“Now, I’ll tell you what I think we should do and then you can use your own judgment,” suggested Barfleur. “By the time we get to London, next Wednesday or Tuesday, England will be in prime condition. The country about Dorchester will be perfect. I suggest that we take a week’s walk, anyway. You come to Bridgely Level—it is beautiful there now—and stay a week or ten days. I should like you to see how charming it is about my place in the spring. Then we will go to Dorchester. Then you can come back to Bridgely Level. Why not stay in England and write this summer?”
I put up a hand in serious opposition. “You know I can’t do that. Why, if I had so much time, we might as well stay over here and settle down in—well, Fontainebleau. Besides, money is a matter of prime consideration with me. I’ve got to buckle down to work at once at anything that will make me ready money. I think in all seriousness I had best drop the writing end of the literary profession for a while anyway and return to the editorial desk.”
The geniality and romance that lightened Barfleur’s eye, as he thought of the exquisite beauty of England in the spring, faded, and his face became unduly severe.
“Really,” he said, with a grand air, “you discourage me. At times, truly, I am inclined to quit. You are a man, in so far as I can see, with absolutely no faith in yourself—a man without a profession or an appropriate feeling for his craft. You are inclined, on the slightest provocation, to give up. You neither save anything over from yesterday in the shape of satisfactory reflection nor look into the future with any optimism. Do, I beg of you, have a little faith in the future. Assume that a day is a day, wherever it is, and that so long as it is not in the past it has possibilities. Here you are a man of forty; the formative portion of your life is behind you. Your work is all indicated and before you. Public faith such as my own should have some weight with you and yet after a tour of Europe, such as you would not have reasonably contemplated a year ago, you sink down supinely and talk of quitting. Truly it is too much. You make me feel very desperate. One cannot go on in this fashion. You must cultivate some intellectual stability around which your emotions can center and settle to anchor.”
“Fairest Barfleur,” I replied, “how you preach! You have real oratorical ability at times. There is much in what you say. I should have a profession, but we are looking at life from slightly different points of view. You have in your way a stable base, financially speaking. At least I assume so. I have not. My outlook, outside of the talent you are inclined to praise, is not very encouraging. It is not at all sure that the public will manifest the slightest interest in me from now on. If I had a large bump of vanity and the dull optimism of the unimaginative, I might assume anything and go gaily on until I was attacked somewhere for a board bill. Unfortunately I have not the necessary thickness of hide. And I suffer periods of emotional disturbance such as do not appear to afflict you. If you want to adjust my artistic attitude so nicely, contemplate my financial state first and see if that does not appeal to you as having some elements capable of disturbing my not undue proportion of equanimity.” We then went into actual figures from which to his satisfaction he deducted that, with ordinary faith in myself, I had no real grounds for distress, and I from mine figured that my immediate future was quite as dubious as I had fancied. It did not appear that I was to have any money when I left England. Rather I was to draw against my future and trust that my innate capabilities would see me through.
It was definitely settled at this conference that I was not to take the long-planned walking tour in the south of England, lovely as it would be, but instead, after three or four days in Paris and three or four days in London, I was to take a boat sailing from Dover about the middle of April or a little later which would put me in New York before May. This agreed we returned to our pleasures and spent three or four very delightful days together.
It is written of Hugo and Balzac that they always looked upon Paris as the capital of the world. I am afraid I shall have to confess to a similar feeling concerning New York. I know it all so well—its splendid water spaces, its magnificent avenues, its varying sections, the rugged splendor of its clifflike structures, the ripping force of its tides of energy and life. Viewing Europe from the vantage point of the seven countries I had seen, I was prepared to admit that in so many ways we are, temperamentally and socially speaking, the rawest of raw material. No one could be more crude, more illusioned than the average American. Contrasted with the savoir faire, the life understanding, the philosophic acceptance of definite conditions in nature, the Europeans are immeasurably superior. They are harder, better trained, more settled in the routine of things. The folderols of romance, the shibboleths of politics and religion, the false standards of social and commercial supremacy are not so readily accepted there as here. Ill-founded aspiration is not so rife there as here: every Jack does not consider himself, regardless of qualifications, appointed by God to tell his neighbor how he shall do and live. But granting all this, America, and particularly New York, has to me the most comforting atmosphere of any. The subway is like my library table—it is so much of an intimate. Broadway is the one idling show place. Neither the Strand nor the Boulevard des Capucines can replace it. Fifth Avenue is all that it should be—the one really perfect show street of the world. All in all the Atlantic metropolis is the first city in the world to me,—first in force, unrivaled in individuality, richer and freer in its spirit than London or Paris, though so often more gauche, more tawdry, more shamblingly inexperienced.
As I sat in Madame G.’s Bar, the pull of the city overseas was on me—and that in the spring! I wanted to go home.
We talked of the women we had got to know in Paris—of Marcelle and Madame de B.—and other figures lurking in the background of this brilliant city. But Marcelle would expect a trip to Fontainebleau and Madame de B. was likely to be financially distressed. This cheerful sort of companionship would be expensive. Did I care to submit to the expense? I did not. I felt that I could not. So for once we decided to be modest and go out and see what we could see alone. Our individual companionship was for the time-being sufficient.
Barfleur and I truly kept step with Paris these early spring days. This first night together we revisited all our favorite cafés and restaurants—Fysher’s Bar, the Rat Mort, C——’s Bar, the Abbaye Thélème, Maxim’s, the American, Paillard’s and the like,—and this, I soon realized: without a keen sex interest—the companionship of these high-voltage ladies of Paris—I can imagine nothing duller. It becomes a brilliant but hollow spectacle.