended and who, in his capricious exacting fashion, he loved as he did Adrian. The friendship had remained practically unbroken since the time when Adrian, the healthier, happier-natured boy, protected him, the queer little Tadpole, from tormentors at school. This friendship had been among the wholesomest influences of his life, and, amid many aberrations and perversities of thought and conduct, he clung to it. But it followed on his self-absorption and selfishness, natural and assumed, that his friend's interests and concerns, save in so far as they bore direct relation to his own, were a matter of indifference to him. He had never troubled himself as to the possible state or direction of Adrian's affections, and perhaps consequently, this sudden juxtaposition of names came to him as a surprise, and an irritating one.
Slipping in and out between private cars, taxis, and humbler, horse-drawn vehicles, he crossed the roadway to the Pont des Saints Pères. The sunset glories faded, while avenues of living white and glow-worm green lights sprang into being. Still, here and there, red splashes, as of blood, stained the livid, swirling surface of the Seine, which, in half flood, fed by the melted snow, hissed and gurgled under the arches and against the masonry of the bridge.
As it happened, just then, a lull occurred in the cross-river traffic, a break in the quick-moving throng of foot-passengers, so that in front of René Dax the pale arc of the right-hand pavement showed empty in the whole of its length, save for a single tall, slouching, shabby figure, clothed in a blue-serge suit unmistakably English in cut and in pattern. As René advanced, his mind still working around those two names set in such irritating juxtaposition, he saw the man in the English-made suit first glance sharply to right and left, then bend down, grasping the outer edge of the parapet, while slowly and, as it seemed, furtively, drawing one knee up on to the flat of the coping.
—Was it possible that Madame St. Leger's repeated refusals to receive him were other than accidental? Was it possible they had some connection with Adrian's absence? Was it conceivable his friend had turned traitor, had interfered, saying or hinting at that which might, socially, justify such denial of admission? Suspicion, resentment, self-pity, a lively sense of personal injury invaded him.—
The shabby, slouching loafer's right knee was fairly upon the coping now. He threw up both arms, threw back his head, his mouth opened wide as one letting loose a great cry. René Dax saw his extended arms, his bare head, his profile with that wide-open mouth, dark against a pale background of buildings and cold, translucent sky. The effect was of the strangest, the more so that no sound came from the apparently loud-crying mouth. Suddenly his chin dropped on his breast. His hands were lowered, clutching at the edge of the parapet again, and he remained thus for a few seconds, immobile, crouched together, his left foot, in a well-cut but bulging hole-riddled boot, still resting upon the pavement.
Then in a flash, awakening from contemplation of his own lately discovered woes, René realized what was about to occur. His height and reach were insufficient, encumbered as he was, moreover, by a thick fur-lined overcoat, for him to get his arms round the crouching figure. So he just clutched whatever came handiest, the back of the fellow's jacket, the slack of the seat of his trousers. Exerting all his strength, René hauled and jerked at these well-worn garments. The attack, though neither very forcible nor very scientific, was completely unexpected. The man's grip relaxed. His knee slipped and he fell back, an amorphous indigo and sandy-red heap, upon the pallid asphalt.