  Wherein the Husband of the Concierge fears that he is growing Blind Darkness was stealing over the city, and Paris was taking a drowsy breath in the twilight before awakening to her evening gaiety and frolic mood. In her narrow old grey streets, many-shuttered, which huddle about the broad Boule Miche that is the students’ highway on the left bank of the river—in the time-honoured Latin quarter—over against the Ile de la CitÉ, there stands a narrow way where artists do largely abide. In the whitest house of the block, or the one that at least attempts the nearest to approach a dingy suggestion of whiteness, where at any rate whiteness is become less a bygone tradition than with the rest of its fellows down the length of the alley, there stood at its topmost window, his hands behind his back, and in pensive fashion, a handsome young fellow in the slouched black hat and short black coat, flowing tie, and baggy brown corduroy pantaloons of the student of Paris; but the yellow hair was the hair of Horace Malahide. His brooding eyes were on the end of the alley, where in the reek of the lilac dusk Paris glittered her myriad lamps, her flaming streets sweeping away into the shadow of the night, showing afar dim sparks of fire that winked up the heights and were lost in the purple firmament, where a white star trembled into liquid light above the gaunt scaffolding of the huge basilica a-top of the distant hill of Montmartre. A cracked voice in the dark room asked: “Monsieur wishes that I shall light the candle?” Before the brooding youth at the window gave answer, a match was struck, and discovered a little old man guarding the flame of a candle with his hand. The old fellow set the candle on a table. Horace turned, with a sigh, into the room, sat down on a chair, and pushed back his hat; he came down into the world. “Husband of concierges,” said he—— The little old man, with skull-cap a-top, coughed, held out a protesting hand: “Pardon, monsieur—husband of the concierge!” Horace laughed: The old shoulders rose in the shrug of protest: “Good God, monsieur, the room is absolutely polished”—the shoulders swore it—“clean as a dish—not a grain of dust. I said it should be so. I did not trust the femme de mÉnage alone. I did it myself.” Shoulders and arms and hands, all bore confirmatory evidence. Horace nodded: “Smoke,” said he. “It is an honour to smoke with so clean a husband of concierges.” The old man laughed, shook his head, and shuffling to Horace’s side, took a cigarette: “Ah, monsieur the student he is always gay—always gay. He has always his joke against his concierge.... I have known students for thirty years—and who would have it otherwise? When students fall away from joy of life they take to believing too much in themselves, and cross the river to Montmartre, and drink absinthe, and die, and are buried.” “Come, my husband of concierges,” cried Horace, “don’t let us weep. Light all the candles, and let us see what the room looks like——” “But, monsieur, not all the candles?” “Certainly! certainly!... This is the last rehearsal, my old veteran; they arrive to-morrow.... Light up, man—light up!” The old man shuffled about the room in his thick felt slippers, setting candles aflame until the place was a blaze of light. Horace’s eyes went over the details of the room. “Those rogues sent a fresh new bed, eh? You saw to that, eh?” “The sommier was as monsieur had ordered it—ab-so-lu-ment.” The old man stopped in the midst of lighting a last candle to point to the couch-ottoman that is the student’s lounge by day and bed by night. Horace nodded: “Good!... The rest of the furniture, though not too profuse, looks far from too new. We showed taste in our choice, my old veteran. Now, you will not forget your lesson? Monsieur Horace has sent what he did not want from his own studio; but there was no stove nor towels, and you have taken the liberty to buy a stove and a dozen towels which were a bargain and they only cost you twelve francs! God forgive me! You have it all in your head, all under that embroidered cap, my husband of concierges, eh?” The old man bowed, shrugged his shoulders, and held out his open palms in the protest of indignation: “Has monsieur yet known me to forget anything?” Horace blew out a cloud of smoke, frowning at his thoughts.... He put his hand in the breast-pocket of his coat and drew out a bundle of banknotes. He beckoned the old man to him; put five of them into his hand, and shut the old fingers upon them: The old man nodded, smiled. “I will have business on the sixth floor morning and evening, monsieur,” he said—“and my wife also; I know of an excellent woman.” “Good!... Now put out the lights.” The old man shuffled round the room, and blew out the candles.... They locked the door and went down the stairs together. Horace turned suddenly on the first landing: “Husband of concierges—we have forgot the baths.” “Mon Dieu, monsieur—yes.” “They will be there to-morrow?” “It will be there to-morrow, m’sieu.” “They—my veteran—they! Two baths.” “They shall be there, m’sieu.” Horace ran down the stairs; called “Good-night!” and was gone. The old man scratched his head: “My God!” said he; “how these English are always washing! That will be two extra cans to carry up.” That night as Hodendouche, the once Sergeant of cavalry, joined his plump little mate in the bed that took up the greater part of that small room in the gateway, on the ground floor where concierges have their habitation, he blew out the candle. “That is you!” said the stout little woman sleepily. The old fellow chuckled: “Thou didst not dream it was the President of the Republic, my Marie?” said he, and cackled again. “If so, I like not thy complacency.” She turned to the wall. “Marie,” said he—“the Petit Journal lies. The English are not canaille.... He gave me five hundred francs.... Our little Aloysius shall go on with his studies.... The Petit Journal lies.” “Tsh! Hodendouche! Thou art grown garrulous. Get thee into thy nightcap and to sleep. Thou fool! he loves the woman.” There was a long silence. “Mon Dieu!” said the old man—“yes, indeed. My eyesight is not what it was.” Which introduces us to the First Lady of France A paddle-steamer cleared the long wooden jetties, and made Boulogne Harbour, hooting the announcement of her coming to the echoing wharves that flung back the chuckling hoot in answering welcome rollickingly; and, churning with fussy thrashings of her paddle-wheels the waters of the narrow sea-way as she settled to her moorings, she lurched against the quay and was still. To Betty and Noll, standing on deck with eyes bent on the swinging prospect before them, there came the fragrance of a new world. The tender greys, gentle blues, and silvery colours of France held out a welcome to their ready senses, and from the many-windowed houses with their hundred wooden shutters there drifted the pleasant odour of wood fires. So Betty, her happy eyes glancing at the shifting scenes that passed by the wayside, and lolling in the grey carriage of her wedding journey, was whirled through the pleasant garden of France. Noll came and sat beside her. “You’re very happy, my Betty,” said he. She nodded—and her eyes filled with tears. She put out her hand shyly to him, and he held it in his. He sat and watched her. It was stupid to speak.... They swung past great sand-dunes by the sea—along the pleasant plains with poplars all of a row—thundered over bridges that spanned the shining river—clanked past villages—passing now and then a picturesque chÂteau on a hilltop that stood sentry over the plains—and always there was the sense of grey-green trees and white buildings and tender blue skies that are the colour of France. Delicacy and tenderness and graciousness and gentleness are written over the face of the land, the subtle land of Corot. And all the world was a-singing.... In the twilight the train dashed past St. Denis and the foundries of Paris, swept under the lea of the hill where the scaffolding a-top showed the building of the great church of Montmartre, and thundered into the resounding grey gateway of the city that stands open to the north—the Gare du Nord. Horace, giving Noll a hand with the small baggage, called a porter and told him to hail a cab. The blue-bloused fellow soon had the scanty baggage stowed away on top. Horace smiled a little sadly at the girl’s trunk and the narrow extent of Noll’s belongings. As they drove off together, Horace explained: “Now, I’ve got you a room, right at the top, in one of the most delightful houses of the old student quarter. I have sent some of my surplus furniture; but I had to get the concierge to buy you a stove and one or two things.” He laughed aside all thanks; then he coughed—a little embarrassedly: “Of course—I told all the boys that you were coming—with a wife, Noll. But the Frenchmen all winked at the word wife; so they’ll be quite friendly and free.” Horace was to show them everything and put them in the way of pleasant economies. In the morning he was to move down from his old studio on Montmartre to be near them. Noll was to share his studio, when he was in the mood to paint—Horace was at GÉrÔme’s atelier at the Beaux Arts. The cab was rattling along the riverside—lurched aside and rattled over a bridge—turned along the quays—up a narrow thoroughfare—took a jolting turn or two—and came to a noisy standstill. They got out, and walked through a high entrance into a cobbled courtyard. And as they passed, to give them rude welcome, out of a doorway that was a hole in the wall of the passage-way popped the stout little woman who is the symbol and the tyrant and ultimate design created by the machinery of the French constitution—the concierge. Horace introduced them. As they mounted the stairs to their first home, Horace discoursed on the panting woman who led the way—in English. The concierge, said he, is the government. The President of the Republic is but her servant. Her newspaper has the greatest circulation in the world—is the furthest reaching—Le Petit Journal. She stands between the landlord and the tenant—that is her sole duty—and she stands on her duty. She has usurped power as the Carlovingian mayors of the palace plucked Arrived at the heights, Horace bade the lights to be lit, and when their home was all ablaze with welcome, he handed Betty the key, wished them happiness, and took his leave until the morning. Which has to do with the Motherhood of the World A clock struck five. The sun rose out of the grey mists of the east and flecked with golden light the upper stories of the white-faced city. Betty roused at the noises of the awakening street below—footsteps—the clink of bottles in which young women bore the morning’s milk to the court—then low voices that gossiped drowsily. The disturbing sense of being in a strange bed. The distant rumble of a cart—and more footsteps and again voices, of a pitch and accent that struck strangely upon her ear. And she knew she was awaking in a strange land. It came to her that she was in Paris. Paris! She sat up in bed. There was a dear fellow’s head on the pillow beside her—he slept soundly. And she laughed low. She put her dainty feet out of her marriage bed, slipped their whiteness into his slippers, wrapped his warm dressing-gown about her, and went to the window. And as the sun rose high above the city’s edge, and smiled down into the dew-damp streets, there came the blithe sounds of a city awakening. The clatter of wooden shoon that entered the alley was the sound of the great black sabots in which tramped the big powerful woman in bunchy skirts who came sweeping the water down the gutters with long black broom. On the heels of her noisy passing came the rattle of a fish-barrow, pushed by a fish-girl that wailed the melancholy street-cry of mackerel. And now the court was all alive with sound—water-pails were clanking, and wooden shoon tapping along the paven way; vintners were cleaning wine-casks, swinging iron chains in the cleansing waters of the barrels; anvils rang under the swinging stroke of the naked-armed iron-workers; hammers tapped; market women and street-vendors joined their cries, musical and unmusical, to the increasing din; and the clinking bell on the neck of a big leading short-necked Flemish horse told that the And wondrous music stirred in the girl’s heart. For the days of her chill maidenhood were departed, fallen from her like a white garment; and just as, passing from childhood, she had been roused by some unseen hand and rid of physical bondage; just as with awakening reason she had been as surely freed from intellectual bondage; so she now stood in presence of the full majesty of her womanhood, morally free. Her senses glowed, and her dainty being pulsed to a music she had not till then known—and the meaning of the book of life was laid open to her, so that with swelling throat and ecstatic bosom she was at one with the motherhood of the world. She had brought her little hoard of twenty-seven pounds—it was the lucky number—three times three times three! She laughed happily. And that handsome fellow in her bed, Noll, had his wits and some seventy pounds a year. And they were one; and all the world lay before them.... Hardship! What was hardship? She had this handsome fellow to wrap her maternal arms about. Mother of God! it was luxury—riches—God’s reward! She gave herself to him with all the shy generosity of her great integrity—of her commanding virtue.... Betty went back to the bed and nestled close to her love “What is it, Bess?” he asked, rousing. “I pity all mateless things,” she said. Wherein the Rich Man’s Son seeks the Sweets of Poverty—not Wholly without Success On the northern heights of Montmartre, into a paved courtyard, where Horace Malahide had his rooms, several laughing students were carrying forth the furnishments from one of the houses, piling them in a heap on the cobbled ground. A divan was already in the handcart, and on top of the divan sat a youth whom they called Gaston, who, with a great brass French horn round about his shoulders, was solemnly sounding a faulty rendering of a quaint old hunting call. Out of the hurly-burly tripped into the court a pretty girl, carrying a couple of hat-boxes and some airy feminine wearing apparel. She halted before the handcart in evident anxiety as to a safe place for their stowage—a perplexed frown came over her handsome face. One of the noisy young fellows, who spoke his French with a strong American accent, saw her bewilderment, plucked the musical Gaston by the heel, and brought him with a clatter to the ground, where, rubbing the back of his skull, he settled himself on a rug, and, fixing his mouth to the horn again, took up the tune where he had left off. The young American flung open the lid of the divan and stowed away inside it the girl’s hat-boxes and scant wardrobe. “That all, Babette?” he asked. “No, mon ami—one minute!” she cried. She skipped up the steps and disappeared into the doorway. When she came back she was laden with linen and pillows and blankets. She laughed merrily. The young American calmly helped her to stow the things away in the divan; and she blithely skipped away again.... Before her doorway, at the passage leading into the court, watching what passed with a sour scowl, stood the hard-lipped little woman who was the concierge to the court; indeed, it was this lean woman’s shrewish tongue that was chiefest cause for the flitting—a clacking tongue that had wearied Horace for months. And now she had fallen foul of the girl and had slanged her from the bottom of the court with taunts and insinuations that Horace had felt compelled to put out of all remotest chance of repetition—and a restless longing to be back in the Latin quarter leaped The act had sobered the concierge. She was brooding upon it now.... The students shut the lid of the divan and flung a rolled mattress on top; the loading went apace to the rattling musketry of quip and jest and caper. Horace, dressed for the street, entered the courtyard and was received with a loud shout from his noisy comrades—a prolonged blare from Gaston Latour’s hunting-horn—and there was silence. Horace glanced round the court, saw that all was ready, and moved towards the concierge. He halted before her, put his heels together, took off his hat, and bowed solemnly. Madame, he said, he felt sure, would understand and allow for his emotion on quitting her house. He handed the key into her grasping outstretched fingers, that were itching for a fee, and commended her soul to her Maker. “He insults me!” she cried; and the students fell a-laughing. Horace turned on his heel as the violent oaths poured from the old shrew’s scolding lips; and the loud tan-tan-taras of the students and the brassy blaring of the French horn drowned the torrent of abuse. They began to sing the Marseillaise. Horace walked calmly over to the handcart, took off his coat and hat, gave them to the girl, and getting between the shafts, he slipped the leather brace over his shoulders, and, with the help of his singing companions, pulled the overloaded and swaying cart towards the gateway—and lurched out into the bright March morning. Horace made southward, the cart rattling after, down the steep streets of Montmartre towards the merry roar of the city’s holiday-making. As the singing, shouting young fellows, hauling and pushing the swaying cart, rattled past the Moulin Rouge into the Place Blanche, they ran full tilt into the genial idle crowd that was out to make the mid-Lenten fÊte of the MicarÊme. From all the windows of the great boulevard thousands of gaily-coloured paper streamers were floating downwards. The broad damp roadway and the footpaths were strewn with many-tinted paper confetti that lay like a carpet, muffling the feet of the people as they moved chatting and laughing along the wide thoroughfare. What little wheeled traffic there was went at a foot’s pace. The riot of students, with Gaston Latour blaring upon the horn, plunged into the procession. The police made a rush towards the disturbance, but only to shrug shoulders when they reached the lumbered swaying cart: “It is only the students!” said they, and fell a-laughing. When they turned into the Place St. Michel they came plunging “Orass” was evidently well known, and was greeted with the honours of a king of Bedlam. It was in a pause that he took, coming to a halt between the shafts, to recover breath and give his other ear a turn of Gaston Latour’s hunting-horn, that Horace espied Noll and Betty standing in the throng. He called to them to come and join him. So it came about that, with a laugh, and shyly enough, they joined the noisiest crew in all Paris that mad March morning. Swinging round, when they got moving again, into a by-way, they soon came to a halt in an old courtyard not a hundred paces from Noll and Betty’s own home amongst the stars. Horace touched Noll on the arm: “Take her up to the top rooms,” said he, nodding towards Betty—“they are mine. I’ll be there in a minute.” Betty with Noll climbed up the polished, creaking old stairway. In the courtyard the students got to their unloading, and were soon carrying the things upstairs. Horace hoisted a couple of chairs under his arms, and joined the stream. Betty and Noll landed in a spacious room at last, an airy large studio that has been the early dwelling-place of more than one man of genius; and Horace, arriving close on their heels, set down the chairs and bade Betty welcome to his home. They were all to lunch together as his guests as soon as the students had set out the place. The great empty room was very soon an inviting-looking habitation. From a back room Jonkin was bringing in chairs and lounges that had never known the handcart. And the young fellows were cheerily laying rugs, nailing up mirrors, and fixing the stove, singing and skylarking—the walls were soon a pleasure to look upon, with a few posters of Steinlen’s and the Beggarstaffs, and sketches, and gay odds and ends. The young fellows worked away with a will. The room was nearly wholly furnished, and the youngsters were beginning to sit about, chatting and smoking, on the floor as often as not, when the door of the little room off the studio was flung open and the girl Babette appeared, wearing with dainty grace the delicate fineries of fashion that a Frenchwoman knows so well how to put on. There was a sudden silence. The girl halted midway down the room, her eyes fixed on Betty where she sat on a divan under the high studio window. “Mother of God!” said the girl hoarsely—“what a beautiful woman!” The students yelled with delight. The girl Babette frowned impatiently, and going close to Horace, she whispered to him, caressingly. Horace laughed, and led her by the hand to Betty: Betty laughed prettily, rose from her seat and kissed her. And, sitting down again, she drew the other down beside her on the divan. Gaston Latour, at a dig of the elbow and mutter from the young American, started to blare upon the French horn—for there were tears in the eyes of the laughter-loving frail Babette. The conversation turned to other things. Horace announced that they were all now his guests, and were forthwith to have breakfast sent in from the restaurant near at hand; as he spoke he noticed that the girl Babette had taken Betty’s left hand in hers and was turning her wedding-ring round on her slender white finger. Horace introduced the others to Betty and Noll: Gaston Latour, who was essaying to bring dignity to the traditions of painting. Jack Pettigrew, the tall Yankee, whom also they afterwards came to know together with four other American students as one of the Five Foolish Virgins—the English students explained, because they were always late; but the French ones soon put the jest to roost in their open bewilderment at their dogged belief in the monogamies. Paul Kendrick of Boston, Massachusetts—which was the fault of Boston, and Paul wholly without blame in the matter. Kendrick bowed. Harcourt Phelps, another of the Five Foolish Virgins. Dick Davenant, known as the Disturber of Funerals, being one who always laughed in the wrong place. Dandy Donovan, the remaining Foolish Virgin. “Gobemouche” de Morneville, who was shirking the law, and catching flies when he should have been catching the subtleties of philosophy and the reasons for things. He put his heels together and solemnly bowed his close-cropped head. And half a dozen other young Frenchmen who talked the most ridiculous Ollendorffian English with serious unwinking eyes masking their fooling.... Jonkin and the waiters, arriving with dishes and plates, burst into the room, ushered in by Gaston Latour, gloomily blaring fantastic joy upon the French horn, and all further conversation was impossible until the cloth was laid.... Wherein the Spring comes a-frolic into the Court Betty’s young blood danced to the blithe promise of Spring that was in the March winds; and her heart leaped to the quickening whisper of the awakening world. The winter was over. Her sweet body sang to her of the gladness of the world. Her light step spoke of the gaiety of young womanhood; and her laughing eyes knew no fear of destiny—her quick ears caught no echo, no whisper of the crack of doom, and had she heard it she would still have gone with the calm effrontery of youth to meet it. She skipped down the highway of life, all dainty and delighted and unafraid. The orchestral universe made music for her feet. She was alive. All nature smiled upon her, even through tears. The rain that pelted with sharp icy particles or chill admixture of snow upon the window-panes, and the gusts that thundered against the shutters and plucked at their bolts, played but the castanets for her dancing blood, sounded but the drums for her ready feet; she took her walks abroad in frank ecstasy of health, and lifting her dear face to the buffeting winds she breathed into her glowing body the emotional air that rocked the tall trees against the swinging firmament, pulsing the sluggish life-sap to their uttermost whistling twigs. She was become a part of the motherhood of the world. The protecting care that she had aforetime spent upon her disreputable old father, she now wound about this youth. Her mother-heart was no longer starved; forgot the suffering of rebuff; flinched no longer, scared by dread of Shame. ’Tis true, at a sudden noise she would start fearfully still, and her heart flutter sickeningly; yet, for the love of a youth, she would have plucked the beard of a sulphur-stinking devil, though the splendid insolence had scorched her sweet fingers to the bone. Her honeymoon was fragrant with the breath of Spring. With Noll she haunted the