Quest of the Golden Girl Part 20

"I think we always do," I said, "when we've done anything that seems wonderful, that gives us the thrill of really doing--"

"And a poor excuse is better than none, isn't it, dear?" said Sylvia, her face full in the cataract of the moonlight.

As a conclusion for this chapter I will copy out a little song which I extemporised for Sylvia on our way home to Yellowsands--too artlessly happy, it will be observed, to rhyme correctly:--

Sylvia's dancing 'neath the moon, Like a star in water; Sylvia's dancing to a tune Fairy folk have taught her.

Glow-worms light her little feet In her fairy theatre; Oh, but Sylvia is sweet!

Tell me who is sweeter!

CHAPTER XII

AT THE CAFE DE LA PAIX

As love-making in which we have no share is apt to be either tantalising or monotonous, I propose to skip the next fortnight and introduce myself to the reader at a moment when I am once more alone.

It is about six o'clock on a summer afternoon, I am in Paris, and seated at one of the little marble tables of the Cafe de la Paix, dreamily watching the glittering tide of gay folk pa.s.sing by,--

"All happy people on their way To make a golden end of day."

Meditatively I smoke a cigarette and sip a pale greenish liquor smelling strongly of aniseed, which isn't half so interesting as a commonplace whiskey and soda, but which, I am told, has the recommendation of being ten times as wicked. I sip it with a delicious thrill of degeneration, as though I were Eve tasting the apple for the first time,--for "such a power hath white simplicity." Sin is for the innocent,--a truth which sinners will be the first to regret. It was so, I said to myself, Alfred de Musset used to sit and sip his absinthe before a fascinated world. It is a privilege for the world to look on greatness at any moment, even when it is drinking. So I sat, and privileged the world.

It will readily be surmised from this exordium that--incredible as it may seem in a man of thirty--this was my first visit to Paris. You may remember that I had bought Orlando's tickets, and it had occurred to Sylvia and me to use them. Sylvia was due in London to fulfil a dancing engagement within a fortnight after our arrival; so after a tender good-bye, which there was no earthly necessity to make final, I had remained behind for the purposes of study. Though, logically, my pilgrimage had ended with the unexpected discovery of Sylvia Joy, yet there were two famous feminine types of which, seeing that I was in Paris, I thought I might as well make brief studies, before I returned to London and finally resumed the bachelorhood from which I had started. These were the grisette of fiction and the American girl of fact. Pending these investigations, I meditated on the great city in the midst of which I sat.

A city! How much more it was than that! Was it not the most portentous symbol of modern history? Think what the word "Paris" means to the emanc.i.p.ated intellect, to the political government, to the humanised morals, of the world; not to speak of the romance of its literature, the tradition of its manners, and the immortal fame of its women.

France is the brain of the world, as England is its heart, and Russia its fist. Strange is the power, strange are the freaks and revenges, of a.s.sociation, particularly perhaps of literary a.s.sociation. Here pompous official representatives may demur; but who can doubt that it is on its literature that a country must rely for its permanent representation? The countries that are forgotten, or are of no importance in the councils of the world, are countries without literature. Greece and Rome are more real in print than ever they were in marble. Though, as we know, prophets are not without honour save in their own countries and among their own kindred, the time comes when their countries and kindred are entirely without honour save by reason of those very prophets they once despised, rejected, stoned, and crucified. Subtract its great men from a nation, and where is its greatness?

Similarly, everything, however trifling, that has been written about, so long as it has been written about sufficiently well, becomes relatively enduring and representative of the country in which it is found. To an American, for example, the significance of a skylark is that Sh.e.l.ley sang it to skies where even it could never have mounted; and any one who has heard the nightingale must, if he be open-minded, confess its tremendous debt to Keats: a tenth part genuine song, the rest moon, stars, silence, and John Keats,--such is the nightingale.

