When she is gone, we are suddenly aware of wanting to leave. For, among the grinning ghosts, reality has passed; touching with her grim wand the puppets, to show them as naked souls—each with its uncovered reason. So seen, they send a shudder through us: the baby-faced girl in her blue frock, now sleepily batting kohl from her eyes in desperate effort to remain amusing; the dancing-girls with their high nervous laughter; the set, determined smiles of the better-dressed cocottes: it is the artist playing in the meanest of all theatres, the artist born without the “proper tools,” or who lost hers, but playing stoically to the end.
And the tziganes are twanging deafening accompaniment on their guitars, and shouting “Patita” at the top of their execrable voices; and smoke and the thick smell of sauces and the scent of the women’s sachet hangs in sickening haze through the place. Let us go—let us flee from it! For this is not Paris; it is the harlot’s house: and that is the loathsome property of the universe.
We rush from it out into the silent street—the air strikes sharp and fresh upon our faces. For it rains, a pearly mist, and the thousand lights make rainbows on the flat wet flags of paving. We hail a cab, but leave the top open to the grateful dampish cool; and glide away down the slippery hill into what looks like dawn.
But it is only other lights—mist-veiled, and gleaming more intimately now; like the gems of a woman who has gone to her boudoir, but not yet taken off her jewels. The woman calls, softly. Can you keep yourself from answering? You may have your loyalty to faithful London, the Comrade; you may burn your reverential candle before the mystic vestal, Rome; or shout yourself hoarse before the triumph of New York, the star: but can you resist the tugging, glowing, multiple allurement of everyman’s One Woman, Paris?
Can you go back over this night when her jewels flashed for you into the Seine, when the rich rumble of her voice called to you across the bridges, when the cool, sweet smell and the throb and cling of her were for you—you; and not thrill to her and yearn for her, as men in spite of their inconstancy have thrilled and yearned and come back to One out of all the rest, throughout the history of women?
I hope that you cannot. For, as you return again and again, the “make-up” of the woman fades; the great artist lays aside the cautious mask, steps down from the stage, and for you becomes that greatest of all: a simple human being.
III
THE CHILDREN’S PERFORMANCE
(Vienna)
I
THE PLAYHOUSE
To see Vienna properly, one should be eighteen, and a young person of good looks and discretion. Patsy was all this, and I, being Patsy’s uncle, was allowed my first peep at the jolliest of cities through her lunettes de rose. It was a bleak, grey morning in January—with the mercury at several degrees below zero—when we rattled through the quiet streets to our hotel.
“Ugh!” said Patsy, some three minutes after we had left the station, “what a horrid dreary place!”