picture-galleries of the Luxembourg and roamed the polished oaken floors that are the slippery footway of the Louvre—stood with him before the Venus of Milo, where, on gazing awhile, the wondrous marble seems to breathe and move in all the majesty of human life—wandered before the Together they trudged the smiling streets of Paris that are the drawing-room of the world—loitered at her shop-windows—clambered up the steeps of Montmartre to the terrace, ill-kempt and weedy, where arose the gaunt and vasty scaffolding of the great church that the pious of France were building to the Sacred Heart in that strange mystic agony that would hope, by taking thought upon it and building in stone, to blot out the sins of the people—wandered about the banks of Seine, poring over the booksellers’ boxes that line the walls of the quays with evergreen hope of finding some good book or print—lingered in the high vaulted aisles of the cathedral of Notre Dame, listening to medieval litanies—loitered about the historic purlieus of the Rue St. HonorÉ and the Rue de Rivoli, and sought cheap dinners in the courts of the old dilapidated Palais Royal, all haunted with the ghosts of the Revolution and rustling, to quick ears, with the silk and satin of the seventeen hundreds. Careless of the elements, they sallied out to hang about the book-shops and rummage in the print-sellers’ trays, coming home with rare booty bought for a franc or so, to hang upon their walls—little masterpieces by Steinlen and others who are keeping alive the flame of art in France whilst the State is decorating the mediocrities; and so, roaming homewards with their prizes, they would make for their quarters in the lilac twilight to dine in some cheap place where students dine—or not to dine—clambering up their six flights of stairs at the end of all with jest and laughter and muddied boots, singing a snatch of song amidst their pleasant weariness, just from sheer gladness to be alive. Loneliness was wholly gone from the girl; she had with her always now, by her side, one to whom she could chatter, one who could share her silences. Her letters to Netherby and Julia at this time were love-lyrics. From her balcony, Betty saw the spring peep shyly into the court below. The silent snow that had fallen yesterweek, swirling softly, stealthily covering the earth, lying muffling white in deeper and deeper carpet to the foot that trod the courtyard, showing twigs and branches, otherwise scarce suspected, in white array, bowing down the leaves of evergreens—all in a night in solid whiteness fell to the ground, sliding from tree and parapet and ivied wall, and sank into the earth below, vanished beneath the gravel, leaving the damp cobbles shining darkly wet. In the night the rain had swept the snow from the face of the world—the morning laughed with sunlight—vasty white clouds swung across the blue firmament. The fat little concierge sallied out upon the high heap of gravel that had lain all winter in a corner of the courtyard, This devilish spreading of gravel satisfies the Æsthetic sense of concierges; and a run of the rake keeps it easily tidy. It is like the speech of concierges—gritty and utilitarian. It was more. It was a grim recognition that Spring had tripped in from the country and glanced into the court; it gave the official sanction. And lo! in the beds, almost in a day, bare bushes were straightway sprinkled with emeralds, the desolate laurels and evergreens roused from their drooping and showed a lighter greenness above their sombre steadfast habit; the tall lilacs ventured upon timid unfoldings. A hazel dangled catkins. The ivy on the walls, washed clean, glowed darkly green, hiding in grotesquely bulky nests the consequences of the loves of multitudinous sparrows. The sparrow no longer sat, one of many, a brown huddle on bare branches, a confessed beggar and one of a gang of greedy loafers, shamelessly indigent, but was become almost a rare sight, shooting like clay pellet from a sling across the void of the court and flinging into the green, his egoism lost in family cares, his life no longer the killing of dull time nor recklessly planned for the debauching of the years. On the bare branches of the trees the impatient buds were swelling to the bursting. Along the brown earth showed themselves diffidently the rare wind-flowers. In the warmer corners, amongst much green of leaves, peeped the occasional violet. The briar came into leaf. The branches of most trees and bushes were bare, but in the corner an almond burst into blossom, blushing to greet the rude kisses and boisterous onset of the spring. Then the concierge’s tortoiseshell cat, patched yellow and black and white, alone suspicious of the elements, walking a-tiptoe in dandified discomfort across the puddled court, flirting the loathed sense of dampness from disgusted paw, blinking unemotionally even at the sparrows, would show sudden uneasiness, turned and cantered home again to the black hollow of the concierge’s doorway—went gliding in—disappeared. A black cloud swung up across the blue, rolled out beyond the chimney-pots and blotted out the sun; the wind, sneering amongst the evergreens, lost its temper, leaped forward with a roar and a yell and smote the ruffled ivy upon the walls—bombasting round the empty court, bursting in at the windows, sending loose shutters a-clattering, and viciously slamming doors. Rain came spitting upon the city—hissed the hail. Thus sadly and somewhat sullenly the twilight would fall. But Spring, though hesitant, left a footprint even in the stony garden of the concierge. April came smiling. The concierge would stand on the gravel and hold out a hand to the sunshine, feeling it between her fingers. Nay, there had been even lack of rain for a couple of days or more. The pump in the court would tell with clanking report that the sinewy arms of the stout little concierge were at work on the iron handle, usurping the habit of the clouds and foster-mothering the narrow garden. Waddling, bucket-laden, to the thirsty earth, she would lean and fling sheets of water in the face of all green things—insolently, lest nature might deem her servile—and, the roots holding firm each hardy plant that had withstood the harsh winter’s enmities as it reeled from the courtesies of her rude ministry, the concierge was moved to ambitions of gardening, digged holes in the stony beds, brought out potted plants and set them out in rigid rows into the quickening earth—pansy and lily and anemone and daffodil—with, drill-sergeant to their marshalled ranks, an occasional oleander bush. The lilac came into bloom. The naked ash still showed black buds, but all else was sprinkled with leaves. The horse-chestnut, coquetting with the romping winds, unfolded little fans of green. And now, in the blue heavens above, white clouds were lightly roaming. The sun had warmth in his breath, and across the seething face of the awakening world flung restless shadows. On a high chimney a couple of pigeons sat cooing. There was the blithe song of birds. The concierge’s tortoiseshell cat would come out and sit in a comfortable huddle of drowsiness upon the sun-warmed ground. Indeed, there had been strange, devilish, and Wagnerian music of late at night, and her modest eyes and demure person knew full well whose tortoiseshell lungs had been the source and set the key. Her nod could incriminate the black tom that sang the throaty ill-timed contralto to her shrill love-music—indeed, he sang under the whip. Even so might a concierge tell her love. And there were voices within open windows—and heads thrust out, pretty heads amongst them—and lively chatter would pass across the court, and jests were flung from story to story, and genial sarcasms would reach the concierge, who flung back time-honoured repartee and time-worn ironies. There was laughter and the singing of a snatch of song—a piano would run up the gamut of a scale. From afar the tuneful hum of the murmurous city sounded deeper, and there was increase in the passing clatter of the nearer traffic. The air was astir with the sayings of many mouths, the thrill of dancing thoughts. Through the open window the setting sun, streaming into her room, would find Betty at work, till Noll should come for her from the studio to take her out. He had tacked prints upon the walls above her desk, and there were books scattered about, and a pleasant picturesqueness held the place. From the early morning, when she arose blithely, put out her rosy-tipped white feet upon the floor, and got to the warming of As the sun’s amber light passed from the court and crept up the eastern wall, and the grey shadow of the dusk began to fall, full of chill other shadows, that took their stealthy stand in dark corners, and made a conspiracy of silence at the heels of the dying day, the air was filled with a mystic sense of evensong. For, when shutters were drawn to, by silent hands, and windows one by one were closed, and lamps gleamed yellow through the slats of close-shut jalousies, her lover’s feet would be leaping up the stairs, and in the deepening blue of the heavens a myriad white stars be set aflame. Wherein it is hinted that it were Best to “Touch not the Catte botte a Glove” There was in and around and about the lithe beauty of the dark slender young woman, Gabrielle Solignac, much of her own strange uncanny poetry, with its stealthy Eastern manner—catlike when she moved, glowing in colour as a ranging leopard, her clinging draperies loading the air with scent of sandal-wood and the fragrance of Japan—catlike when at rest, and warm-hued and alertly languid as the Indies, her skin now showing saffron as dyed wood, now gleaming white as cunningly wrought ivory. She was mystic always as some half-revealed god in the great shadow of the deep hollows of pagan temples—silent and calm as Egyptian Sphinx. Her exquisite fame had passed beyond Paris, and was broadcast over Europe; yet she was little more than girl.... She had been married to Myre a month; and as she now lay on her side at full length along the great Eastern lounge, her dark head on her father’s knees where he sat at the end of the lounge, there was something of leopard grace in her attitude; and in the long half-closed green eyes, something of leopard’s latent fire. Solignac, his great head bowed, chin sunk on chest, lay back on the lounge, his eyes staring out from the black shadows of their deep hollows under the heavy brows; and he passed his shapely nervous hand over the girl’s tawny hair. “It only seems but yesterday,” said he hoarsely, “that he praised my sonnets—and I brought him here.” He laughed bitterly. “I brought him here. Think of it, my Gabrielle; had he not praised my verse I had never——” “Hush, father!” said she. “It seems but yesterday that you married him—and went out and left me alone——” “Father,” said she, “I am so glad to be back. It was horrible—to be a woman. I am so glad to be a child again.” The old man laughed: “I have gained,” he said—“and, by God, I am almost glad he is a villain.” “I have done with him,” she said. “To think that I am amongst the greatest European authorities upon the mysteries of the East! and all to be juggled out of my wits by the first vulgar sycophant who sings my praise!... Ye pagan gods! how little wisdom is in books!” She reached up her slender hand and put her fingers upon his mouth: “Hush!” said she—“let us back to our books and rejoice in our lack of wisdom. We were happier with our curios and the mysteries.... I am done with him.” And all about them the little fat Eastern idols sadly smiled and smiled.... The poet never recovered from the blow. He felt that through his conceit alone his girl had been bought. He would harp upon it sadly. She laughed always her soft low laugh at all his self-blame, purring of her love for him. But Solignac was a disillusioned man—thought the world wagged chins at him—lost heart—stooped beneath the secret shame of the blow. The blunder about his girl’s marriage killed him.... As he lay still and cold upon his white bed, at midnight, the great candles flaming in their high brass candlesticks, idols of the East gazing sadly down upon him, the girl, who had flung herself beside the bed, her bowed head on his chill unanswering hand, of a sudden ceased her sobbing and stood up. She bit her finger tips upon the urging of some sudden mood, gazing stealthily about the room. She was alone. She walked, with strange catlike tread, to an exquisite lacquer cabinet; opened the lock, and lifting the lid, took out a red Japanese fan. She went to the dead man’s bookshelves and took down Solignac’s last volume of sonnets—the pages were uncut. She sat down at the foot of the bed. How often she had so sat as a child! He had had such pride in her! The high flames of the great altar candles flooding her with their light, cast shadows down upon her where she crouched over the book. She gripped the handle of the fan in her long supple fingers and plucked a bright blade from out the cunningly wrought scabbard—the fan had only been in the outward seeming, most wondrously carved. The blade was a cruel one, and keen as pitilessness. She cut the pages of the book with it—and as the paper hissed its surrender to the sharp blade’s thrust she smiled. But in the smile was little mirth. Across the river, in the students’ quarter, brooding before a wood fire in the rooms of his hotel, sat Mr. Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre. He had written a play, choke-full of the most obvious symbolism. It had failed. It was not even considered original—indeed, it had been condemned as being very poor Ibsen indeed. Nor had he won money out of the venture. He was sadly puzzled. Not to be original! it were not to be Quogg Myre. He searched the history of genius to find a precedent on which to act—to be original. He arose on to his splay feet, and with his awkward slovenly gait paced the room, shivered at the discomfort of his thoughts, walked to the fireplace and stood brooding at his image in the mirror above it; his hands thrust deep in his trousers pockets. His untidy colourless hair fell over his paste-coloured forehead—it was more untidy than usual, more colourless. A hank of it stood out on the back of his poll like the crest of a cockatoo. He was sickly pale. His weak puffy red lip was limp and uneasy. His long quarrelsome chin alone held firm for bouts of decision. It was his chin that fought the slacknesses of his body. How had Shakespeare and these clever fellows discovered their great art? Why should not he create a school? These fellows—Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac, Carlyle, Meredith, Sterne, and the rest—they had been just real live men, needing their dinner, sleeping o’ nights, fighting their way to fame year after year, rebuffed, sneered at, ordinary human flesh—without half his chances. What was the trick that they had discovered? Ay; what the key to their wizardry? These fellows, the big ones, had never fretted their souls with all these frets of style, of art for art’s sake, of their rating by jabbering classifiers in the eternities. Whilst he—he had wasted the years on such tom-follies. Nay, in expressing themselves they had created style. They had had something deeper than style. What was it? There was something deep down in the heart of things that made their work live. Some mystic sense—— By heavens, it was mysticism! He would get up mysticism—read it up at the libraries. He would write mysticism into his work—— He shivered. In the curio shop, a fool of a Jap had drawn a sharp dagger from its sheath that morning—he hated knives and edged tools. God! how cold it was! He suddenly remembered—— Solignac lay stretched on his death-bed. He had a mind to go and see him lying so.... This Solignac must have died enormously rich—his collections were world-famous. He went and put on his hat and cloak; lurched to the door—— At the door he hesitated. Have a care! Look to thyself, master Myre! That leopard quietude, the catlike lithe walk, may be the watchful prowl of one that sees He shut the door—came back—took off his cloak and hat—flung them on a chair. He would like to have flouted this cold woman in that death-chamber; it had never been done, it would come well in his autobiography; but—— What had this woman heard—guessed—seen—in that first month? Damnation! He had been so careful—so circumspect. He recalled the warm accents frozen to cold disdain almost before they had left her father’s house. She baffled him—made him uneasy. He had scolded, supplicated, whimpered, blustered.... What chiefly remained in the fearful hollows of his conceit was the passionless voice in its last statement that if he stepped across her door again she would kill him. On his soul, he had been glad to be rid of her. She alarmed him. He had jested about her to his fellows—but—— He shivered uncomfortably. Yes. This woman alarmed him. He felt that his throat might be slit as he slept.... He rather liked a wordy brawl with women—he had his moments in drawing-room cynicism. He could brow-beat them with the best. He had pen-courage too. With a pen and ink-pot he was absolutely without fear. But—— With this silent woman he never could shake off the feeling of discomfort. She baffled him. He feared her. By God! he had it. He would write a book upon all his gadding loves with women—she should figure there as one of many. She would free him in the divorce courts. And the scandal would float him into public notice again. Wherein Yankee Doodle is bugled—with a Strong Foreign Accent Hearing her name called, Betty roused; and, crossing the room, went to the balcony. Looking down into the court she saw the Five Foolish Virgins standing there below with faces upraised. The big fellow, Dick Davenant, called up that his cousin Molly wanted Betty to go to her straight away—wanted her along—before her guests arrived—she was giving a “tea”—they would meet later—when they had gotten the cakes and looked up “the boys.” All this bawled at the top of his jolly lungs’ strength. Betty called down that she would go. The young fellows waved their hats and marched out of the courtyard, chattering. Betty wrote upon a half-sheet of paper that she was off to Moll Davenant’s, and pinned it on the wall where Noll must see it on entering the room; and, quickly dressing for the street, she let herself out of her room. Moll Davenant was sitting on the side of her bed, seized with a harsh attack of coughing—sitting there, clutching the bedclothes with her long thin fingers. The perspiration came out in a heavy dew upon her white skin. The struggle for breath was terrible, pathetic. When she took her handkerchief from her mouth it was stained with blood. She passed long slender hands over her damp brow and with deft fingers made a weary effort to get order into the bedraggled disorder of her mouse-coloured hair. She moaned miserably, and her eyes roamed heavily over the littered room before her—“I shall never get this place tidy,” she said. There was a sharp brisk knock. The door opened and Betty stepped into the room: “Gracious, Moll!” cried she, glancing at the litter of the untidy place, “we must be quick!” She had shut the door behind her when she entered; she now went back and locked it. Moll Davenant rose from the bed with the sudden and feverish “Thank Heaven, you are come, Betty—I was at my wits’ end.” Betty gently unlocked the girl’s embrace: “Come, Molly,” said she, taking off her gloves and jacket—“there’s no time to lose—they’ll be here in an hour. Gracious! What confusion!” She laughed gaily. Moll Davenant looked about her helplessly. Betty kissed her: “Come along, Molly—where are the fineries? We’ll start with the sommier.” She tidied the bed coverings, and before the other, languidly sighing, had brought some faded silks and embroideries from a box, Betty had made smooth the wondrous bed of the Latin Quarter to its intention of many-coloured lounge by day. Betty’s quick fingers were soon hiding all signs of bed under silk and satin. She arose, flushed from the tuckings-in, and the smoothings-out; and, taking an edge of battered silk pillow-case in her teeth, she slipped a pillow into it, shook it into place, and buttoned it down. As the pillow disappeared into its crumpled once-gorgeous covering, the last sign of bed-hood passed out of the bed, and the sommier took on the splendour of an Eastern ottoman. Betty laughed; sat down on the edge of the ottoman, and ran her eyes over the room. Moll Davenant went to her, flung herself on the floor at her feet, and burst into tears. Betty stroked her shoulder: “Come, come, Molly,” said she—“we must get on. Don’t be stupid——” The girl made a pitiful effort to stop her sobs. Betty stood up; raised the poor girl to her feet; and led her to the stove: “Come, Moll—we’ll talk as soon as the room is in order....” Wherever Betty went, order resulted. The easel was swung into position and a sketch placed upon it—sketches were set out on a ledge that ran along the wall. Chairs were slewed into position. And soon there was but a little pile of stray impossible things in the middle of the room that had no ordered place therein. Betty completed the pile with a pair of dingy slippers. “I think,” said she—“it is time to bury the refuse.” And the two of them, laughing, soon had the litter thrust under the bed. A silk hanging descended over it, and it was gone. Order was everywhere. “I’ll finish the coffee,” said Betty—“you go and tidy yourself, Moll.” Betty made herself tidy, and, flushed with the exertion, sat down on the lounge: “Heigho!” sighed she. “Now, Moll, what is it? But we had better unlock the door—all’s clear.” She rose to go to the door. Moll drew her down by the skirt: “No, Betty—not yet.” Betty sat down and drew the dainty head into her lap: “What is it, Molly?” “Betty”—she hesitated, and added miserably—“I ought never to have come to Paris.” “Why?” “Because—because there is no one to look after father—and—he never said a word to prevent me coming to Paris—he said he thought it would be just splendid for me—but—I know now how lonely he is—he’s such a man—he never said a word to hinder me leaving him all alone—never said a word that hinted of the lonely home I left behind me—but—well, it was the night before I left, I was lonely and got out of bed and crept downstairs, and he was sitting at a table, a lighted candle beside him, and he was looking at a little pair of shoes—they were the first little shoes I ever wore——” She fell a-sobbing: “And now I know—I know—I know.” Betty laid her hand on the girl’s shoulder: “But, Moll—you are going home to America within the year!” She shook her head sadly: “I ought never to have come here—we are so poor—I have crippled their means—I have crippled father—I am crippling dear old Dick—and I am only a mediocrity after all. And now I am doomed.” “Hush, Moll! You mustn’t say these things.” The girl was seized with a violent attack of coughing. “Betty—I just wanted to be a genius—to be talked about. At heart I only wanted to be an artist in order to make a name. It was the name. Now—I have awaked to find—I am a woman. I—have—only a little while—a little, little life. I know it. Why fear it? Don’t shake your head, Betty, dear heart—the doctors broke it to me this morning.... But—I would just like to have—played—with a child——” Betty laughed softly: “Oho! mistress Molly,” said she—“so there’s a man—at last!” Betty turned up the girl’s face between her hands: “Who is it?” she asked. “Eustace Lovegood.” Betty bent down and kissed her: “You happy thing!” she said. “And how on earth did you come across Eustace Lovegood?” “We were a whole month in London before we came on here—Eustace and my cousin Dick took to each other—and—so—everything came about.... We knew nobody and were lonely—but “But, Moll—what became of Eustace—and—the sunshine?” “He’s in Paris. Has been in Paris for nearly a week.” “Oho! and you’ve been keeping the sunshine all to yourself, Moll! Tut tut!” Moll burst into tears. Betty stroked her cheek: “No, no, Moll; this will never do. Where’s the sunshine?” “He’s gone,” she sobbed. “Gone?” Moll nodded through her tears: “One of the girls at the studio said he was making me ridiculous. And—I told Eustace. And—yesterday morning he wrote to tell me the girl was right—and—and——” She was seized with a violent fit of coughing. Betty’s brows were knit: “What did you do, Moll?” “Nothing.” Betty drew the dainty head within her lap: “Thou fool!” she said in French—it seemed less harsh, whilst just as true; and, after a while, she added in English: “Thou poor mad fool, Moll!” Moll was sobbing miserably. Betty sat and soothed her, running her