The real truth about a country will never be known till every representative type and condition in it have found their inspired literary mouthpiece. Meanwhile one country takes its opinion of another from the apercus of a few brilliant but often irresponsible or prejudiced writers,--and really it is rather in what those writers leave out than in what they put in that one must seek the more reliable data of national character.

A quaint example of a.s.sociation occurs to me from the experience of a friend of mine, "rich enough to lend to the poor." Having met an American friend newly landed at Liverpool, and a hurried quarter of an hour being all that was available for lunch, "Come let us have a pork-pie and a bottle of Ba.s.s" he had suggested.

"Pork-pies!" said the American, with a delighted sense of discovering the country,--"why, you read about them in d.i.c.kens!" Who shall say but that this instinctive a.s.sociation was an involuntary severe, but not inapplicable, criticism? A nightingale suggests Keats; a pork-pie, d.i.c.kens.

Similarly with absinthe, grisettes, the Latin Quarter, and so on.

Why, you read about them in Murger, in Musset, in Balzac, and in Flaubert; and the fact of your having read about them is, I may add, their chief importance.

So rambled my after-dinner reflections as I sat that evening smoking and sipping, sipping and smoking, at the Cafe de la Paix.

Presently in my dream I became aware of English voices near me, one of which seemed familiar, and which I couldn't help overhearing. The voice of the husband said,--you can never mistake the voice of the husband,--

'T was the voice of the husband, I heard him complain,--

the voice of the husband said: "Dora, I forbid you! I will NOT allow my wife to be seen again in the Latin Quarter. I permitted you to go once, as a concession, to the Cafe d'Harcourt; but once is enough. You will please respect my wishes!"

"But," pleaded the dear little woman, whom I had an immediate impulse, Perseus-like, to s.n.a.t.c.h from the jaws of her monster, and turning to the other lady of the party of four,--"but Mrs. ---- has never been, and she cannot well go without a chaperone. Surely it cannot matter for once. It isn't as if I were there constantly."

"No!" said the husband, with the absurd pomposity of his tribe.

"I'm very sorry. Mrs. ---- will, of course, act as she pleases; but I cannot allow you to do it, Dora."

At last the little wife showed some spirit.

"Don't talk to me like that, Will," she said. "I shall go if I please.

Surely I am my own property."

"Not at all!" at once flashed out the husband, wounded in that most vital part of him, his sense of property. "There you mistake. You are my property, MY chattel; you promised obedience to me; I bought you, and you do my bidding!"

"Great heavens!" I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, and, springing up, found myself face to face with a well-known painter whom you would have thought the most Bohemian fellow in London. And Bohemian he is; but Bohemians are seldom Bohemians for any one save themselves. They are terrible sticklers for convention and even etiquette in other people.

We recognised each other with a laugh, and presently were at it, hammer and tongs. I may say that we were all fairly intimate friends, and thus had the advantage of entire liberty of speech. I looked daggers at the husband; he looked daggers at me, and occasionally looking at his wife, gave her a glance which was like the opening of Bluebeard's closet.

You could see the poor murdered bodies dangling within the shadowy cupboard of his eye. Of course we got no further. Additional opposition but further enraged him. He recapitulated what he would no doubt call his arguments,--they sounded more like threats,--and as he spoke I saw dragons fighting for their dams in the primeval ooze, and heard savage trumpetings of masculine monsters without a name.

I told him so.

"You are," I said,--"and you will forgive my directness of expression,--you are the Primeval Male! You are the direct descendant of those Romans who carried off the Sabine women. Nay! you have a much longer genealogy. You come of those hairy anthropoid males who hunted their mates through the tangle of primeval forests, and who finally obtained their consent--shall we say?--by clubbing them on the head with a stone axe. You talk a great deal of nonsense about the New Woman, but you, Sir, are THE OLD MALE; and," I continued, "I have only to obtain your wife's consent to take her under my protection this instant."