healing hand over the sobbing girl’s hair, and thinking: “Fancy!” she said at last—“fancy! Eustace Lovegood!” And she looked down at the fragile figure at her knees. She saw that the slender frame was grown more sadly slender—the thin hands more sadly transparent—the fire of the strange and awful disease was eating her blood. The girl was torn with the feverish energy of the devil of consumption, that whispered urgingly at her elbow to live her moment at the topmost pitch of energy or she would be too late. Betty was roused from her brooding by the shuffle of footsteps that ascended the stairs outside—and the sound of light-hearted laughter. “Moll, quick! here they come!” She bent down and kissed the girl: “Let me think it out,” she said—“we must do something. I’ll do it. I know Eustace Lovegood well.... Now you are hostess—stand up—and take command of yourself.... That’s right.” She sprang to the door, unlocked it, and skipped back to the other. There was a loud knock. The Five Foolish Virgins trooped in, headed by Gaston Latour, playing on the French horn what was soon discovered to be “Yankee Doodle”—with a strong French accent. Wherein we skip down the Highway of Youth Saturday night. The Boule Miche was ablaze with light of frequent cafÉs; its roadway vexed with roar of wheeled traffic; its pavements astir with shuffle of many feet. From the Place Saint Michel, where the black waters of the stealthy river washed her quays in darkling passage to the far sea, the broad thoroughfare of the Boule Miche, the students’ highway, flaring in the black reek, swept upwards to the shadowy gardens of the Luxembourg, topped the hill, and was lost amongst the stars. Riverwards, where the Ile de la CitÉ, with sombre hint of law-courts and hospital, arose from out the flood in the pitchy murk of the night, loomed the dark cathedral towers of Notre Dame, gloomy with threat of eternal punishment to transgressors—and low down and afar gleamed the weeping lights of the Morgue, where sleep, after their last violence, the disowned and discarded dead. But neither above on the limitless blue, where are the stars, nor below on the unthinking litanies of an outworn creed, nor upon the rude death that ends alike the abstemious nun and the dizzy jig of Folly and Crime, were bent the thoughts of the multitudinous students who ranged the highway, making holiday—indeed, their eager eyes were wholly set upon living the conventional unconventionalities of youth, skipping down the highway of life with shout and laughter and song and merry riot, arm in arm, in rollicking mood, reckless of the flitting years, careless of the eternities. It was midnight, and the Bal Bullier being at an end, its frantic dancings done, and its doors closed, the youths were pouring into the Boule Miche with much rustle of prettily dressed young women who hung upon their arms—and were hovering about the lighted spaces where the cafÉs blazed into the street. The sombre academics enwrapped in the darkness of the alleys at either hand, and the professors who snored in their staid beds—what mattered they? Away with pompous thinking, when the blood’s jigging. And if they were awake even the most learned of the old gentlemen, with fullest sprinkling of dandruff on collar, God! what it is to breathe! to love God’s design by living it. What hath philosophy done but make the world yawn, thou numbskull dreamer of dreams that shouldst be living dreams? This is life. The miracle is given to you. What is changing water into wine to this? Take it in both hands. Grasp it. Live it. All the thinking of all the academies cannot give you this. Grown old in mere thinking upon life, you shall not call back the blithe days of your youth. Dig your hands deep into the grave of your dead self, and you shall not find the splendid years of the joy of life. Get you up to the uttermost mountains’ tops, dive you to the bottom of the uttermost deeps, you shall not find it. It was yours. Whilst you brooded hesitant how to spend it, it hath slipped your fingers, passed like a sunlit merriment, and become part of a sigh in the eternal mystery. The lordship over vasty continents shall not yield you the glory of it—neither ambition nor riches nor learning nor immortality shall yield you a shred of that which, wholly unasked for, was yours. God! how lavish, how wasteful, thou! Why hug the skeleton of life? Fool! peer thou hard enough: yonder, at the end of all, in the shadows, stands the Reaper—down the roadway grimly smile the sombre mutes standing impatiently by a plumed hearse, expectant of fees. Alike for saint and sinner and gay and sober they smirk. They take your measure. ’Tis waste of time to protest with them. The rascals have the last word. Tush! Go hang to them! So they sing in the tavern on youth’s highway—and toss off the toast—and are merry. Inside the CafÉ Harcourt, at a table, in an angle somewhat apart from the scintillating din, sat Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre and the exquisite Aubrey. The Honourable Rupert Greppel also was there, hidalgic, aloof, aristocratic; and Lord Monty Askew, leaning his chin on the jade handle of his cane, and gloved with sleeved gloves, like a woman’s—he, too, being aristocrat, could not live without the attention of the crowd whom he despised in speech and verse. And as Rupert Greppel uttered his splendid contempt of humanity, Askew would nod, giving Greppel the polite attention of his eyes—his thoughts the while on his own pose and poesies. Aubrey too was gazing at himself in a mirror. Quogge Myre was about to yawn openly, when his roving gaze fell upon the handsome face of Bartholomew Doome at a table near by, where, on either side of him, there sat two of the most pronounced beauties of the Latin Quarter. Myre caught the eyes of Horace Malahide, who with Babette at his side also sat at Doome’s table; and he nodded and smiled through his colourless untidy moustache at the young fellow. The two beautiful young women were turned to Doome, gazing upon his handsome face with hungry eyes of admiration. Gaston Latour, sitting opposite, was leaning forward, stroking the gloved hand of one of them where it lay upon the table, Doome listening to him with an amused smile. “Ah, Liane,” said Latour, “the English are good fellows, but they cannot love.... Conjugate their verb: I lof, thou loffest, he lofs, ve lof, you lof, zey lof—it is like coughing into a passionate woman’s ecstatic ear—it is born of their fog—as well kiss a haddock!” The two young women smiled away the sally pityingly, keeping their rapt eyes on the Byronic Doome. Gaston grinned: “Mon Dieu!” said he, “he has not even an Englishman’s excuse for existence—he is not even rich.” The two women had arisen, scowling at each other’s handsome faces, their beautiful lips set angrily, and began to quarrel about the seated Doome, who thrust his hands into his pockets resignedly, and sat grimly silent through it all. Words were like to come to blows between the two women, for the hot-blooded Liane, to reach the other, moved out to battle—the other retired slowly up the cafÉ, her reckless rallies as she withdrew bringing all eyes to the disturbance. Women stood up on chairs and tables, to see the details; and the students thundered applause, and threw in comic suggestions. “The last word is with Liane,” shouted a great burly fellow with a big laughing voice, an artist; and added: “Tiens! what a Juno, hein!” Liane turned her pretty back upon them, and the wit ran down. She came back to her seat beside Doome; sat down; and laid a hand upon his sleeve: “It was thy fault,” she said. Doome looked at her grimly: “Now call me a fool, Liane,” said he grimly. The tears came to her eyes. Gaston Latour went and sat down beside her, touched her hand: “Hist!” said he—“Liane, you must not contradict him. It is the privilege of genius to utter the truth.” She turned to him, the tears in her eyes giving way to sad laughter. Latour, with mock absent-mindedness, kissed her: Doome smiled: “You must forgive Gaston, Liane,” he said. “He forgets everything—he even forgets himself.” The girl leaned on Doome’s shoulder, turned to Latour: “He says I am to forgive you, Gaston,” said she. “I love him.” She took Doome’s hand in her lap, and stroked his fingers between her gloved hands. “I love the English,” she said. Gaston looked shocked: “Oh no—not so many as that!” said he, “it isn’t proper....” As Betty, led by a waiter, and followed by Moll Davenant and Noll and the Five Foolish Virgins, peering at the light, entered the flare of the cafÉ, looking for places, unable to find seats under the awning outside, she heard her name called, and, looking round upon the merry crowd, she saw Babette signing to her to go to their table. But Noll had been recognised, and there were loud shouts for him about the cafÉ, and hands held out. His genial ways, his frank habits, his kindly tact, had early won the hearts of the rollicking student crew, and he had soon passed from “Monsieur” to surname, from surname to Christian name, translated to heathen barbarianisms, to Noll, mon vieux, old man.... Dick Davenant and the other Foolish Virgins came in for a like ovation from “the boys.” And it was with some difficulty that they managed to struggle through the genial riot after Betty and join those that sat at Doome’s table. Quogge Myre and Aubrey took advantage of the chance to join the party. Babette held Betty’s hand now, and prattled happily. She pointed out to Betty’s keen eyes the many beauties present, told their histories with light touch, without malice and without exaggeration—just the simple picturesque sketch. And always the end was the same. Suzanne yonder, with the glorious hair like copper, she was the companion of that artist—he would arrive—oh, yes, the world would hear of him. Suzanne had been a model at the studios—but the hours were long—it was very fatiguing—the walls of the studio were grey and bare—she hated dull gowns—she went to the Bal Bullier—the next morning the studio was very grey—she was cross and sleepy—the students were surly—it’s so stupid to stand and be drawn—stupid and tedious and tiresome—she would go no more—at the cafÉs one can do as one likes—the cafÉs were gay—she had found a bourgeois—he was dull, but she had silk dresses instead of gowns of stuff—still, he was a bore—so she left him and came back to the cafÉs—the students were always gay—the cafÉ always bright—— Ah, yes, that was Mimi—she had been a dressmaker—she too had gone to the Bal Bullier—and had become the companion of a law student—it was hard to keep the pot boiling, but she had been happy—then his five years of quartier latin were up, and he had Betty touched her arm: “And after that?” she asked. Babette shrugged her shoulders: “Perhaps she will marry a tradesman,” she said. “Perhaps——” She gave it up. “And after that?” Babette kissed Betty’s serious face: “Thou odd inquirer,” said she. “If you ask after that and after that, why we grow old one day—and after that die—and after that are buried—and after that, who cares?” She laughed, and stroked Betty’s hand: “Ah, and that is Marcelle—she was apprentice to a sempstress—but the work was hard, the hours long, oh so long, and the food scarce and poor—and she has only once to live—and she has Titian red hair—she, too, came to the cafÉs, where the students are always gay and the lights are——” There was a shout of laughter from the students. Out of the riot the quavering voice of age rose in broken falsetto, singing a snatch of song that was on the town in Betty’s childhood, a soprano passage from an old Italian opera. An old woman, with blear watery eyes, her tattered and rusty old dress hanging in an untidy bunch about her shrunken body, a few grey hairs straggling over her withered leaden face, was singing in the full operatic manner. A strange pathetic sight. So an old harpsichord sounds, awaking startled ghosts in some old-world room at the rude touch of living hands. The end of the broken song was received with loud laughter from the students, who shrieked and coughed until the tears stood in their eyes—they flung pence at the old woman’s feet. Women were standing on tables, students were crowded in a ring about her. “Thou hast danced with Victor Hugo, Margot, my pearl—show us how!” cried a bearded cub from the schools. She bowed—gathered up her seedy tattered skirts with something of the old-world grand manner that went with the stately crinoline, and, showing down-at-heel boots of the elastic-sided variety that are called “jemimas,” her feet got shuffling to the steps of an old dance of the quarter. In the sunken hollows of the wan old face hovered the ghost of the set smile that dancers smile, baring toothless gums—the lights flickered but feebly in her lamp of life—she skipped the steps now right, now left, now back, now forward, with the stiff travesty of old age—and set the tables in a roar. A grotesque attempt at high-kicking brought down thunders of applause. The sous showered upon the floor. She picked up the scattered money with pathetic weary old hands; bowed to the applause, and taking her way stiffly through the cafÉ, passed out into the night. “Ah, that is old Margot.” Babette touched Betty’s hand. “She comes out so at night—it was here she had her triumphs fifty years ago.” “And—the end?” Babette shrugged: “She is rich,” she said—“she comes out so at night—but in the day she is rich. She has a villa in the country. Oh, but yes ... Gaston Latour has seen it. Last year. Ah, she was so droll—she had sung a love-song in the tenderest manner. Gaston gave her a gold piece by mistake for silver. She was here the next night—Gaston also. He told her. “Bien!” said old Margot, and gave him her card.... He went by rail—the villa was on a lake—charming. He knocked. A servant opened the door. He was shown into a salon. Madame would come in a moment. Madame Margot came. Ah, yes, said she, the twenty-franc piece! She opened a cabinet and gave it to him. Gaston, dumbfounded, thanked her, was retiring towards the door thanking her, apologizing. She put her hand on his sleeve: ‘But, monsieur has forgotten the franc!’” Betty smiled: “Who is she?” asked she. “The old woman once lived with a student who came to great fame, and——” She shrugged her shoulders. She turned suddenly and gazed hard at Betty: “There are tears in your eyes,” she said. “What are you thinking of, my dear?” Betty sighed, and said hoarsely: “The waste of women—the waste of women.” That evening, Aubrey cast his evil eyes upon Moll Davenant. He sat beside her, showered upon her the subtle flattery of his whole attention, was soon in touch with her thwarted ambitions, was sharing her dreams—and before the evening was out he had set a hedge of confidences round about her that isolated her, with him as sole companion, from the rest of her fellows. With all the moods of her frail talents he was swiftly intimate; and, as he sat leaning forward, his cheek on his hand, gazing intently at her, where she lolled back at his side, his eyes took in every turn and line of the strange pallid beauty of her hungry features. He put off his outward conceit and interested her in herself—as he himself was interested—— There was a loud shout. A number of the students and their young women rose, and each dragging a chair behind him along the floor, they formed into line, and marched round the cafÉ, singing a student song. Thrice round the cafÉ, and flinging down the chairs, they streamed out into the street.... “You look nice and fresh,” he said. Betty turned her back upon him. He always affected her like filth; when he spoke it was as if filth could speak. She slipped her hand through Molly’s arm. Horace Malahide, who had watched the incident, laughed: “Come, Babette!” said he—“we’ll see Noll and Betty and Moll home.” Betty drew Moll Davenant away as Aubrey put his heels together and gave his bow like a dancing-master. “Come, Moll,” said she, and squeezing the girl’s arm, she added in a laughing whisper—“and I’ll find Eustace to-morrow.” To her surprise there was no answering smile. As Aubrey and Myre turned out into the night together, Aubrey looked at the other out of the corner of his eyes: “That’s a very beautiful woman who—snubbed you—Myre,” said he. Myre shrugged his shoulders: “A woman should require winning,” he said. He licked his puffy underlip sullenly. They walked awhile in silence. “They say that she’s Baddlesmere’s wife,” Aubrey said—“and a prude.” Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre laughed: “Oh, they all like their squeeze,” said he. They walked some way down the street. Aubrey sighed; and after awhile he said absently: “I have never loved a consumptive woman yet. And I have found one—it will be a strange emotional experience.” “Oh, she’s consumptive, the faded lily, is she?” growled Myre. Aubrey smiled: “She is beautiful,” he said—“and she has a hectic mind.” Wherein the Widow Snacheur separates the Milk from Human Kindness In a large and shabby room on the ground floor of the court, a dark blur in the gloom of the gathering dusk, crouched rather than sat the widow Snacheur—La bÊte noire, the street urchins had it in awed whisper, thrusting out mocking chins behind her back. With hard old fingers she was smoothing out upon the bare table the crumpled sheet of newspaper which she had just unfolded from a package sent by a tradesman; the hawklike eyes strained to read the print, but the fading daylight smudged the page. She drew her soiled black shawl more closely about her bent shoulders: She lifted up a reedy voice: “Madelaine!” she cried harshly. A door opened, and there stepped through the opened way a lean girl of fourteen, the drudge that is called maid-of-all-work. “Yes, madame,” said Madelaine, or what was the half-starved embodiment of Madelaine, her long bare arms thrust out through her turned-up sleeves, her dingy black dress a world too short for her and showing bare legs, her stockingless feet in down-at-heels boots that had already served another owner. The child held herself insolently. Indeed, the old woman Snacheur had beaten her the night before, falling upon the slender shoulders with a stout stick; and for the first time the girl had flown at the brutality and struck back—the old woman shuffling backwards into a corner of the room before the onslaught, retreating in sullen surprise, wiping a long tingling nose with the back of a sinewy hand as the pain sent the tears trickling down the runnels of her withered cheeks. Through scowling evil eyes she had realized that the harsh thrashings of these poor lean shoulders were at an end—that the four years of grim domination since she had taken this poor outcast child to be her drudge were gone—and that whatever cruelty of starvation and neglect her miserly wits might still impose upon her hungry years, the rod had fallen from her gloating fingers and the blue weals upon the poor thin shoulders were painted with the hellish brand of her “Yes, madame,” said Madelaine. The brooding old woman came back out of the humiliating past: “There are halfpence on the table,” she said—“go and buy milk—and see that the thieving beast gives you full measure—there was no milk in the neck of the bottle last night—he is a scoundrel—unless you drank it on the way and are yourself the thief.” Madelaine shrugged her lean shoulders, and gathered up the halfpence. As she left the room the old woman called after her: “And see that you are back before the darkness—there will be no light to show you to bed.” When the child had gone, the old woman arose and shuffled to a cupboard. She listened to the girl fumbling at the latch of the outer door—heard her depart—waited so until the brisk footsteps died away into the traffic of the street. Searching in her skirts for a bunch of keys, she glanced carefully round the darkening room, opened the cupboard door, and took out an old tin canister. She held the canister to the fading light of the high window, chose an end of candle from some others, and carefully locked up the tin in the cupboard again. She set the candle in a bottle and lit it. Sitting down by the table again, she smoothed out the crumpled newspaper. It was said that the widow Snacheur was rich. She owned at any rate the block in which she lived—from the ground floor she herself occupied up to the top floor where Moll Davenant rendered tribute to her. As Betty crossed the twilit court and entered the deeper gloom of the house, she found Madelaine, a lean shadow in the dusk, fumbling with the latch on the outer door of the widow Snacheur’s apartments. “Is Mademoiselle the American at home, Madelaine?” she asked the girl. Madelaine left the door, walked out into the courtyard and looked up. “Madame, there is a candle burning on the sixth floor,” she called across the court. She came to Betty: “And there is a shadow cast. Mademoiselle the American must be at home,” she added; and got to fumbling with the latch of the door again. “Can’t you unlock it, Madelaine?” Betty asked the girl. “Shall I hold your bottle? Your hands will be free.” “Thank you, madame, no—you are very kind. The widow will not have the lock mended—so I have to tie it with string from the inside—when I go out.” Betty stood on one side to let a young workman go by. He was a pasty-faced slouching young fellow of powerful loose build; he had come down the stair with curious stealthy step; and he took off his hat clumsily as he passed. “That dirty fool HiÉne wants to be my lover,” she said—“he pesters me—but I am not going to love workmen—I am going to be driven in carriages.” “Hush, Madelaine—you must not say such things.” Madelaine gave her good-night, laughter in her eyes, and with the grace of coming womanhood took herself off airily towards the city’s lights—a promise of lithe beauty in her walk for all her bedraggled rags. Moll Davenant had heard Betty’s light step upon the stair; she opened the door for her to enter as Betty reached the landing. When she had shut it, the two girls embraced each other. “Come, Moll—and sit on the bed; and we’ll gossip.” Moll suffered herself to be led to the sommier, and they sat down upon the snowy whiteness of it. Moll was watching Betty’s face hungrily. “Moll,” said Betty—“I have been to look for Eustace Lovegood—ah, such a mean shabby little hotel it was, poor fellow! but he was gone. The waiter said he went back to England yesterday—after waiting restlessly about the place for a letter that did not come.... I wish Eustace would spend a little money on himself instead of giving it to every pitiful person that cries out to him.” Moll was seized with a violent fit of coughing. She slipped on to the floor, buried her face in Betty’s lap, and sobbed miserably. Betty stayed with her until far into the night—until the heart-rent girl slept peacefully upon the white bed. She covered the poor sleeping soul with her meagre blankets.... As she rose to leave, her glance fell on a new book which lay beside the lamp. It was a volume of erotic verse. She opened it and found an inscription on the fly-leaf from Aubrey. Betty sighed—put the lamp low—and slipped on tip-toe from the room. ****** In the dusk that held the city the next evening, Betty tapped at Moll’s door; and she thought she heard a sob for answer.... She listened awhile; but all was still. She rattled at the door and called. Only silence. Slowly she descended the stairs again. At the bottom she came upon Madelaine, lean and cheery. There was some talk. She was just about to leave the girl when a man entered from out the dusk of the court, passed them, and began to ascend the stair. It was Aubrey. She heard him climb flight after flight. He reached the top. Her eyes were on Madelaine’s gossip, but her ears were listening for only one sound. A door opened and slammed. There was silence. Wherein is Some Worship of the Moon It was the national fÊte of the Republic—the Fourteenth of July. All day, Paris had been a-rattle with tap of hammers. At every street corner, baggy-trousered carpenters had been putting the last nails into the pulpits of the lightly made bandstands; and now, as the flaring sun went down in golden glory over the edge of the city, bathing the decorated streets in amber light—the boarding of the bandstands being covered with the gay splendour of tricolour bunting, and gaudy coloured paper lanterns strung in gay festoons from lamp and tree and window—Paris felt herself arrayed in all her holiday attire as she took breath before her dancing. At the end of the street where Noll and Betty had their lodging, the carpenters completed their task amidst wide-eyed wonder of inquisitive children and chatter of gossiping neighbours that stood at gaze along the pavement. The landlord of the little restaurant opposite called to the workmen to go and sit down at his tables and quench their thirst. The great slouching fellows needed no second bidding—indeed, they knew the liquor good, for the fat genial little host, Monsieur Charcot, had been plying them with tankards throughout the day, at every hint of heat or weariness, and the hints had not been few, urging them to push on, that he might get up his lanterns, and cover the stand with the red, white and blue stripes of France before darkness fell. Beaming with hospitality, he now sallied across the road, two waiters at his side carrying paper lanterns and bundles of the nation’s flags; and the rickety bandstand was soon converted into as near a gorgeous opera-box as the limitations would allow. Madame Charcot stood near, crying orders to the waiters, which nobody obeyed. All the pretty blanchisseuses, bare-headed, were out along the curb, adding advice and merriment. The which brought out the shop-lads. There was kindly genial banter, and much talk and prophecy of dancing in the evening. The old people stood about, smiling; and were raising reminiscences from the dead. In the evening, Gaston Latour and Horace and the rest whooped to Noll and Betty to come down from their high lodging; and in The youths and maids were dancing; the middle-aged were dancing; shop-folk and artisan; the old people were dancing. Mine host, Monsieur Charcot, kicked a heel, blowing hard to keep the time with a young milliner to the pace of the ill-jigging waltz—the trombone being overfull of beer was inclined to sluggardy, whilst the fiddle had developed ambition under the heat of the wines of Italy to lead the music by more than an easy length. The trombone did well, doggedly thrashing the air with overwhelming beat of time, save when he hiccupped, when confusion would threaten. All the little sempstresses and washer-girls were stepping it, swinging round in the whirl with the grocer lads and the youths of the quarter, petticoats a-whirl. The pasty-faced and sullen young workman HiÉne, in his best clothes, was jumping through the measure with Madelaine, who had given old widow Snacheur the slip. And now the melancholy-visaged Gaston Latour seized the plump concierge about the height a waist had once been, and Madame Hodendouche, but mildly protesting, found herself flung off her feet and swept into the revolving whirl, well-pleased enough to be in the social eddy.... All in the street danced out the night, the same tune serving more than thrice—indeed, the call for new airs had started an unseemly brawl between the fiddle and the trombone on the art of Wagner, which had only been washed out in Chartreuse. So they got to jigging it again to the old limping harmonies. They were not over-critical. They had all grown up together, had danced out the national fÊte together through the warm summer evening in the ruddy glow of the orange-paper lanterns to the like halting music since they could well remember. Thus they now footed it, until the white light of the coming day crept over the eastern roofs and snuffed out the orange glow of the candles that guttered in the lanterns’ sockets, and sent them all to their beds. The early midsummer sun that came a-peeping into the town lit silent thoroughfares in a drowsy city. The arisen sun ascending into the high firmament saw the students thronging to the railway-stations, with scanty baggage and uproarious souls, to spend the hot days in country places or by the sea—a cheery boisterous crew, good-tempered, chaffing, frankly jovial. The exodus from the Latin Quarter begun, the “boys” burst in upon Noll and Betty—Babette and Horace and the Disturber of Funerals and the rest, and Gaston Latour. They all helped Betty loved this summer time. Noll was with her all the day long, blithe of heart and in good spirits, sketching with her and a dozen others out of doors or writing by her side in their delightfully bare room in the primitive inn. The world was fragrant with the scent of flowers. As the sunny daytime passed into the violet grey dusk, they would wander arm in arm along the pretty country roads—Babette and Horace, Noll and Betty, Gaston and the beautiful Liane, the Five Foolish Virgins and the rest—straying through the twilight carelessly, never wandering too far from civilization and the band and the casino’s paper lanterns—never too far to reach the merry dinner of an evening, lolling in pleasant fatigue round the table in the trim little bosquets of the courtyards of inns, where they all loitered over dinner to talk wondrous nonsense about the delights of a country life, mixed with criticisms of art and of books and of the world. And, the dinner done, they would stroll round the lake, and sit upon the banks, and gaze entranced at the moonlit fairyland—the lights that danced upon the waters and the stars that bespangled the sapphire heavens with a myriad winking mysteries—glad to be alive where all was beautiful. And there would be sweet idle talk of the day when they should all have villas on the lake with lawns by the water’s edge, disdainful of the rough struggle of the world, watching the pigeons and the peacocks in the sun, listening to the coo of doves, and, when the day was done, content to sit at gaze with the wizard moon and myriad stars, fretting their souls with no stupid thought for fame or name—yet each one knowing in his heart that in most delicious idleness would be weariness beyond the weariness of toil. There was one thorn only in all this summer delight—Moll Davenant, moody, a prey to odd whims, possessed now of strange reservations and sudden shrinkings, now frightened, now daring, now boisterous, now brooding, lived feverishly, crowding her life into its little span, her pathetic eyes on her doom, as one who knows how short a while she has to live. More than once, Betty had sold some trinket of her own to get the wherewithal to tempt the uncertain appetite; and Noll, too, was the poorer by more than one little possession which he cheerily said he did not want. Then the girl would disappear for days, returning fagged and troubled, like one drugged. Her flushed colour showed that the flames of her life were burning out the tissues of her frail body, and a feverish desire to live the night as well as the day urged her to ****** At the doors of the Hotel Continental in Paris stood Ponsonby Wattles Ffolliott, talking to Quogge Myre; Rupert Greppel and Lord Monty Askew stood at either hand; they gazed superciliously at the passers-by. Ponsonby Ffolliott, blowing cigarette smoke through his nostrils, said, drawling: “It’s an awful bore—but Lady Boone is throwing her girl at my head—an awfully pretty girl, she is, by Jove—but, you know, a fellow must have his fling first—or how is a fellow to know he loves the girl—and I am really quite too young——” They slapped him on the back, and there was laughter. Ponsonby Ffolliott felt the glory of a man of the world jumping in his marrow; he kicked out his legs: “Yes,” he said affectedly. “The old trout made me swear to go down to Enghien-les-Bains for lunch. Such a silly hole—such a silly meal—but, you know, a fellow isn’t bound by a promise made under compulsion, is he?” Ponsonby blew out smoke: “By Jove,” he said, staring at a girl, one of a bevy that passed, who glanced a roguish eye at him—“what a very pretty girl!” Ponsonby kicked out his legs jauntily; and followed the girl. And, as he walked, the long white laces of his stays hung down behind and swung to his strutting. Wherein it is suspected that there has been Peeping through Windows August and September passed, and the fever went out of the hot breath of the sun; October came into the city in cooler fashion and more russet habit. The scent of autumn in the air brought the students scrambling back from the country, and the Boule Miche knew their light gait and cheery voice once more. With the return of his boon companions to their old haunts, Noll was out and away early and late again. The first day of October had seen him taken off by Horace Malahide, with a set of drawings to GÉrÔme—had seen him receive the letter which should admit him a nouveau to the great man’s atelier in the State schools of the Beaux Arts. He had only to wait until the fifteenth to be initiated into the riotous mysteries of the French studio where Latour and Malahide were not the least boisterous of its boisterous pupils. As Noll came back, triumphant from his interview with the celebrated painter, Horace and Latour singing him in, he flung down his drawings upon the floor. Betty, glowing with delight at his delight, took them up one by one, and was somewhat surprised at their technical accomplishment. She had feared his days with Horace Malahide had been but idle days. Yet, even with this evidence before her eyes, she was not without shrinkings, for she knew the feverish energy which Noll could put into any effort to gain what he wanted for the time being—and she knew he had greatly fretted to get into GÉrÔme’s atelier. Beyond? She knew his Beyond had been of the vaguest. The jovial comradeship of the schools had roused him to effort. And even whilst she went up to him and embraced him, she wondered whether his eyes had been fixed upon any Beyond. She glowed to the pressure of his jovial embrace; she felt the delight of his achievement—yet her clear-seeing eyes were afraid for him. He was so easily successful. They all sallied out together with Betty, roused the Five Foolish Virgins (Moll Davenant’s door refused to open); and there was cackle and riot as they took a restaurant by storm. The crude Early on the morning of the fifteenth, a fresh October day, Horace Malahide and Gaston Latour came for Noll; and he, in mighty high spirits, an easel over his shoulder and a couple of rush-bottomed stools dangling therefrom, hugged Betty and sallied out with the others to face the wild horseplay that greets the coming of the nouveau on the opening day in the art schools of Paris. Betty, leaning over the balcony, kissed her hand to him as the three, looking up, waved their hats, and departed out of the court. She smiled as she thought of the devilments that would ensue; and she smiled still more at the thought of Noll, returned from it all, helping her on with her jacket and hurrying her off to dinner, telling her of the amusing details in his rollicking humorous way, with his quaint eye for the quips and oddities of droll situations. But the day was heavy upon her—she could not bend her will to her work—the hours passed with sullen tread.... As the sun set she began to listen for Noll’s footfall. The last sunset glow of the eastern heavens passed into the grey twilight; the chill breath of the evening warned her that her frequent roamings to the balcony must cease; she shut the shutters and the window. But the stairs echoed to no sound of Noll’s eager return. It came to the girl for the first time—selfless as she was—that Noll was finding the sufficient delights of life very well without her; and the thought bit into her heart. She sighed and arose wearily. To-night she must dine alone, as she had so often dined alone of late—yet to-night, for the first time, she resented it—was stung by the whisper that it need not have been. She took her way to the little street of l’Ancienne ComÉdie. She did not trespass into Noll’s noisier cafÉs—the noise and the disturbance and restlessness distressed her. Noll preferred “life” at the noisier cafÉs—the greetings were louder. Betty betook herself languidly now to her dinner, through the white portals of the CafÉ Procope. She stole into a quiet corner, where she was used to sit and think her sweet thoughts, where the pen was always busy. But her weary brain this night was branded with harsh truths from which she could find no hiding-place. She wondered what the great brooding brains that had known this ancient hostel had gnawed upon within these very walls—what petty little insolences had been thrust upon them whilst they were “thinking in continents.” And she felt it a relief when at last the old-world spirit of the place took possession of her, and she found her wits roaming from herself through the pageant of its past magnificence. The dark atmosphere of its sombre peacefulness was lit for awhile with the glory of its ancient days; and the dark corners of the CafÉ Procope became haunted with the mighty breath of its Great Dead. These had been no mediocrities, whatever their faults and failings, but big full-blooded Men—their very Fallen into the faded relic of bygone days, this peaceful place has passed into the quietude of the neglected thoroughfare on the narrow footway of which stand its white portals. The strenuous world goes rattling past the end of the old road, unheeding of its one-time magnificence; turns but seldom into its neglected way. Its noisy history is now forgot, its splendid drama remembered by how few of them that live in all this vast splendid city—nay, even by how few of such as have their dingy habitation in this very street, or win the prizes of learning in the illustrious schools of its neighbourhood! Heretofore had been the very heart of all France—her hot blood had leaped hottest here, sending the throb of its pulsing life to uttermost valley and hamlet of this vast realm. In this little coffee-house, now fallen into neglect, had met together the great wits of France, her master-minds. Nay, rumour hath it that here indeed was very name of coffee-house begotten, begun, made manifest; for here was first given, to France, coffee to chase the dinner and to comfort the stomach of France. Hither wandering, our Orange William being just come to the throne of England, there had entered into possession, in curly long peruke and somewhat dandified exterior to his shrewd inner man, Master FranÇois Procope, in that same year that the Comedy of France took possession of the then ThÉÂtre FranÇais over the way; and, forthwith, glory and fame came to his CafÉ Procope—the wits gathering there to the sipping of coffee and making of elaborate waggeries, not without wrangle, and swords whipped from sullen scabbards, and the like follies manifold. Here had descended from sedan-chair the bent lean figure of Voltaire, his play Irene being in rehearsal opposite, and sipped the cup of coffee that was now become the mode in France, the maker of mode. The keen eyes had roved over these panelled walls—here he had stood sneering away the tawdry pretence of popes and kings and laughing to death the diseased and putrid hereditary aristocracy of France. These walls knew the lean mocker well. In yonder sombre little room you shall see still the chair and table at which he was used to sit and write his vitriol jibes, that were the severe medicine for the corrupt body of the decayed nobility. Here, in fantastic riot, had Rousseau been carried shoulder high after a dramatic triumph; here had Condorcet, in intervals of writing upon the Integral Calculus, been not above horseplay; here had sat Diderot, scheming his encyclopÆdic schemes, talking tomfool solemn travesties of dangerous talk with winking eye upon his fellow-wags, to lead on the over-zealous police agents to the fussy discovery of large mares’ nests of conspiracy. Nor had jests and badinage been the only fare. In these ghostly dingy mirrors had passed the faces of the great actors in the world tragedy of France. Within these walls had intrigued the master conspirators of the seventeen hundreds. Here had Nay, within these very walls had been conspiracy within conspiracy—massacres planned—the killing beginning at these demure white doors. Here, on that August day that the Monarchy fell, had sat Madame Roland and Lucille Desmoulins, the sweet and beautiful and rich mate of famed Camille, together with Madame Danton, their ears athrob with ringing of bells and roar of cannon—the shadow of the guillotine not flung as yet their way, unsuspected, their eyes as yet not seeing, their white necks not feeling, that harsh doom either for themselves or their lords. Hence one day a genial, dreamy, kindly young officer of artillery they called Napoleon Buonaparte, that lived at a small lodging in a street hard by, walked out bare-headed, leaving his cocked hat as security for his reckoning, having forgotten his purse. Here, in days not so long past, Gambetta fumed and raved and swore and dreamed and spouted, holding the Republic together as best he could, a Republic broken with a dozen warring internecine strifes and petty interests. Here, the old cafÉ having fallen on more peaceful days and slow decay in its neglected thoroughfare, the poor dirty shabby genius The greatest of these had been mighty workers, men of iron toil. These had not been content to thrum little five-fingered echoes of the great music of the drama of life—these had created their own music, their own methods, their own art. No man shall come to greatness through juggling with echoes. These had made their own style to express themselves—had no need of the elaborate polishing of the tricks and ornaments of the mediocrities who, having nothing to express, filch little movements and sounds from the vasty music of the masters to cover their own little insignificance—who in toil to polish phrases miss the statement. Nay, these men had not been content with praise of mediocrities—had scorned even their approval. When, an hour before midnight, Betty, going homewards, passed the house where Moll Davenant lived, she became aware of hoarse whispers; looking up the dark side street as she crossed the road, she saw a man standing on another’s shoulder peering into the lighted room within—the widow Snacheur’s room. The fellow leaped down, and the pair of them calmly sauntered down the alley. Betty hurried on, vaguely wondering. She reached the house where she lodged, and found the great gates shut. It came to her that it was the first time she had felt a certain shrinking from ringing the bell in the concierge’s den—the first time she had felt alone; the first time she had tried to find an excuse for being alone. She rang—the postern opened with a clank—she stepped in, shut it, called her name as she passed the concierge’s window, and climbed her stairs wearily. It was very late, yet she had no fear that Noll had returned to find no welcome. She laughed sadly. It dawned upon her that it was she who had always returned unwelcomed to the empty hearth. He was probably leading the laugh at some fantastic tavern’s good-fellowship.... As she let herself into her room, her glance fell on a note that had been slipped under the door. She picked it up, lit her lamp, and opened the letter listlessly: it was from the Disturber of Funerals—her heart warmed to the genial handwriting, at the thought of the big-hearted kindly man. As she read, her own loneliness fell from her, her own affairs as usual became as naught. Her eyes grew serious. Dick Davenant was off to America, recalled by his people on urgent summons; he would catch the Atlantic liner from England—would Betty, like the good comrade she was, watch over Molly until he returned—she was grown full of strange moods and kept him from her—he was at a loss.... “I will go to her at daybreak,” Betty said; and languidly she undressed. She lay down on her bed; and the pillow that had known so many bright dreams, ambitions, hopes, was for the first time wet with Betty’s scalding tears. Which treats of what chanced at the Tavern of The Scarlet Jackass And Noll? It was close on midnight. In the smoke-laden air that made a blue haze within the quaint tavern of The Scarlet Jackass, up and down the narrow gangway between the crowded tables paced restlessly the nervous figure of its artist-landlord, AndrÉ Joyeux. He wheeled round, and flung a phrase at the room; and a loud burst of laughter greeted the sally. At the tables, smoking, chatting, their glasses of milky absinthe and tankards of ale before them, sat journalists, artists, poets, poetesses, students, bohemians, women, musicians, and a soldier or so. At one table was a group of students from GÉrÔme’s atelier, with Horace Malahide, Gaston Latour, Noll. Early in the evening, as they dined, AndrÉ Joyeux became possessed of all the latest news of the town—political moves, social happenings, scandals, theatrical gossip, literary events, before these things were yet in print, often before they were written; and as he now walked up and down, haranguing, he made his satiric comments upon it all. He smiled at the roar of laughter and applause. As he turned on his heel at the end of the room, his glance fell on a wizened little old man in gold-rimmed spectacles, who sat bent, and huddled, and drowsing, his arms folded on the table before a glass of absinthe, a wreath of white roses with which he had been crowned earlier in the evening pulled slanting over one sleepy eye. AndrÉ Joyeux stopped in his stride: “What, poet!” cried he, with a laugh, “thy wreath is awry.” He clapped it on the back of the old man’s head. “What, thou sleepest on the very steps of the altar of Fame! Thy brains are drowsy with the fumes of the incense in the very temple of Wit; so Genius, hiccupping with wine, misses his footing at the very threshold of Immortality!... Tsha!” He turned on his heels and continued his walk, striding down the room again. “Sleep if thou must—thou canst read during to-morrow, twenty-four hours late, and at thy leisure on the boulevards with the pot-bellied trader, the world’s news that will be stale here with the snuffing of to-night’s candles; and thou wilt get thy news, too, devoid of wit, without colour, stale and But the vague eyes of the little old mad poet had closed, and he was nodding over his glass. AndrÉ Joyeux laughed: “Our old singer of tuneless songs comes from the Latin Quarter, across the river, comrades,” said he—“he has the drowsy habits of the academies—it is always so over there—on the flats across the river, with their vaunted universities and isms and ologies. The professors with dandruff on collar, and the students with talk of new ideas and of the new generation, what do they know of life?” He flung out his arm as he strode to and fro: “Tush! they have books down there, ridiculous printed things to tell them of life! to tell them what other people think of life!... They have museums, dry holes where bits of the dead past are stored in glass cases. They have talk of architecture that is dead and useless architecture—schools are endowed to teach it—nay, schools are endowed to tell of what it used to be.... They hang up armour, and write books about it—about armour!” He laughed loud and long. “They might as well write about cooking-pots and discarded tin cans with holes in them.... They will.... They talk of relics of the past—nay, they worship them—build churches to them. They collect things—coins, postage-stamps, what-not. They will collect spittoons next. They form societies—learned societies to pester each other with things that do not matter. They peer at old pictures that have lost their vital significance, completed their function—build public galleries for them, each room a nightmare of incongruous warring canvases, lost to their original intention over a church’s altar or what not, wrangling together, inadequate, foreign, out of place. As though by the looking upon Cromwell’s bones or Napoleon’s breeches they would learn to rule the world! Students pay to see these things—spend the precious years of youth poring over them, even copying them! The delirious years of youth!... They call it culture. Gods! culture!... To the Latin Quarter, to the professors, dandruff-collared, to the gaping student, life is this dusty dull study of what is dusty and dull and stupid and dead.... We of the Hill of Martyrs, it is we who know what is life. Stand at your doors in our steep streets, climb you up yonder to the top of the hill, up with you to the topmost scaffolding of the preposterous cathedral of the Sacred Heart that is a-building, topped with cupolas that shall stand like giant onions to acclaim the sins of garlic-eating burgess France, and look down—condescend to Paris. Between us and the river, with Latin Quarter beyond, glitter the lights of a different Paris, another world—a Paris that knows as little of us of the hill as of the professors of the Latin Quarter yonder—a Paris of the boulevards, a Paris of the aristocrat and of the burgess—a world that knows little of poetry or of learning, and tries to forget what it knows; a world that despises us as we despise it; that shuns us as we shun it. There the burgess, with sole ambition the desire to best his neighbour, plods in glum respectability his mean inglorious