Curiously enough, "The Old Male," as he is now affectionately called, became from this moment quite a bosom friend. Nothing would satisfy us but that we should all lodge at the same pension together, and there many a day we fought our battles over again. But that poor little wife never, to my knowledge, went to the Cafe d'Harcourt again.

CHAPTER XIII

THE INNOCENCE OF PARIS

This meeting with William and Dora was fortunate from the point of view of my studies; for that very night, as I dined with them en pension, I found that providence, with his usual foresight, had placed me next to a very charming American girl of the type that I was particularly wishful to study. She seemed equally wishful to be studied, and we got on amazingly from the first moment of our acquaintance. By the middle of dinner we were pressing each other's feet under the table, and when coffee and cigarettes had come, we were affianced lovers. "Why should I blush to own I love?" was evidently my quaint little companion's motto; and indeed she didn't blush to own it to the whole table, and publicly to announce that I was the dearest boy, and absolutely the most lovable man she had met. There was nothing she wouldn't do for me. Would she brave the terrors of the Latin Quarter with me, I asked, and introduce me to the terrible Cafe d'Harcourt, about which William and Dora had suffered such searchings of heart? "Why, certainly; there was nothing in that," she said. So we went.

Nothing is more absurd and unjust than those crude labels of national character which label one country virtuous and another vicious, one musical and another literary. Thus France has an unjust reputation for vice, and England an equally unjust reputation for virtue.

I had always, I confess, been brought up to think of Paris as a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah in one. Good Americans might go to Paris, according to the American theory of a future state; but, certainly I had thought, no good Englishman ever went there--except, maybe, on behalf of the Vigilance Society. Well, it may sound an odd thing to say, but what impressed me most of all was the absolute innocence of the place.

I mean this quite seriously. For surely one important condition of innocence is unconsciousness of doing wrong. The poor despised Parisian may be a very wicked and depraved person, but certainly he goes about with an absolute unconsciousness of it upon his gay and kindly countenance.

"Seeing the world" usually means seeing everything in it that most decent people won't look at; but when you come to look at these terrible things and places, what do you find? Why, absolute disappointment!

Have you ever read that most amusing book, "Baedeker on Paris"?

I know nothing more delightful than the notes to the Montmartre and Latin Quarters. The places to which you, as a smug Briton, may or may not take a lady! The scale of wickedness allowed to the waxwork British lady is most charmingly graduated. I had read that the cafe where we were sitting was one of the most terrible places in Paris,--the Cafe d'Harcourt, where the students of the Latin Quarter take their nice little domestic mistresses to supper. But Baedeker was dreadfully Pecksniffian about these poor innocent etudiantes, many of whom love their lovers much more truly than many a British wife loves her husband, and are much better loved in return. If you doubt it, dare to pay attention to one of these young ladies, and you will probably have to fight a duel for it. In fact, these romantic relations are much more careful of honour than conventional ones; for love, and not merely law, keeps guard.

I looked around me. Where were those terrible things I had read of?

Where was this h.e.l.l which I had reasonably expected would gape leagues of sulphur and blue flame beneath the little marble table? I mentally resolved to bring an action against Baedeker for false information.

For what did I see? Simply pairs and groups of young men and women chattering amiably in front of their "bocks" or their "Americains."

Here and there a student would have his arm round a waist every one else envied him. One student was prettily trying a pair of new gloves upon his little woman's hand. Here and there blithe songs would spring up, from sheer gladness of heart; and never was such a buzz of happy young people, not even at a Sunday-school treat. To me it seemed absolutely Arcadian, and I thought of Daphnis and Chloe and the early world. Nothing indecorous or gross; all perfectly pretty and seemly.

On our way home Semiramis was so sweet to me, in her innocent, artless frankness, that I went to bed with an intoxicating feeling that I must be irresistible indeed, to have so completely conquered so true a heart in so few hours. I was the more flattered because I am not a vain man, and am not, like some, accustomed to take hearts as the Israelites took Jericho with the blast of one's own trumpet.