day, yet once in a blue moon struts his holiday, his limbs cramped with lack of use to live, his only law of life a fear of his neighbour’s opinion, his object in life to put a number of coins in a bank, to grow full-bodied in the doing, and “Ay, AndrÉ—they exist; they do not live,” cried a young fellow of pallid countenance, whose hand, thin, and white, and delicate as a woman’s, shook as he raised his glass of absinthe to his lips. AndrÉ Joyeux laughed in his stride: “Ay, comrades,” said he—“it is we on the Hill of Martyrs who live.... Climb Montmartre, and you are in a rare atmosphere—get you up amongst the scaffolding a-top of it, and you may touch the clouds—the air is light, vivacious, exciting as wine—solemn things and dull talk fall away from you—you must stoop if you would kiss the hand to Paris, stoop to hail her, stoop to see her. Here we condescend to the world. We are amongst the clouds—breathe the air the gods have breathed. We have here no rare inclinations to riot—here life is a riot. Down there they toil and moil all day through, all the months, to snatch infrequent glimpses of life, that they have not the habit to enjoy. Tush!” He laughed. “They call it a holiday! Ho, Ho, Ho! a holiday!... They lie down at the ticking of a clock—sleep at the bidding of their task-masters—awake at the striking of a clock to work their fingers to the bone for a shabby grave. Worse still, work others’ fingers to the bone, even the fingers of woman and child, this pitiful scourged crew, to make rich the brutish vulgarians whom they so fantastically serve. God! what a hell’s stew!... With the darkness they lie down and go to sleep—to awake with the daylight to further toil and moil again. A Russian grand-duke steals their prettiest daughter for a week or more, then takes another. The rich, who are their idols, misuse their beautiful women; so they look up to the rich.... But we! we live all the while. If we’ve a mind to it, we rejoice in the night—we sleep when we will—live whilst we may. Life’s but for a few flitting years at best. These others are so mad they think us mad who know them mad.... If we are mad——” He stopped a waiter who passed with a tray of tumblers filled with absinthe. His hand shook so that he spilled some liquor as he raised a glass: “If we are mad, then here’s to madness!” They roared with laughter, banged their fists upon the board, raised their glasses and drank with him. He emptied the glass and flung it to a waiter. “If theirs be sanity to huddle in foul dens, feed on the Mad Cow of Hunger, scowl sullenly at life from work-stunned eyes, all to fill the purse of pot-bellied tradesmen, to build with their blood and toil the vulgar habitations of their pretentious vulgarity, then ’twere better to be mad.... And no worse than Sanity.... We too have tasted the flesh of the Mad Cow, but we have not sold our souls for bread, nor our lives to be allowed to rummage on a dunghill.” He held out his hands and grasped the air, adding with hoarse passion: “We live, I say—we live.” He stood proudly, and gazed at the applause. “Proud as kings and loud as carters, Live we who live on the Hill of Martyrs.” When the rousing chorus was done, amidst thunders of applause, fists banged upon the tables, AndrÉ Joyeux mounted a chair: “Our exquisite singer and friend, Adolphe St. Pierre, is unable to keep his engagement to-night,” said he. “But our ancient friend, Paul de GattepoÉsie, will take his place,” he added. There was ironic applause. The old man with wreath of roses on his head, rousing from his stupor at the nudgings of those that sat near, arose from his chair and, with a smile, shuffled towards the piano. He took his place in serious conceit as the player ran through the refrain of a lilt, and, in a broken voice, he began to utter the verse of his song. But he forgot the words, and the piano finished without him. There was a titter. His vague eyes lighted up again and he started to utter another mood, and again the piano finished without him. And thus, standing there, his straying wits roamed through the maze of the bewildering land of the mad—inconsequently, unabashed, pathetic, unashamed.... He had loved a maid that was red—and swore his allegiance—and she was very beautiful—but somehow he came to love a maid that was white—but she had a mother—and the maid that was red did not like it—so she drowned herself in the lake, a clammy, forbidding, ill-smelling lake—but it was the mother that, somehow, made him love a girl that was dark—but she had a brother—and—and—the magistrate asked him why he drank strong drinks—but he said he had but drunk the milk of the Mad Cow—— The rose garland slipped forward and came down over his eyes, when in the midst of the buffooning laughter that greeted the accident the doors of the tavern were flung open and several Salvation Army girls entered the room. The old mad poet blinked at the interruption, sighed, and shuffled back to his seat and his absinthe. AndrÉ Joyeux rose and went forward to greet the Salvation lasses, received them gently, and asked them if they would sing. One of the girls nodded, ran a few notes on a droning concertina, a tambourine was struck and chinked, and the Salvation Army lass raised her voice in song—the strange sound of an English hymn sung in French with rough true notes, and with passionate eagerness declaring the glory of God and the gentleness of the Christ in this fantastic place of worn-out moods and critical art-sense. At the next verse the chant was taken up by the other women, to the threat of hell-fire, the dread of judgment, the fierce revelling in the blood of Christ, the promise of eternal life amidst the glory of the angels; the girls’ voices gave out a last hoarse shout of praise, and the tavern rang with the riot of applause. AndrÉ Joyeux went and thanked them prettily. When the girls had trooped out of the place he watched the door close upon them: “God!” said he—“what enthusiasm!... It is very dramatic.” The talk became more intimate. AndrÉ Joyeux would rise from his seat between the rallies, restlessly pacing the half-empty room, gesticulating, laughing, frowning, droll—bending his whole wits to the point at issue. His trenchant mind took on a lighter humour. Whatever topic came up, when he felt about it and did not let it pass him with uncaring eyes, he would get up from his seat and get to pacing the room again, playing with it, extolling or condemning, criticising, turning it over and inside out, his keen wit tearing it to shreds or weaving for it a wreath of bays—ever and anon moistening his throat, tilting his glass of absinthe in his shapely white hands. An hour after midnight he was more than exhausted. He called for supper.... He drank; none deeper. His talk was wild, his quick tongue and nimble brain were matched against some of the keenest wits of Paris, and his sharp satiric rallies, his rollicking and fantastic humour, never showed to greater advantage than on that night.... Some young fellow asked why Adolphe St. Pierre had not sung this night; it was a somewhat unhappy query, and AndrÉ Joyeux’s quick ears caught it. It set him brooding; the laughter went out of his eyes: “His nerves have gone,” he said—“this morning at daybreak he became violent—dangerous—about the double genitive.” He smiled sadly. “It took four poets and a journalist to hold him down, and a musician to pluck at the locked door and wring his hands and say how dreadful it was.... Poor Adolphe! he is gone quite mad.” The pale youth touched AndrÉ Joyeux on the sleeve with trembling fingers: “Comrade,” said he—“your life is a furnace, burning night and day—you, too, will go mad.” He laughed a rough laugh, boisterously unmirthful; raised his glass; tossed it off: “That is what they used to say to Rodolph Salis,” said he hoarsely—“that is what they used to say to Rodolph Salis.... Ah, that was a man. He knew how to live....” He got up, his hands twitching, and paced the room again: “It was Rodolph Salis that brought the wits to Montmartre. It was Rodolph Salis who saw that Genius would condescend to roar at the tavern, not to snore at the academy—it was Rodolph Salis who saw that as artist he could only be one of many, but as tavern-keeper he might be immortal—so it came that Rodolph created the most renowned tavern of France—so it came that Rodolph Salis opened the tavern of The Black Cat; and AndrÉ Joyeux ceased speaking; stood brooding; roused; striding to his place, he raised a glass—his hand shook—— The room was deathly still. “Rodolph Salis knew life,” he said hoarsely. There was silence whilst he drank; and again he got to his restless pacing: “There was one man in all this wide world,” said he, “who was glad when the sign of The Black Cat was taken down—that man was Rodolph’s brother, Gabriel Salis. They had been estranged from the time of Gabriel’s setting up this tavern of The Scarlet Jackass, hating each other’s successes, jealous that the same mother had endowed them with equal wit, resentful of each other’s magnificence....” He strode up and down several times in silence. “And Rodolph being dead,” said he—“Gabriel reigned in his stead.... Here within these walls his wit flashed.” He swept his arm proudly round the room and strode off again: “And—because his hand shook—and—his tongue wagged feverishly, speaking the fantastic thinkings of that teeming imagination, they cried out that he, too, would go mad; and he, raising his glass as Rodolph had done in trembling fingers, would laugh boisterously.... But—Gabriel, too, heard the whisper—he feared to die the death that Rodolph died—and the tavern of The Scarlet Jackass passed to AndrÉ Joyeux.” He laughed, wheeled round, and swept his hand towards the flaring poster at the end of the room: “There have I drawn Gabriel on his scarlet jackass, bags of gold He moved down the room again, moodily: “But he, too, took to his bed—he had lived his life—he missed his glass, his fellows, the rousing chorus, the jovial good fellowship. He was bored. He took to his bed——” AndrÉ Joyeux paced in moody silence a couple of turns up and down the room, went to his place, raised a glass and drained it to the dregs: “And now the wits feast with me.... Steinlen, and thou, Toulouse Lautrec! ye drink in Joyeux’s tavern. And thou, Willette! though thou didst draw that red ass there in likeness of Rodolph Salis, because thou hadst thy quarrel with him—thou at least quarrelled with a man.... God! I have drunk wine here with Paul Verlaine, first lyric poet of France. Ay,” said he—“why poor Rodolph? why poor Gabriel? why poor St. Pierre?” And he added hoarsely: “I tell you these men were not afraid to live. They were men. They were not—afraid—to—live....” In the smoky twilight that goes before the dawn, as the purple night moved westward over the city, sweeping the world with dusky train, the door-keeper in fantastic livery, his cocked hat on the back of his head, yawned, as beadles yawn at sermon-time, and unlocked the door of the tavern that is called The Scarlet Jackass, to let the revellers pass out into the street, Noll and the young students along with them. They stood on the pavement in the chill air to make an end of their last gossip before parting on their separate ways. Several were giddy with the haze of their potations, and, having lurched out into the open world, more than one stood with difficulty, though none were wanting in the desire for dignity. All night long, Noll and Horace Malahide had been stealthily exchanging their full glasses for the emptied glasses of beer-soaking bohemians; but, even so, the fumes of the place were in their brains, and the fresh air made them both for a moment light-headed. The old bibbers of the place, stupid and smoke-stained, and sphinx-like in reserve, stepped out of the tavern cautiously, pale, weary, and nerveless. As the old poet, with his wreath of wilted white roses, lurched out into the night, the door-keeper shut and locked the door from within. The old man tripped over his own feet, stumbled, and sat down suddenly on the footpath, whence he bade them all good-night repeatedly, and fervently recommended them to the care of God. The pale youth, holding Noll’s arm, which he had seized, said, with a hiccup: “Mon Dieu, what a night!” “Ay,” said the frequenters, shivering with the cold, and drawing their thin cloaks about them—“what a night!” The pale youth burst into tears, and made as though to fling his arms round Noll’s neck, but missed his calculation, and fell over the wreath-crowned old GattepoÉsie. He tried to pick himself up; and, as he stood on all fours, he said, with a hiccup: “He will go mad.” They all sighed: “Yes,” said they—“they knew how to live.” The bell rang and clinked and swung, hoarsely complaining, over the bed in the little dark den of the concierge; and Madame Hodendouche, rousing sulkily, sat up amongst her bedclothes and pulled the string viciously that drew the bolt of the postern in the great gate outside, muttering a snuffling curse on the lateness of the night. “Ring—ring—ring, thou pestilence!” she scolded savagely. The gate outside shut with a slam, feet tramped past, a voice called, and all was silence again. “Hodendouche,” she said sulkily to her snoring bedfellow—“the Englishman does not give madame too much of his company in these days—I had thought them lovers, but they are indeed married. He is ever more late now.” She settled her fat little body down amongst the bedclothes: “Yes, thou mayest well snore, Hodendouche, thou lazy hog—but I kept the Englishman ringing till he broke even thy sleep, and a good cooling will do the fine fellow no ill. He has rung off and on this good half-hour—I only fear he may have taken some varnish off the gate with his pestiferous kickings and knockings....” In the smoky twilight Noll softly entered the shadows of the room, and as he gently closed the door, he heard Betty toss restlessly in troubled sleep. He went and sat down upon the side of the bed: “Betty,” said he, taking her hand, “can’t you sleep?” She drew his hand into the warm bed, and folded it under her warm fingers against her breast: “Have you had a happy day, Noll?” she asked. Noll yawned—he was very weary.... All day he had forgotten Betty; he was now so occupied with his own weariness that he dully failed to see there was one in his life who was selflessly eager to hear of his doings. As he unlaced his boots and undressed, he told her baldly of his day’s adventures, but he scarcely troubled to recall the events—he was very sleepy, he said. Indeed, he had been shining all day, and, however attentive this single audience, it was not the same thing as the rousing applause that made his wits glitter in the midst of the wild good-fellowship. His adventures, robbed of the drolleries and stripped of the fantastic details that had made the laughter and the interest, sounded tedious enough. Ah, Noll, thou numbskull! hath it not dawned upon thee, then, that thou canst kill this all so precious love for thee by these ignorings of it—just as much by neglect of her for the goodwill of thy rollicking so-called friends as by neglect of her for another woman? Indeed, the difference is but a toy of hypocrisy. If thou must drift off to selfish pursuits, what boots it that thy pursuit be this or that or the other? If thou must needs bawl thy share of the chorus in the night-haunts of the poetasters, why not have her dear companionship beside Wherein the Tears of Compassion heal the Bleeding Feet of a Straying Woman Betty fell feverishly a-drowsing as the chill dawn crept stealthily into the room. When she awoke, Noll was still sleeping. As she sat up in bed, heavy with unfinished sleep, she remembered the letter of the night before. She slipped out of bed and dressed. She descended gloomy stairways that were still haunted by the lingering shadows of the departed night. She hurried to Moll Davenant’s quarters. The leaves were falling from the trees, and their bitter scent filled the air with the pungent fragrance of late autumn. Betty had not seen Moll for some weeks now—the door had been sternly closed to her knock. But she decided to haunt the threshold until she got admittance. There was little need for setting the will to a stern resolution. As Betty reached the topmost step of the high climb she paused to take breath; and from within the door she heard the harsh cough that told of the girl’s struggle for life. She knocked, and, waiting for another fit of coughing to pass, she knocked again. A dreary pause, and the door opened. Babette’s face peered round it. She put her finger to her lip and came out on to the landing, kissed Betty, tears in her eyes, and said: “She is dying. I got admittance two days ago.” Betty went in, and as she halted on the threshold, her heart stood still. Seated on the side of her bed, in her poor worn night-gown, was Moll Davenant, struggling for breath. Betty ran to her, knelt down beside her, and drew a blanket about the shoulders and limbs; and, as she did so, she saw that her body was wasted as with old age. She saw also, with the quick sight that is given to us in emotional moments, that the place was well kept—proofs of the care of Babette’s hands were everywhere. “Betty, dear heart,” said she—“kneel by my bed, that I may keep my hand on your head a little while.... I am broken—broken—wounded—dying.... But God in His mercy has sent you—and my feet have ceased to bleed—there are no thorns upon the road now—no roughnesses. I cease from stumbling. And there is the light—flashing up—from afar. And the song of birds. The spring must be coming.... I have nearly gone mad for want of you——” “Sh-sh! Molly—I am here,” she said. As Eustace Lovegood stepped to Molly’s bed, the others slipped quietly from the lamp-lit room.... The big man had been seated on the side of the bed some time, with Moll’s slender fingers in his great hand, when she awoke and found him there. She leaped up and clasped her arms about him, as a frightened child runs and hides itself in its mother’s skirts. “Molly,” said he, taking her terrified face between his hands and holding her eyes to his until the pallid face of fear became a flush of shyness: “Molly, you are not frightened?” She buried her face on his neck: “I have been a mistake—a large mistake, all through,” she said. She was seized with a violent fit of coughing. The big man put her gently into the bed—the air was nipping, spite of the room’s warmth. “No, Moll, you always overstate a case.” He smiled sadly. “You even admire my verses.” She laughed in spite of herself—gladly; but fear lurked in her eyes. Her mood turned to sudden terror. She leaped up, and held him with fearful hands—the sweat stood in cold beads upon her flesh: “For God’s sake, Eustace; don’t go away again——” “No, Moll—I will never go away again.” He soothed her, racked with the torture of violent coughing, her veins standing out like cords upon the torn meagre body; and as the struggle ran down he set her gently back amongst the pillows and warm bedclothes. “Molly, you must be still—Betty sent me word that you were ill—and I have come.” She lay, her eyes closed, her hand in the big protecting hand of the great-hearted man who sat beside her; lay so quietly there that he thought she slept. After awhile she turned to him and spoke: “I have lain here, panic-stricken, doomed, wholly terrified, alone—in my ears the sound of the worm’s nibble eating through the dull wood of the narrow confining coffin—I have smelt corruption—I have died many times—discarded—a rejected thing—flung into an unwept grave——” “Hush, Molly——” “Tush,” said she, “it is finished. I do not even fear to recall it. It’s but a ghost’s walk seen by daylight—a ridicule that in the night was a tragedy. Now there comes to me the fragrance of flowers. I am in the arms of the sweet brown earth. I rise through sap and root and stem and blossom of the dear plants to become life again, and a part of the sweet exhalation of eternity. My heart’s blood leaps within me—I am glad.... Your voice fills my ears, dear heart—if God’s be only as exquisite!... Yours and Betty’s and this tender Babette’s—the voices of them that I love are the refrain of an eternal hymn to me.” “Molly”—he knelt beside her—“I am glad then that I have come.” She ran her slender fingers over his hands with loving touch: “I have been polluted,” she said. “They whispered, with evil satyr eyes upon me, of what they called Love—and I had so little a while to live—and I went. They stripped me naked, body and soul, and took me furtively down the mean ways of adultery.... Oh, it was such shabby, shabby sin!” “Hush, Molly!” “But Betty came—and the sunlight with her—and sweetness and delight. And this other wounded woman brought me the light—brought her to me—led me into pleasant ways again.... And thou, dear heart, at the end of the journeying—that I might know love before I died.” She sat up suddenly: “But I am wasted, shrivelled, withered like the old,” she said—“look at me and see it.” She watched him hungrily, with anxious eyes. He put his arms about her and held her to him. She flung her arms about his great head, and held his face close to her: “It is worth dying—to have loved a man,” she said. She lay back quietly for a long while, gazing at the big fellow, who put her back so gently amongst the propping pillows, where he sat beside her. Her eyes were rid of frown and fret, suspicion and distrust gone wholly from her. She held his hand in pathetic transparent fingers; and a smile played about the corners of her mouth: “Thou art wholly mine,” she said. “They will none know thee as I know thee, my beloved—the hearing of none will hang expectant on thy footfall as my hearing has served thee—none will wait upon thy dear whims as my whims have waited—the notes and shades of thy dear voice shall arouse in none other the sweet reverberations that have echoed in the hollows of my quick ears.... Thou wilt bury with me thy largest self.... I die wholly rich.... The rest may have the unessential husk of thee.... Thou hast given me the Realities.... Thou hast brought me into Paradise....” For near upon a month Moll Davenant lay a-dying to the She died on the Day of the Dead—her slender fingers in Betty’s—passed, with a little sigh of glad relief to be asleep, into the eternal mystery. Eustace Lovegood, his head buried in his arms, knelt by the bed. He was roused to consciousness of death by a sob from Betty as she touched the sightless eyes and drew down the blinds of the dead woman’s soul. “Betty,” said he, a great tear trickling slowly down the gentle fellow’s pale cheek, “she was happy, indeed, to go into the dark holding your dear hand.” The last leaves of the year were falling, a threadbare russet carpet to their feet, as they bore Moll’s still white body to her grave. Babette with Betty added the holiness of her innocent heart’s service to the simple dignity of the slow procession. As they turned out of the street into the Boule Miche, all wayfarers halting and standing with heads uncovered as the poor silent body passed to its chill resting-place—children ceasing from play, hushedly, to pull off caps of reverence; workmen and loafers, students and women, merchants and servants, paying homage to that strange procession of the dead which all must one day lead—a workman turned to another: “Poor soul,” said he, with a great pity—“she will never walk Paris again.” So might that sorrowing angel have spoken as, with irrevocable clang, he sadly shut on departing Eve the excluding gates of Paradise. Wherein it is suspect that our Betty has the Healing Touch Betty had early perceived, with wise foreseeing eyes, that life’s scheme is not work nor leisure nor sleep. The human day is compact of all that makes for happy sanity—work and rest and the decent pleasures that are called recreation—each as important as the other, each a part of the triple crown that tops the human day’s achievement. Every mortal has the birthright to this splendid heritage; and where there is lack in the three, there has been filching. There be foul rogues who ever shirk the toil, and such must of necessity steal another’s leisure to overfill his own measure. Work Betty never shirked. The work done, she would go for the bracing walk along the banks of the Seine before the dusk fell in tender greys upon the quays of the city. Or the Foolish Virgins, one or several, would call up into the twilight, whooping her down from her high lodgment, and take her for a ramble along the quays or into the elaborately planned wildness of the city’s woods, or straight across the river into the boulevards with their glitter and colour and the shops of fashion; or away up to the heights of Montmartre they would step it, climbing the steep streets to look down upon the city, and home again, loitering before print-shops and places where they sell artistic things. And the “boys” would always halt before the modes, that Betty might have a good hint of the fashion—they were proud of her beauty, proud of her comradeship. Babette, too, would come, and, as they went, talk her genial frank talk, full of shrewd observation and worldly wisdom. Bartholomew Doome, too, more than once, had been of the party—another Doome, without a hint of sin upon his lips, a strange Doome who was without pose, devoid of Byronic gloom, lacking as to insincerities, a Doome who spoke tenderly of children and showed intimate and wondrous knowledge of their ways—altogether an astounding strange Doome. Noll, only, was now too often absent. He had other things to do—had “something on”—urgent nothings amongst the nobodies. It is the busy people that find time to do everything—but to Indeed, Betty was busy enough in these days. It came as an instinct that she should be the healer. As a wounded child, with confident appeal, looks to the grown-up to banish pain, so such as were in distress plucked at Betty’s sleeve asking comfort. When a student lay dying, he would always send for Betty—when one raved in restless delirium of fever it was Betty that sat writing by the bed and brought gentleness into the harsh atmosphere—it was to Betty’s discreet ears that was unfolded the long-hidden tangle of the secret man, the struggle of the troubled soul flinching from the cowardice of its own shabby reservations—Betty’s hands that quieted the restless brain, and her calm command that brought back honour. Her dear ears were shut to all strange peevishness or conceit that the unmasked egoist unconsciously uttered. Her presence cleansed the talk, her sweet humour raised the clean laugh, her intelligence roused the sense of dignity, and the gaiety of her fresh young vigorous womanhood made of the sickroom a pleasaunce, and of the world outside a garden of fragrant blossom. And Babette, who was fellow conspirator in her offices, and hung upon her ordering, though she had a gossip tongue, knew no English. Wherein Betty feels the Keen Breath of Winter Noll took it all very much for granted, this large-hearted service of Betty to her fellows. He felt that it reflected the very greatest credit on her womanhood. It added stature to her natural dignity. When Betty had been away, watching over the last flickering days of Moll Davenant, it seemed natural enough—it was perhaps a little lonely at moments—but he arranged to pass the days pleasantly in closer good-fellowship with rollicking companions. When Molly was gone, put away in the obliterating earth; whilst the mystery of the corruption of the white body (that had lived so strenuously and laughed and wept and loved so fiercely itself and others only to end in the grave), whilst the why and the whence and the whither of it all roused the most profound emotions in the vibrant imagination of Betty, Noll had settled into a very merry and slovenly way of life; and he kept up the untidy habit. For Betty’s entertainment he would occasionally forego some meeting of his boon companions, and show a boisterous rally of the old comradeship, as on Christmas Day, which was kept by them all in right jovial English fashion. The whole crew of them dined at a students’ restaurant, and everything was À l’anglais, a fact not in the least discounted by the strangeness of each dish to English eyes and palate. Indeed, the plum-pudding alone awakened the familiar recognition, for it had a piece of holly a-top, and Gaston Latour got enough delight out of setting on fire the encircling brandy in the dish to comfort him for the suppression of the hunting-horn by the police. The generous humours of the occasion were only marred by a slightly too generous flow of wine; the which had been of small moment in itself, had it not chanced that it loosed Noll’s tongue, and he, growing somewhat garrulous under the ruddy excitement, and feeling compelled to shine, did not hesitate to give more than a sly cut at Betty in the midst of the railleries, crying out in mock defence of her that when she did finish her masterpiece it might make a noise in the world, though it certainly took a long time in the making! Betty became aware at a stroke that for months he Betty’s sensitive ear lost no slightest shade of the sneer amidst all the jovial manner; it was not wasted upon her. It stung her to the quick. From any other mouth it would have passed her by, a dog’s snap. It revealed to her in one ugly moment that all the work she had done to increase his ease for work, all her forbearing patience to his encroachment upon her own working hours, all her care to free his hands from drudgeries and release his wits to the full concentration on his career, all was already largely forgotten—worse, had been scarcely appreciated. And, somehow, the wild spirits of the evening failed to reach her; she was in a daze, she had received a buffet full in the face from the hand from which she had least feared it. And it was the sign of her splendid selflessness that she was sickeningly struck with pity that he could be guilty of this meanness—she was filled with a strange bewildering shame, not because the blow had been delivered, not because it had struck her, but that it had come from the one in all the world who, more than any, fouled his hand in the act. She flinched from that punishment as from an abyss that yawned. Wherein the Landlord of The Scarlet Jackass is unable to sing his Song At the tavern of The Scarlet Jackass the hero of the evening was a young poet who had that day found a publisher. The wines and ale went round. Amidst uproar they were crowning the old mad poet GattepoÉsie with a wreath of pure white roses, where he sat blinking and smiling in a chair upon a table, that he, having uttered a panegyric upon the new immortal, after the manner of the Academy, might conduct him to the chair and crown him; and it was in the midst of the resulting fooleries that Noll, nudging Horace Malahide, noticed the absence of AndrÉ Joyeux—missing the flow of his rollicking wit and the effect of his commanding personality. He signed to one of the waiters, an enormous stout man, chosen by AndrÉ because he resembled Renan in his Academic uniform. “GarÇon,” said he—“where is the master?” He was resting—upstairs—in the room just over the tavern. He was only allowed to drink milk—he was in need of rest. The young Englishmen said they would go up and see him, and the waiter leading the way, the two young fellows followed him up the private stair. At the door the waiter knocked, and left them. They entered. On his bed lay AndrÉ Joyeux, his face deathly pale, and a drawn look about the eyes. He received the two young fellows affectionately, held Noll’s hand, embraced Horace. Noll found himself mute. But the sick man saw that he was affected, and patted him on the shoulder—it was only nerves, he said—it would pass—he would soon be giving them Proud as kings and loud as carters, Live they who live on the Hill of Martyrs —they should have the rousing chorus—— The distant sound of laughter below checked him, and brought a frown to his knit brows. He sank back on his pillows, shutting his eyes, wearily. Noll drew a chair beside his bed, he offered to come and look after him; but AndrÉ patted his hand, put his offer aside, laughed pathetically, said he would soon be all right—they should see—they would very soon again have Proud as kings and loud as carters, Live they who live on the Hill of Martyrs. The sound of a song being sung below brought a questioning frown to the sick man’s eyes again. Who was it playing? What was the song? He did not recognise it! Noll asked if he might not send them all away—he would stop the noise. “No, no,” said AndrÉ. “Let them sing their songs—it was Guitreau who had found a publisher—he had himself discovered Guitreau—it would be boorish to spoil his evening—no, no—let them sing their songs. We have only once to live——” There was loud laughter.... They had sat awhile in silence, when Noll asked if they could do nothing. No; he wanted for nothing. The waiters were good souls. Everyone had been kind. No.... He thought he would now sleep. He embraced them, and they left the room—crept from it silently, some strange instinct and dread dictating their going a-tiptoe. And as Noll turned to close the door, the wan-faced man in the gloom of the ill-lit room ran his hand wearily over his brow and flung his arm restlessly upon the coverlet. Wherein a Comely Young Woman waits at a Window all Night, watching for Sir Tom Fool—listening for his Step The bleak night without was cold as God’s contempt. The March wind shrieked shrilly about the court, swung up out of the resounding blackness, tugged at the shutters of windows, rattled at all loose things ill-naturedly, smote the walls in a huff, and tossed insolently out of the court again, shrilly screaming—leaving a gloomy sullen lull, full of dry-throated questionings. A bride of a year—and anxious self-questionings! Betty sat at the window, uneasy, watchful, ashamed. All evening had she come and gone, pacing out disturbing thoughts. Many nights had she thus watched, humiliated, alone—watching for Noll, listening for his footfall. Once the city clocks had struck midnight, the passing of each wheeled conveyance became a goad to her anxious hearing—a stab to her anxiety—an added sneer at the loss of her hold upon her lover’s affections—a muffled insult to her attractiveness. A year ago had been a wedding-day—this morning the youth had whistled out of the house wholly forgetful of it. A year ago this room had been a garden of flowers scattered from a wedding-bouquet—this night the room was wholly bare of flowers. A year ago had been wondrous tendernesses, and watchful care over her that had been a very burden of sweet attentions—eyes that hungered, ears that listened to her every whisper, hands that burnt into her white flesh, caresses that shamed her with delight—to-day was criticism, excusings of neglect, carelessnesses. To-morrow, perchance, Youth would cease even to excuse itself. A year ago had seen youth and maid climb lightheartedly to the harsh garret of the world’s toil, full of high hopes and noble purpose, stepping it gleefully, clear-eyed, will and heart inflamed with the Certainties. To-day the very Certainties of yesterday were crumbling into ashen doubts. She ate her heart out, silently, with womanhood’s uncomplaining dignity; yet was her soul riven by this fool’s folly—his littlest harshnesses turning to bitterness in these long night-watches. His forgetfulnesses, his ignorings, his egotisms, his Nay, so fatuous his conceit, he must needs even rob her of the dignity of her work, sneer at the child of her imagination, leave her nothing. But he had wasted bad manners. Genius is serene in the confidence of its mighty Patiences. Time waits upon the great Wills. Then she would make excuses for him. Of a truth, he had had a little vogue—stood well with his fellows—— But he wrecked his own cause. In a passing mood of conceit he had strutted it in the mock-modest manner, tapping his own chest, half ashamed to drag in so modest a fellow. But look at him—even him! and the like; and forthwith averred that he “knocked off” more in an hour sometimes than she in a month—the “knocking off” inferring fertility and facility of genius. The which, whatever it lacked in the courtesies, held at least some virtue of truth. But Truth may walk abroad too naked. Ah, Betty—and if thou, looking out of thy window, couldst but see with thy clear eyes across the lamp-lit city this Noll of thine! Wherein the Ceiling of the Tavern that is called The Scarlet Jackass is stained with Blood Noll was at a gathering of little men—at a students’ tavern on the heights of Montmartre. The praises of the mediocrities flushed him. His eyes were bright; he had glittered. Ah, Noll; and there is one who watches for thee, sitting alone, her handsome head bowed by the midnight lamp to give thee welcome. She is thy one selfless friend—with brain whose verdict is worth all the splutterings of these bedraggled talents that sit about thy self-sufficient elbows!... That was a rousing night at the tavern of The Scarlet Jackass. The room was choked with the wild rioting bohemians. “Waiter!” “Waiter!” “Waiter!” “Yes, sir—mon Dieu!—one minute—one minute.” The waiters rushed to and fro, perspiring, white aprons flying. The glass went round. So the place roared with laughter and riot and noisy good-fellowship and song. As the crowd began to thin out, and the place emptied of all but the regular frequenters, the old mad poet, his chin sunk on his chest where he snored in a chair, his wreath of roses askew over his ear, roused and asked for AndrÉ Joyeux—he regretted that he had not been there—he missed his waggeries. At the mention of his name they called the head-waiter, who lay a-drouse in a corner. No, he had not seen the master since sundown. There had been no time to go and see him—but he had only to ring his bell should he have need of anything. He was sleeping, they trusted, content that his tavern was filled to overflowing—he had need of sleep—much sleep. Yes, yes; it had been a mad night indeed—a great night. Yes; the English gentlemen might go up and see the master if they would but go very quietly—yes, they might all go, if they would but go very quietly, in case he slept—— Noll and Horace stumbled up the dark stair that was but And as the others, befogged with the potations of their riot, entered the room, close-following at their heels, they solemnly took off their hats—the old mad poet last of all and with a mighty hiccup. Yes, AndrÉ Joyeux slept at last—and slept well. He would ring no more for sleeping-draughts. He had no more needs. His philosophies were at an end. In a loud burst of merriment that had echoed from below, he had taken his life, the pistol unheard in the frantic applause. They lifted up the poor lifeless body and placed it upon the bed—the arms restless no longer now—the body still, in the strange silence of death. An old bohemian stepped forward and looked down on the pallid peaceful face; stooped and kissed the dead man upon the cheek. He stood and looked down upon him. “He took me from beggary and starvation in a garret,” said he.... “Ah, that was an artist! And—he knew how to live. He——” Wherein the Angel of the Annunciation enters into a Garret As the chill grey of an April dawn crept across her silent garret, sweeping the frayed shadow of the night aside to join other lurking shadows in gloomy corners, Betty, in white night-robe, was awakened and sat up in bed, all in a strange wonder and alarm. With unuttered timorous questionings, with delicious fears, out of the void she heard the first whisper of the annunciation of her motherhood. As the sea-voice carols ghostly refrains of mystic adventures within the music-haunted chambers of a sea-shell, so, to the hollows of her subtle ears, came exquisite murmurings that to her ecstatic fancy held the quick rhythmic breathings that are the sleep of a little child; and, of a sudden, her white body glowed and her dear breasts swelled at the dream-touch of infant-fingers—leaped to the greedy caress of infant lips. Her comely limbs shivered, fearful with a thousand fears; her whole being flushed hot—she was dumb with bewildering muteness before the majesty of the mystery of a new life. Her eyes filled with tears. Across the murk of the stress of life that is the dust-storm up-blown from the sordid details of living—across the dreary fog that is compact of the accumulations of vain strivings and failings and galling insolences—across the black clouds of the humiliations and the indignities that are flung along the path of womanhood under cover of the fulsome hypocrisies, there leaped, with rainbow brilliancy, the bright sign that gladness is the law, the night but the shadow of the light, that there is laughter in the firmament and gaiety and delight, and on the earth a splendid wayfaring. She smiled through her tears. She arose from her bed, and stood amazed. She saw visions. The bare garret of her motherlessness swung away from beneath her exquisite feet, vanished in frantic vertigo from her ken. She put out dazed hands. And lo! as her wounded feet, climbing upwards always, topped the hill of her pilgrimage—the clouds lifted—she stepped into the garden of her kingdom. She heard a call, and she answered the call—stood at last at the threshold of the innermost sanctuary of the most holy place in the magnificent palace She sobbed, and sank upon the bed. Ay, thou winsome one; yet even here may be wrought scars also in thy heart. Ah, thou most happy thou, to have a heart that may be thus scarred! When womanhood, idled with such fearful ecstasies, quickened with the mystery of a new life, alarmed with chill dreads, yet pulsing to the rhythm of an added glory, realizes her lover as greater than lover—it is at this time of all times that he should be at her side. But Noll was taken up with trivial things; so trivial that he thought them serious—so far had he lost the focus of noble vision. The garret was possessed with the gloomy announcement of a drizzling new day when Noll opened the door and entered. Betty, crouching on her bed, held out her arms to him: “Noll,” she began, tears in her eyes—— Noll went to her, caressed her, and sat himself down on the side of the bed. He yawned. He was very tired. “Betty,” said he, heedless of the eagerness in her voice, deaf to the strange thrill in her being, his eyes on his own amusements, his thoughts on his own fatigue; “Betty, I am dog-weary—I have to be off again at six—I must snatch a couple of hours sleep.” He flung into an armchair, dressed as he was. “You might give me a rouse at six——” He yawned again and was silent. “Noll,” she said shyly—“I have felt so strange—whilst—whilst you were away—during the night. And just as the dawn was breaking I——” Noll moved uneasily in his chair: “Ah, yes, Betty, dear heart,” said he drowsily, a suspicion of compunction stirring within his gadding conscience that this girl had been too much alone of late. He misunderstood her delicacy. His conceit jumped to the uneasy conclusion that she was blaming him. “You see, the whole of the last few days our fellows have been toiling day and night at our car for the procession at the Bal des Quatz Arts; but it—is—finished. To-day has come at last—to-day we hold—the—orgy—of youth—to-night is the Bal des Quatz Arts.... After to-night, sweetheart, I shall be able to get home earlier.... I am afraid—I haven’t—done—my duty by you—of late....” He roused for a moment. “By George, our studio is going to win the laurels at the students’ ball He yawned. His eyes closed: “But—oh—ah—I must stop cackling indifferent prose.... The massier of our studio wants us all back at six.... We have to get Bellona to the Moulin Rouge for this evening’s show, and she has a heavy tread—as becomes the goddess of War. We are going to—drag her—across Paris with—ropes—up to Montmartre.... It will be—a rollicking—march.... Our lot at GÉrÔme’s studio—always begin early—and—stay—late.” He yawned heavily “Hi-yo-ho!... Yes—it will be a—rollicking——” He relapsed into a drowse. He started up for a moment: “Half a hundred French students make—an—ex’lent—flea—in th’ ear—of—Paris.... An—ex’lent—flea——” Silence took possession of the room. “Noll——” Noll roused: “Oh, yes—let me see—where were we?” He laughed embarrassedly: “Oh, yes—we’re to march her across Paris to the tune of the Marseillaise.... We’ve been practising the Marseillaise all night, Gaston Latour’s hunting-horn going full blare. We’ve been raising the ghosts—I can—promise you.... It’s a strange—thing—how few patriots know the words of—their own—national anthem! However—tra-la-la, sung loud enough—goes a long way—to—express a patriot’s parochial emotion. An-extra—ordinary—long—way——” He mumbled into a drowse. Betty made a last effort to tell him, before he should relapse into sleep: “Such a strange thing has happened—to me—Noll,” she said. “Y-e-s?” drawled he, missing the shy hint. There was a long silence. His heavy breathing told that he slept. For two weary hours, Betty sat up in bed lest sleep should overcome her, and Noll miss his rouse. And brooding there, her chin on her knees, her sorry vigil dragged through the laggard minutes. As the clocks struck six across the city’s roofs, she crept out of bed and roused Noll; and he, after much rousing, got up, vague-eyed and wit-wandering, embraced her, and, searching for his hat, put it on and lurched out of the room in a drowsy daze. Betty reeled from the cruelty—stumbled—and was overwhelmed with sickness. Wherein Betty walks into the Desert Betty was dressed for a journey. On the floor, near the table whereat she sat writing a letter, lay a battered old black trunk, strapped and labelled. The day was chilly grey without. As she blotted the last lines, there came to her hearing, from the thoroughfares of the Latin Quarter below, rollicking snatches of song, and the stir of students in noisy holiday mood. Betty brushed aside her tears, and read carefully the letter she had just signed:
There was a rustle of skirts on the landing without—a knock at the door. Betty uttered no sound. She thrust the letter into an envelope and sealed it. There was another knock, and a panting voice cried from without: “It is I, madame—Madelaine.” Betty went to the door and opened it. “Ah, Madelaine—you are back!” Madelaine, daintily dressed, and her slim being looking charming and refined, entered the room and shut the door. “Madelaine!” exclaimed Betty, “what a pretty frock!” “Ah, madame—I go to a dressmaker’s by day now—the old miser is content to have me work for her at night.” She shrugged her slender shoulders. “It saves her my meals.” She had not become a dressmaker for nothing. Every stitch and flounce told, bringing out the beauty and lithe grace of the girl. “Yes, madame. But—mon Dieu, you are of a surety amongst the stars here!” Her pretty scarlet lips smiled. “Amongst the stars—as the angels always are. But—ah, yes—I went and put on decent clothes and took your letter to Mademoiselle Babette, madame; but she was out—she is preparing for the Bal des Quatz Arts to-night—has gone out with Monsieur Horace and the others.... Mon Dieu, yes; you live amongst the stars, madame.” “Madelaine, have you kept the carriage waiting?” “Yes, madame—it is below.” Betty arose wearily from her seat: “Will you help me to carry down my trunk?” Madelaine looked at her sharply: “Mon Dieu, no, madame,” said she. “I will carry it. No—Hodendouche shall carry it—he grows fat. Yes, madame; do not interfere with me—I will call him——” She skipped out on to the landing with swift light step, and hailed Hodendouche from below. She came back, her lips parted with the exertion. “Madelaine,” said Betty—“will you come to the station and see me off?” “Mon Dieu, yes, madame. I would have gone if I had walked—in tight new shoes.” Betty laughed sadly. She went to her and put her hands on the girl’s shoulders. She held her off at arm’s length. There was a lovely glow on the girl’s beautiful dark Southern face. “Madelaine, you are all a-tremor! What has happened?” Madelaine laughed gaily: “Ah, madame; it was intoxicating,” she said. She hesitated—almost shyly for Madelaine. “When I drove through the streets—in the carriage—it was splendid.... All the world thought I was some man’s mistress——” “Oh, Madelaine!” “Come, madame,” said Madelaine—“here’s Hodendouche.” Hodendouche entered the room with a set smile, and took off his cap. Madelaine turned to him: “Ah, Hodendouche,” said she—“what a climb to reach the stars!... But now you are here, pick up that box and take it downstairs; Madame will follow us in a minute.” As the grunting Hodendouche shouldered the trunk, and, followed by Madelaine, left the room, Betty went to the bed and put the letter upon the white coverlet; and for awhile she lingered there. She sat down on the side of the bed. Ah, youth’s couch! what limitless imaginings hath thy pillow known! what vasty ambitions have burnt out upon thee! what schemings and plannings for the payments of the bare needs of life! Tears thou hast known, and sighs—but the stars glittered ever in the firmament even when it was darkest; and at every rebuff Resolution reborn put out wounded hands to the heights. Who so weak of spirit that disdained to climb the stairs to the topmost garrets when the need was! For did we not sit there under the roof, expectant amidst the splendid galaxies whilst the workaday world did blink its myriad utilitarian street-lamps at our feet! Ah, those gipsy days of our wander-years, when we strolled, careless of the infinities, along the blithe alleys of our youthful wayfarings, and every garret was the topmost chamber of a palace, and the rough bed but an excuse for splendid dreams! Betty stooped and kissed the pillow where Noll would sleep. She let herself out of the room, shut the door softly, and hurriedly followed the others down the stairs.... The fat little concierge, as she bent over her morning coffee-making in her dark little den by the gateway, was startled by a vision which appeared to her, kissed her rough old cheek, slipped a gold piece into her hand, ran out to a carriage, and was gone. Which has to do with the Great Orgy of Youth “Suzanne!” The shout rang through the great hall of the Moulin Rouge; and the vast crowd of dancing revellers, dressed in fancy dress, stopped their dancing and crowded towards the wide-flung doors that gave entrance from the gardens. The leader of the orchestra hurried the jigging mazurka to an end, and, with blare of the crashing chords that in music stand for finality, ceased playing the dance-music. He tapped for silence amongst the ranks of the musicians and held out hushing hands. He stood up, turned and glanced at the great tribune of the twelve judges, saw that, arrayed in their splendid robes, they had taken their seats; saw, too, that the gorgeous stream of colour and glittering armour was moving in mass of revellers towards the great doors of the garden entrance: “The cavalcade!” he grunted. There was a fluttering of white sheets of paper. Settling himself in his seat, he tapped for attention, swung his baton, and with resulting crash the orchestra burst into the thundering music of a triumphal march. “Suzanne!” The shout went up from the hoarse throats of a thousand fantastically-robed students, sounding vibrant in the golden haze and echoing in the blaze of light to the resounding rafters. They drew their swords, Greek and Roman, and they of the courts of the Louis, Crusader and Saracen, and Goth and barbarian; the flashing steel greeted her: “Suzanne!” Upon a golden shield, supported high above all heads by four of the most famous models of Paris, she came, her white body statuesque and calm; gleaming rosy-tinted, she stood poised in all her slender beauty—and as the shout went up she smiled. “Suzanne!” She knew it well. She was in all the beauty of youth—and her perfect body not only held the glory of the ancient art of the sculpture of Greece, but it had the exquisite mystery of life in its pleasant surface which the art of man cannot utter. After the queen of the models came the procession of the rival studios. From amidst the crested helms and glittering steel of Greek and Roman soldiery arose the great figure of the war-goddess Bellona, the fury standing a-tiptoe, sword and shield upraised, head thrust forward snake-like, her scarlet mouth shrieking at topmost pitch the fierce yell to war, her black brows gathered in black hate; before her feet an angry snake, with head upraised, darted a black sullen tongue. As the great travesty of GÉrÔme’s awful figure of the lust of blood moved along, there shone from out the hollows of her staring eyes a pale green light, cruel and livid. On her gilt chariot she passed, escorted by her bodyguard of Greek and Roman soldiery, and gave place to the classic float on which sat the nude young model, Marcelle, posed as GÉrÔme’s exquisite statue of Tanagra. Marcelle’s slight and slender girlish figure at this time made her a serious rival to Suzanne, and was markedly affecting the whole ideal of womanly beauty and proportion throughout the studios of France. As she sat, in all the simplicity of pose of a Tanagra figure, the light making her delicate colour glow, the cry of hoarse admiration for Bellona changed to a shout for “Tanagra!” And shout of Tanagra gave way to “Marcelle!” The swords flashed. GÉrÔme’s students passed, giving place to other schools, each in its pageant striving to express the ideals of the art which inspired its chosen master. The rude groups of the barbaric men who wore but the shaggy skins of animals; the wild groups of Merovingian and Carlovingian Franks; the dandified figures of the bewigged and heavy-booted court of the great Louis; the powdered and patched and silken-habited gentlemen of the last Louis; the large-lapelled, long-tail-coated and high-stocked dandies of the Revolution: they all passed with their triumphal cars, and drew the loud acclamations of the boisterous revellers. The splendid procession circled round the great hall, passed the tribune of the judges to the thrash of the martial music; round and round again. But amidst the frantic din it was soon known that GÉrÔme’s students had won the honours of the night. As the gladiators and warriors passed the judges’ tribune the last time before the procession broke up to join the revellers, the twelve judges stood up in solemn silence, and saluted the goddess of war and the exquisite figure of the young woman who sat in all the triumph of her beauty. They stood whilst GÉrÔme’s students passed. And as they so stood in strange dignity, the emblems of imperial Rome above them, the battle-axes bound in faggots, and the motto Death to Tyrants emblazoned between, as they so stood beneath the row of heads that dripped the blood of the dead tyrants, there floated across the ages some whisper of the eternal struggle of life, of the As the clocks struck three, there was a rush of revellers towards the procession of waiters who appeared in white aprons carrying chairs and tables and plates and glasses. In a trice the place was a great banqueting-hall, white with the napery of a hundred tables. The students collected about the boards of their different studios, thundering for supper with fist-banged poundings upon the tables, and the singing of songs; which gave way to a roar of applause when the army of waiters reappeared laden with wine and the dishes of the feast. And as they ran backwards and forwards, their white aprons flying, there was the clink of glass amid the babel of a thousand tongues, and the clatter and roar of merry-making. When GÉrÔme’s students arose from their table in a body, and the company of gladiators and Greek and Roman soldiery moved in an orderly array towards the judges’ tribune, they were greeted with thunders of applause, which burst out again on their return, laden with the prize of victory, bottles of wine. They swept round to their tables; and, opening their ranks, took possession of their seats. The massier rapped upon the table, and called for silence. Standing before them, statuesque in a splendid girdle with the embroidered cloth hanging therefrom before and behind, stood Suzanne, jewels glittering in her ruddy hair. They all stood up and greeted her with a shout. The massier filled a glass: “To the queen—the victors!” he cried. They all drank to her. As they sat down, she leaped lightly upon the table; stooped down; took up a bottle of champagne in each hand, and flinging wide the amber wine for baptism of victory over the encircling students, she threw the empty bottle from her. She laughed with mischievous glee, sent the glass and china flying with sandaled foot, to clear a space upon the table, and, raising the bottle, bathed her bare shoulders in the foaming wine before the assembled company. There was a call for a dance—and the orchestra striking up the quaint pulsing music of a Moorish measure, Suzanne, her feet stepping it upon the snow-white tablecloth, swung her graceful way through a strange haunting dance of Arabia. With slow step and dainty feet that never hurried, the beautiful young woman strutted, in pride of her body’s perfection, upon the white carpet of the tablecloth. In the shout of applause that greeted her, she skipped deftly from the table, flung herself upon Noll’s knees, held up his face, kissed him, and with “Thou handsome Englishman!” she laughed, put him gaily from her, proudly went her way, and was lost in the tumultuous throng. She had set the fashion; on to the tables leaped a score of models, in fancy dress, and danced among the glasses; the great revel proceeding with riot and feasting and boisterous merriment. In the midst of the whirlwind moved Gaston Latour, disguised in his usual affectation of lugubrious and melancholy seriousness. He went arrayed as Midnight Alarms—for trousers he wore a white shirt, his legs solemnly thrust through the sleeves, the cuffs fastened about his ankles with enormous brooches for gaudy sleeve-links, enormous naked indiarubber feet strapped on for boots. This symbolism of hurried midnight dressing was further insisted upon by the lady’s stays that bound the shirt’s tails about his waist, his shoulders bare, save for the great hunting-horn over his chest, and a fireman’s bucket strapped to the top of his head. The pretty little model who was with him, dressed solely in a pair of shoes and Gaston’s corduroy trousers, the braces holding them up, strapped over her white shoulders, replenished this bucket on his head during the evening with heel-taps from the wine-glasses, so that whilst talking confidentially to anyone, Gaston gradually lowered his head until the liquor splashed down upon their faces and trickled down the front of them—a result greeted by Gaston with a loud triumphant blare on the horn. GÉrÔme’s students had drawn their tables into a semicircle; and before the centre table, where the massier sat, were two young Frenchmen in the armour of Roman lictors; they were holding up Ponsonby Wattles Ffolliott under the armpits, whilst he, dressed as Narcissus, with a bath towel strapped round his loins, and daffodils in his hair, was drunkenly attempting to make a speech. He showed signs of going to sleep, spite of the occasional shaking up by the lictors; so, amidst loud laughter, they all held out their hands, thumbs down, and Gaston Latour advancing from his seat with a soup-tureen, poured a libation of soup over his hair, and as it trickled down his stupid pallid features, clapped the tureen on his head; the lictors carried him away and laid him upon the floor amongst a heap of black bottles, where he settled to uneasy rest, and mumbled into sleep.... Noll, his strong clean-cut features and his virile youth enhanced by the severe lines of the Roman helmet with its great framing steel cheek-pieces, and his well-set body and his shins glittering in the steel breast-plate and greaves of a classic warrior, sat at the outermost table of the semicircle. Beside him sat Madelaine, her white shoulders gleaming as she nestled close to him in the low-bodiced grey silk dress with great hooped skirt of Velasquez’s infantas. Babette, who sat at her other hand, had seized upon her early in the evening (taking her away without ceremony from Ffolliott, who was even then in a fuddled state from wine-bibbing), and Babette had sternly kept the girl by her side throughout the resulting riot. Indeed, the girl had not needed much compulsion, for she clung to Babette anxiously, and a Noll touched her hand: “Madelaine,” said he—“who gave you that dress?” “That beast!” She pointed to the drunken figure of Ffolliott, where he slumbered amongst the bottles. “He shall have it back to-morrow—I hate him,” she said passionately; and she leaned against Noll and nestled close to him. Babette leant over her and whispered to Noll: “Leave her so. When the procession forms to start for the march to the Latin Quarter, I will take her with me,” she said. And she added gently: “I will watch over her as Betty has watched over me.” She sighed sadly, and putting her elbow on the table and her chin in the pink palm of her hand, she got a-brooding. Horace Malahide, in the midst of laughter that greeted a sally of Gaston Latour’s, turned to her. He leaned over to her, and looked into her eyes: “Babette! serious! and here!” A tear fell, and she let it fall unheeding. Horace put his arm about her slender shoulders: “What, Babette! Has Noll been preaching a sermon?” She smiled sadly, stroked his cheek, and, drawing down his face to her, she kissed him. He looked such a splendid sunny fellow in his Roman armour: “No, dear heart,” she whispered—“I, Babette, have been preaching the sermon.” Horace laughed.... Thus they feasted, danced, and sang until the golden yellow lights of the great hall paled and became but flickering ghosts of flame as the sapphire shadow of the night passed away in blue and purple and lilac before the white dawn. But the students danced on into the daylight.... At last the musicians came down to the floor, and bursting into a triumphant march, the vast crowd of revellers formed into procession, and streamed out after the music into the fresh air of the early morning. In the streets the early concierges that stood yawning at their gates, stopped their clacking tongues, cut short their scandals, and gaped at the din; the street-sweepers rested from their sordid calling; rag-pickers from their grimy traffic amongst the dust-bins—for an invading army, gorgeously apparelled, was taking As the stream of revellers poured down the heights, they seized all cabs, and putting their helmets on the heads of the protesting coachmen, Greek warriors danced wildly on the tops of the cabs, adding the rattle of wheels and the cracking of whips to the din. With shout and yell they captured a number of great drays laden with stone, and pulling down the drivers from their seats and dispossessing the teamsters, Roman charioteers took the reins and sent the great horses trotting and pounding clumsily along at the tail of the gay procession, adding the thunder of their passage to the tumult. With song and yell and laughter and skylarking and jovial horseplay, they burst upon the great square of the Opera, swarmed up the broad steps, and setting the band in their midst, they took hands and danced in a mighty circle round and round the place.... They got moving again, in gorgeous procession, and headed towards the Louvre, singing student songs, and cheering. Gaston Latour curdled the blood of passing cabmen by running out into the road and letting the wheels run over his great indiarubber feet whilst he yelled in simulated agony. He then threw himself upon the breast of policemen, and wept bitterly over their shoulders—whilst he chalked innuendos across their backs. With colours flying, band playing, and gorgeous battle-standards swaying on high, with glint of spears and gleam of armour, the noisy throng passed through the arches of the old-world palace of the Louvre and surged into the courtyard, bringing back for awhile some hint of its ancient magnificence. The sun arose out of the morning over the edge of the city, painting with golden glory her heights and upper places, and the great towers of Notre Dame blushed in his dazzling magnificence, as, with song and shout and laughter, the youths crossed the river into the Latin Quarter; and the old quays rang to their merriment as it has echoed for generations to the familiar riot and reckless feet of the studentry of this most illustrious university of the world. Up the narrow way of the road that is called Buonaparte the resounding clamour went, until the great gates of the schools of the Beaux Arts opened and swallowed the gay procession that trooped into its court—the gates swung together with a loud clang, and the orgy spent itself within the staid precincts of the old courtyard that is set about on its several sides with classic columns and the faded stateliness of ancient palaces. Noll halted outside the gates, saw them shut, and took his way Ay, Noll, to what end has been all this frantic skipping? Ah, youth! that ever plays the gadabout amidst the strenuous tomfooleries, with eager chasing of the wild-goose, whilst through lavish wanton fingers slip unrealized the essential things of life! Even so did the young Adam, as gossips say, toss away the title-deeds of Paradise that he might but take a bite at an untried apple. Wherein Youth finds the Cap and Bells to be but a Bizarre Crown As Noll shut himself in, he felt a little injured that Betty was not home to greet him. He saw her letter lying on the pillow. He flung himself upon his bed, drew a rug over him, and slept until nightfall.... When he awoke, heavy and stiff and chill and bewildered, he put out his feet into the darkness, and sat for awhile on the side of the bed, whilst his drowsy brain cleared from the fog of sleep. He felt somewhat ridiculous in the dress of a Roman soldier. He shivered. He felt miserable—he was overwhelmed with a sense of loneliness. He wondered where Betty was—and what doing. “Betty!” he called. No answering sound. There was a ghostly stillness. He vaguely remembered seeing a letter lying on the bed when he had lain down to sleep. He put out his hand, and his fingers struck the envelope. He opened the letter languidly and tried to read, but the light was gone. He arose stiffly and took it to the window, but the darkness wholly baffled him. He searched about for a light, and only found a box of matches with difficulty. When he had struck the match he realized that the girl’s care for him was lacking—that it had never before been lacking—there was no candle or lamp set out for him. He felt sorry for himself, neglected, aggrieved.... He went back to the bed, sat down upon it, and struck a match; and by the light of that match he read the opening lines of the letter. He struck match after match, and by their light he read to the end of it. And as his hot eyes took in the last words some of his old dignity came back to him—he saw that he was sitting in a tomfool’s masquerading rags reading the generous deed of gift of one who refused to be a clog upon him to whom she had intended only to be an honour and a delight, who asked nothing of him, who made no complaint, who simply wished that he should be free, who would not even embarrass him with the initiative of her dismissal—who was gone! And in the darkness he seemed to feel cold hands grope towards him and clasp icy fingers about his feet; and a whisper spoke in his ear: “Thou art alone.” Wherein it is seen that a Man is More or Less Responsible for his Father Noll, arriving on Horace’s landing, found Babette outside the door; and she was sobbing. “What! Babette?” said he—“and crying?” Babette brushed her fingers across her eyes: “No,” she said; her trembling lips giving her the lie. “Babette, why?” He put his hand on her shoulder kindly. Babette stamped her foot: “I am not crying,” she said; and a large tear fell.... She made an effort and said: “Horace is going home.... He is going—away.” She opened the door, and they went in together. Noll walked into the studio; but the silken rustle of Babette’s skirts passed the door, and hurried on into the darkness of the house. In the deep dusk of the studio sat four or five figures, smudgy dark shadows, sprawling in armchairs. “Is that you, Noll?” cried Horace from behind the red spark where a cigarette glowed. “Yes—I thought you were alone——” “Did you want me?” “There’s no hurry, old boy,” said Noll, and added grimly: “It can wait.” “That’s right,” said Horace, pushing a chair towards him with his foot. “There’s the bottle by you—and a glass—and the dried cabbage of Egypt. Set it ablaze and talk.” Horace struck a match on the seat of his breeches as Noll flung into the chair, and handed the flame to him; and Noll, setting the light to a cigarette, saw the faces of Bartholomew Doome and four of the Five Foolish Virgins in the gloom. The light went out. “Your room’s all dismantled, Horace,” said he. “Yes,” said Horace—“I’m off home. I was just sending “Why?” Horace shifted uneasily in his chair; and then he laughed. “My father’s become chairman of his newspaper company; and he’s going to give an address to a learned society on the Dignity of Literature.... I can’t stand that.... After all, one is more or less responsible for one’s father.... Indeed, the drawback of having a father is that he has the right to bear the same name.” “But——” “Oh, yes, Noll—I know. They call him the Napoleon of the Press in the newspapers. In his own newspapers ... yes,” said Horace drily; and added judicially, making every allowance for the defendant: “Of course, the old gentleman may be the Napoleon of the Press—perhaps he is. I don’t see why I should wrangle about that. And I’m bound to say that, since they called him so, he has shaved off his city whiskers and keeps his hand thrust into the breast of his frock-coat, and pretends to think a lot, and isn’t so beastly familiar with millionaires. He wanted to wear a grey overcoat last winter, but I had to draw the line. You see, the old man has no flare for the subtleties.” Doome coughed in the darkness: “How did you break it to him, Horace?” he asked drily. Horace pshawed: “I told him he couldn’t do it—he’d be getting into a damned black cocked hat next,” he sighed heavily: “I hate to be rude to my father,” he said—“it always hurts me more than it does him.” There was a long silence. “I don’t think, Horace,” said Noll, “that you make allowances for your father.” “Well, there’s something in that,” said Horace. “However, we’ll allow that the old gentleman is the Napoleon of the Press. And of course he and the mother are in the thick of life. Indeed, the mother’s gowns are always described in the morning paper after a big social function—and, by St. Paquin, it’s extraordinary how well they sound in print; yet—I don’t know how it is—for she is a comely woman—but when you put a gold ornament upon my mother it looks like brass—she’s one of those women who, when she hangs diamonds round her neck, looks like a ball-room chandelier. She’s as sound as the apostles beneath her stays, but she has about as much taste as a housemaid—or the House of Brunswick. Then, the old gentleman dines with old Lord Bardolph Nankhill—sits at meat with Cabinet Ministers—and has been seen at Marlborough House. All that, of course, cannot do him any real harm. But—the Dignity of Literature! and to a learned society! No ... it can’t be done.” “Why?” asked Doome. “Society accepts the words of an associate of Cabinet Ministers in a Tory Government as revelation sent direct from God.” “Why?” scoffed Horace. “If learned societies want hints Noll, finding Horace taken up with his own affairs, felt shy of telling him his trouble; and it was borne in upon him sadly enough that his friend was leaving him, and had to be about his own business—far away from him at the very time he most wanted his sympathy. An overwhelming sense of loneliness came upon him, and the silence was profound. The melancholy sense of coming departure—of the breaking up of old pleasant associations, of the passing out from their midst of a congenial and blithe companion and a happy face—set them all brooding. It was abundantly clear that Horace Malahide was being packed; for the valet, who had always before been hidden, though never far away, could now be heard in the next room brushing clothes and buzzing at the business. “Oh,” said Horace, rousing—“by the way, you fellows will want mourning for my feast of departure to-morrow!” He turned towards the door beneath which gleamed a yellow streak of candle-light: “Jonkin!” he called. The door opened, and in the golden glory of the doorway stood the ineffable Jonkin. He was dressed like a student, short black coat, big black tie, velvet waistcoat, corduroy trousers and all; but the dignity of the gentleman’s gentleman glowed within. “Bring those boxes of black kid gloves, black neckties, and the crape for these gentlemen to choose from,” said Horace. “Yessir!” said Jonkin. He brought the cardboard boxes with stealthy walk, and handed them about. “Jonkin,” said Horace—“is everything packed?” “The serious baggage is all ready, sir,” said Jonkin. “I want you to take it all away the very first thing in the morning, and get it out of sight and off to London before the men arrive to drape the room.” “Yessir.” “Not a thing about the place here after to-morrow morning but what will go into my oldest and most battered bullock-trunk and my portmanteau.” “Yessir.” “And you understand you are not to leave any silver-mounted things about.” “Yessir.” “Oh, and Jonkin—reserve me a first-class carriage by the next morning’s boat-train for Boulogne.” “Yessir.” “Be in it yourself.” “Yessir.” “With my dressing things.” “Yessir.” “And English clothes.” “Yessir.” “I will go as far as Amiens third class.” “Yessir.” “Oh—and Jonkin——” “Yessir.” “If there’s a beastly row in the railway-station and I’m in it, for God’s sake don’t look anxious, or as if you belong to me.” “No, sir,” said Jonkin. Which treats of a Farewell Banquet to Departing Youth—whereat Gaston Latour glitters with at Hectic Glitter The light of many candles set in a row along the white napery of the table showed but dimly in the large room, for the walls were hung with the sombre black cloth hangings that are drawn across the doors of churches in honour of the dead. The glint on plate and china and glass was chastened and modified by the solemn blackness of decorating black ribbons—large black bows upon the gilt necks of black bottles of champagne, narrow black bows upon the handles of knives and forks and stems of drinking glasses, and round salt-cellar and mustard-pot and cruet and centre dish. The menus were printed on large black-edged mourning-cards. Flower-bowls had given place to the painted wreaths of wire flowers that are placed in graveyards. The tablecloth was strewn with dead leaves. The black figures of the waiters, who stood in solemn row to either side of the table, tricked out in the gloomy garb of hearse-lackeys, melted into the darkness behind them except for their pale faces, which caught the up-flung light from the candles that played upon chin and nostril and eye-pits, and sent shadows up their features, pronouncing the frown of expectancy with which they waited for the belated guests. There was a loud blare; a hunting-horn without began to bray the Dead March in Saul. “Mon Dieu!” said a waiter. “Silence!” growled the head waiter. The door was flung open, and Horace entered in black, wearing black kid gloves, and followed by Gaston Latour, also in mourning and black kid gloves, blowing all the emotion of which he was master into the resounding brass of the great wind instrument that encircled his chest. And as the guests trooped in after them, all in black and wearing black kid gloves, students and their young womenfolk all taking their seats at the table with a titter, Gaston Latour solemnly tramped round the room behind the waiters in slow step, blaring the march of the dead, taking his lips from the brass mouthpiece only to imitate the roll of the kettle-drums and When Horace had seen them all seated, he sat down. But, in spite of the vigorous lead given by Gaston Latour, the jests did not come tripping to the call; laughter lost something of its hilarity; tongues that were wont to wag with airy wit were barren of banter; voices had a tendency to huskiness; quip and crank gave way to tales of the days that were gone—so they feasted for awhile with something of the fever gone out of their riot, and until the coffee came they sat unwontedly staid and hushed, and in reminiscence and story lived again their insolences and their rebuffs, their darings and their hesitations, their enthusiasms and their hardships, their glorious comradeships, their hero-worship, and their fantastic revelries.... It was near midnight when a skull was passed round filled with little folded papers, and they cast lots for Horace’s corduroy trousers. Gaston won the breeches, and had to deliver the funeral oration. He stood up, pulled on his black kid gloves, and blew his nose strenuously, taking a long-sustained and melancholy note that sent a titter round the solemn row of waiters: “Friends of my youth, companions of my unmitigated follies! the ancient figure that sits at the head of this table was once young—the years cannot rob him of that. And it is because he has not been ashamed to share his youngness with the lion and the ass that I rise to-night to bid you drink to the Passing of Youth in the mirth-provoking wines of France. This is the last mad moment of his splendid years; to-night his heroic follies are done; this room, where have been revelry and dance and song and wit and laughter and boon companionship, will know him no more. He is called home—across the sea-sick channel. He goes to shiver forlorn amidst the gloomy fogs of respectability. He will marry a staid wife and beget staid children and dine with lord mayors and wear white waistcoats over a self-conscious stomach. With the corduroy breeches of his studentship he has no more to do. Whither he goes there are no gay cafÉs—no riotous junketings. He will dance down the streets no more—shout no more—to the stars no more. Whither he goes the people are glum, grey-minded, commonplace—he must not sing, except out of tune, or monotonously, for fear of sin in the music—he must not dance, except with pre-arranged precision and with demure one, two, three to tunes that are piously bereft of all ecstasy. Revelry he will pass by with averted glance and eyes downcast. And yet, as he sits at his plethoric ease before the fire, after a full dinner, prosperous, rotund, bourgeois, he will nod, and nodding sleep—and in the freedom of dreams his ranging memory, rid for awhile of its crude discipline, will flit here, back to the old room, back to the bare walls—he will live again the blithe days of his fantastic youth; he will hear the echo of old laughter as his old jests set the ghosts of his old companions in a roar about the table; at break of day, as the mists rise from the river, he will skip down the They all rose to their feet. Latour raised his glass: “Old man!” said he, with meaning accent on the threadbare words; and “Old man!” cried they all, laughing, with a sob in the laugh. Horace rose, when they sat down, telling them that he could not trust himself to speak otherwise than to say that it warmed his heart as it grieved his heart that he found himself seated amongst his dear companions for the last time in his old room. He raised his glass to Youth, to the comrades of youth, to the students’ quarter, to the university, to the Boule Miche which was the highway of youth, to the great dead, to Paris, to France. They all stood up and drank the toast in solemn silence; and Horace standing there at the head of his table, they each passed by, handing him a keepsake for remembrance, grasped his hand, and after a husky greeting, strode out of the room. Babette was the last to go. She went up to Horace, drew down his face between her white hands, and kissed him upon the mouth. He stroked her head; they spake never a word. Her eyes filled with tears, and she hastily followed the others out of the room. Horace was left alone with the solemn waiters. He stood for awhile, too much touched to speak. He roused himself at last with an effort. “Jean!” he said. The old head waiter came to him. Horace held out his hand and grasped the shy hand of the other. “Jean,” said Horace—“you are an artist.” The man’s face flushed with pleasure. Horace took a banknote from his pocket and flung it on the table: “Divide that amongst the waiters,” he said; “and, Jean, give this to your good wife—it will help little Marie to her dowry.” He handed the man a crisp banknote; and the old fellow’s eyes filled with tears.... As the door closed on Horace, one of them laughed: “Ah, mon Dieu!” said he drily—“that they should ever grow wise!” “Silence!” roared the old waiter. Horace, as he passed through the doorway, was greeted by Gaston Latour: “You must skip down the highway of youth for the last time, They, all hatted and cloaked, flung his cloak over his shoulders, set his black slouch hat upon his head, and together tramped down the stairs and out into the street; and, linking arms, the students and their young women strolled along the roadway and made for the Boule Miche, singing a rousing student song—the dark and deserted street echoing to the racket. They came out on the Place St. Michel, took hands, and in the dim moonlight they danced in a wide ring before the fountain in the wall where in his niche the bronze saint slays the dragon at the threshold of the student’s world. Out of breath, they went and leaned over the parapet of the bridge of St. Michel, and then one sighed, and silence fell upon them all. Out of the flood loomed the great towers of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and low down and beyond twinkled the lights of the Morgue; and, beyond all, the waters of the river swirled into the mists sweeping on to the restless sea—out into the night and the eternal mystery. Gaston Latour leading, they clambered down to the river’s edge; and they sprinkled Horace with the waters of the Seine, and made him for ever a citizen of Paris. Up they all clambered again, scaled the parapet, and joining hands, along the Boule Miche they went, singing—now forming a ring to dance round embarrassed policemen, now pounding shutters with their fists, greeting with a cheer the sleepy heads that were thrust out of open windows, blinking anxiously down into the night; and with these and the like tomfooleries, saluting the closed cafÉs where they had held their many light-hearted revels, they reached the garden of the Luxembourg—stood before the Pantheon—in the paling night they uncovered to the great dead. Thus silent, Horace stood for the last time as a student on the heights of Montparnasse. The immensity of the night was passing in purple majesty into the western heavens; and beyond, where the students’ highway topped the hill, in the smoky twilight glittered the morning star. Wherein a Comely Young Woman broods upon the Years Horace shook hands with them all amidst their hearty promises to come and see him off, bade them good-night, and climbed the dark stairs to his rooms. He pushed open the door of his studio to find the room possessed by the sombre twilight of the dawn. The heavy curtains that had hung across the great windows had been flung open, and the beginnings of light showed the deserted banquet, discovering a young woman who sat at the table, her face buried in her arms. Horace shut the door gently and went and sat down beside her; took off his black hat; flung it on the table; and, leaning towards her, his golden hair touching her dark masses, he put his hand upon her pretty head: “Babette,” said he. She raised her head wearily, and leaning her elbow on the table, she set her dainty chin in her hand, and wiped the tears hurriedly from her eyes. She gazed moodily before her. Horace took her hand: “What are you thinking of, Babette?” She sighed. “Why should I fill your heart with my sadness, Horace?” “Come, Babette.” “I have been thinking of the days that are gone, Horace—you have always been very gentle with me.... And—I have been thinking of the days that are to come——” Her lips trembled; and a tear stole down her cheek. Horace nodded: “Yes, Babette—and of the days to come!” She sighed: “I have been wondering whether you will think of me, Horace—as the days pass. I have been wondering—wondering—wondering——” “Yes, Babette?” “But why should I tell you?” “Tell me, Babette,” he said; and he stroked her hair, gazing at her hungrily. She uttered a little sob. She waited a little while: “I have loved thee for love, Horace.” She smiled sadly and stroked his hand. “Must I love now for livelihood?... To me the moonlight nights by lake and river can never be the nights they have been with thee. And he who walks beside me must needs feel it so.... You go home, Horace, to life—I go on here, growing old, year by year. I have been sitting here in the dark, peering at the years. One day the gaiety will go out of my heart, the freshness out of my looks, the colour out of my face, the light out of my eyes. Men turn and look at me now—their eyes smile at me. The time will come when men’s eyes will pass me by. Students in the Boule Miche will say, ‘She was some clever fellow’s mistress—once.’ And there will be laughter. So, one day I shall sit at the tables—alone; my only prospect—the grave. Yet—with some—memories.... My haggard eyes have been staring at these things all through the long night, and the disillusioning dawn has but confirmed the nightmare.... Yet, Horace, dear heart, I have done nothing to deserve it—except in loving thee ... except in loving thee, dear heart.” The tears brimmed over her eyelids, and her voice was stayed in a sob. Horace took her tear-wet face between his hands and kissed her upon the eyes and mouth: “Listen, Babette,” said he hoarsely—“thou hast wept thy last and thy only tears for any harshness from me. Dost thou think, dear heart, that I who have never found thee guilty of the smallest meanness will leave thee alone because, forsooth, thou hast loved me well! Dost thou think that thy dear hands and thy sight and thy breath and thy hearing and thy sweet bosom are not become a part of me! Tush! we have been married these many months. In a month from now thou must go through the law’s farce with me—but thou art my very wife—thou canst be no more to me than that, nor I to thee——” “No, Horace—thou hadst better leave me. It would be a jibe against thee——” “Tush!” He laughed huskily. “Thy train and steamboat passage are bought hours ago—there is a room preparing for thee in my father’s house.... Thou canst surely bear to be a maid again for thirty days!” She laughed, and flung her arms about him and kissed his hair: “I love thee, fool,” she said; “and will share thy folly....” “Look,” said Horace—“the room is full of light—the sun will soon be peeping over the roofs. We must be packing. I have kept my best trunk for thy belongings, Babette.” She laughed: “It will take no time—I have as little wardrobe as dowry to bring thee, Horace.” “You always look so well, Babette,” said he—“I had not realized thou hadst not even a trunk till the night before last.... Thou must be at the Louvre as early as the big shops open She laughed and handed him her light purse. He bulged it out with banknotes. “Thou must spend all this in gowns,” he said. She took the notes and unfolded them upon the table: “But—but, Horace, this will buy me many silk gowns—we must not waste——” He kissed her, and laughed: “I forgot to tell thee about the insignificant things—we are rich, Babette.” The tears came into her eyes: “But—but—I shall shame thee, Horace——” He kissed her quivering lips to silence her: “Then God send me shame, Babette,” he said; and he added, with a twinkle in his laughing eyes: “My sisters will judge thee largely by thy clothes, so buy for thyself as thou wouldst buy for my honour and my credit.” She laughed gaily; then a frown knit the handsome brows. “What is it, Babette?” “Only an hour to buy a trousseau!” she sighed. “An hour is such a little while.” He laughed loud and long; and she laughed at his laughter. “No, Babette,” said he—“no, no, not thy wedding-dresses. Buy just thy few gowns to fill my trunk. Thou wouldst not rob my sisters of a month’s shopping, thou selfish egoist. They are rich—and must have employment.” “I may not find gowns that will fit me,” she said. “Thy needle will do the fitting.” She sat, the happy tears in her handsome eyes, her hand in his, and gazed at the coming day. “What!” said he—“thou wouldst weep!” She kissed his fingers, put her dainty palm on his lips: “Supposing thy sisters——” She hesitated. “I am taking thee home, Babette, to teach my sisters manners,” he said. She laughed: “And thy father, Horace?” He put his hands on her slender shoulders: “Babette,” said he—“I have told my father you are of the De la Rues of Paris.” She laughed gaily. He frowned at her in mock solemnity: “Thou must not laugh at that jest before my father,” he said. “My father believes in the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Nobility and Me. It’s his only creed. Thou must never shake a man’s religious faith, my Babette. And he will love thee, with his rough love—for thou art very beautiful—and—thou lovest me.” “Horace,” she said simply—“I will tell thee now what I had intended to tell thee never: there is a little one coming—a little child——” He was filled with a great silence and wonder. He sat holding her slender fingers and gazing at her shy eyes. He put out his hand and placed it upon her breasts: “And what if it usurp my place and oust me from thy fragrant bosom?” he said. She laughed a low happy laugh: “Ah, Horace; that would be fearful,” she said in gay raillery, “for thou mightest then treat the little one as harshly as thou hast used me....” Thus they thou’d and thee’d and kissed and kissed again, until the sun peeped in over the eastern window’s ledge, and touched the young man’s hair. She put her hand upon his head: “Thou art pure gold,” she said. Which treats of a Harmless Riot amongst such as Dwell on Mount Parnassus Horace descended from Mount Parnassus in a whirlwind. Indeed, he had a keen sense for the becomingness of things. He was the poor student to the end. He departed from Bohemia in the tattered habit of Bohemia and after the fashion of Bohemia—indeed, it was splendid poverty. The courtyard swarmed with students, and Gaston Latour stood solemnly directing the devilries, his pale face more than usually tricked with gloom, his dreamy poetic eyes dark with melancholy, his lips sounding blood-curdling ear-splitting blares upon his hunting-horn, regardless of all the municipal laws against the use of the same except at public festivals. The place was astir with chatter and laughter and fool’s play and the coming and going of feet. In the midst of the ferment, Horace and others were securing his baggage to a handcart, the embarrassed porter standing to one side, his hands itching to do the roping. A loud blare from Latour’s hunting-horn—and there was silence. Horace strode up to the fat concierge, who stood on the steps with her three small children, the better to see the sights. He lifted each of the little ones, gave them a hug, and setting them down on the steps again, slipped a large silver piece into the small fingers. He took off his hat, and kissed the jolly old woman upon the cheek before them all, and slipped a hundred-franc note into her rough toil-worn hand. The little ones began to cry, and the concierge, the tears in her eyes, told them not to be stupid. Horace patted them on the head: “I’m coming back to play with you, you lazy little rascals,” said he; and putting on his hat, he pulled it well over his eyes. He strode over to the handcart, and at a sign from him, they seized the porter and hove his expostulating bulk a-top of the baggage, where he was compelled to sit for the remainder of the journey across Paris to the railway-station of the north, in embarrassed discomfort; and Horace getting between the shafts, a bevy of students set the light rattling affair moving on clattering A fussy burgess, put to the wall with some indignity by the stream of careless students, went up to a group of police and reminded them that the hunting-horn was not allowed to be blown in Paris except on certain high festivals. His venom was wasted. The police shrugged amused shoulders: “It is true,” said they—“but it is only the students....” As they came into the Boule Miche, singing the National Anthem, the landlords of the taverns and cafÉs and the white-aproned waiters came out to their doors, and greeted the noisy crew—indeed, Horace was well known, and his genial ways and amiable personality robbed him of all enemies. Horace, amid handshakings down the street, foreseeing that the catching of the train was becoming a nice question and thinking Babette looked pale, took advantage of a moment’s breathing-space to whisper to the girl that she had better drive off to warn his man Jonkin that they might be late; and Babette was glad to get into a passing fiacre and slip away. Her heart was too full for jesting that had tears in the jest. The noisy crew got the handcart on the run as soon as they crossed the river, the jolted porter a-top, but rattled up the Rue la Fayette in none too good time; as they dashed into the great station the bustle of departure that comes before the leaving of the boat-train was at its noisy height. The officials were quite unable to cope with the students, who, chaffing them, rushed and swarmed over the barriers and took possession of the platform. The man at the barrier laughed, shrugged shoulders: “It is only the students,” he said. Gaston Latour, gloomily dancing the danse de ventre on the platform, was assailed by a pompous fussy little man in uniformed authority, who alone displayed sufficient lack of tact to interfere with the young bloods. Gaston stooped down; solemnly stroked the official protruding paunch, and putting his ear thereto, said “Cough!” The sulky fellow growled threats: “My God,” said Gaston—“he is wasting away!” The surly fellow made as if to go. Gaston Latour grabbed him and listened at his stomach again: “He has a bad heart,” he said; flung his arms round his neck, and crying over his shoulder hysterically, he wailed melancholy sobs down the great hunting-horn. He had a grotesque mind.... And thus, amidst frantic foolings and warm hand-grippings and promises of early return, the train steamed slowly out of the huge station, taking Horace away from the days of his youth—for he had realized during the night that was gone that manhood was come upon him. Wherein our Hero is ill at ease with his own Shadow The train being gone, and Horace borne away, Noll drew aside from the noisy crowd of departing students that strolled chattering and jocular from the scene of their leave-taking. He walked home alone. When he climbed to his room, the loneliness yawned at him out of the void of the empty place. Every shadow, every chair, the bed, the whole deserted place, whispered that Betty was gone. He moved restlessly about his rooms all day, chafed and fretted, and, when the twilight fell, he as aimlessly fidgeted out into the dusk and betook himself to the streets of Paris. And as he strode moodily along, nagging whispers went with him—unpleasant questionings nudged at his elbow—irking discomfort plucked at his sleeve. He had very clearly realized during the last few days that, good fellows as they were, Horace and his companions were all taken up with their own affairs—that they were really only genially interested in him in relation to themselves—that he was interested in them in relation to himself. Not a soul had asked a word about Betty. He resented it—yet he knew that his neglect of her alone had been the beginning of her being set aside from their ken. If he felt so of a sudden about their neglect of her, what must she have felt about his neglect of her? God, how he had let her drop out of everything! He knew now that his one selfless friend had been this girl—this handsome dainty woman. And he had let her go out into the dusk, alone—leaving him alone. And for what? He laughed bitterly. It came to him now, a whisper in his ear, that her brain was worth all the wits of all these others put together. It was revealed to him that most of the keenly observant, large, and humane phrases that had sounded the music of well-spoken insight to his understanding had been hers. Of a sudden he realized what an appalling obstacle his indifference to her confidences about her work must have been! Indifference? Nay, he had shown a harsher snarl than that. What He turned into a cafÉ and was greeted with a shout. And in the resulting rolic, for several hours, he forgot his self-recriminations. But in the black night, taking himself homewards, it struck him like a buffet upon the mouth delivered out of the surrounding darkness. He had lacked manhood. Reaching his rooms, a dozen petty discomforts assailed him to remind him of the mother-care and gentle hands that no longer showed their tenderness—on striking a light, the stealthy shadows stole away skulkingly into the corners, mocking at his loneliness, nudging elbows at him. He lit a candle, and sat down on the side of his bed. It was borne in upon him, sitting there in solitary communion with his own unmitigated selfishness, that the man alone is not a human entity. Ay, Noll; thou art not the only numbskull—the very nations share thy cap and bells. Man is indeed incomplete without the woman. Any scheme of life that eliminates the woman is a futile scheme of life. The human animal is not one, but two—man without woman is wholly incomplete, a crudity, inadequate, a fatuity, and hence a thing of shame. Nay, the lad had glimmerings into depths deeper than that; gazing at the naked truth of things, it came to him that any scheme of life wherein the woman is made inferior degrades the man with her degradation, since she is a part of him—and a part of a man in a state of humiliation humiliates the whole of him. He wondered what she was doing; whether they were being kind to the sensitive, large-hearted, dainty Betty. A sob caught at his throat. He knew—with a hot flush he knew—it was the first generous thought that had moved him these many days. He had been pitying himself like a whipped cur, the which never yet brought a man honour or comfort or dignity. Wo-hee-ho-ho! moaned the scoffing wind without. What was she doing—out there—in the dark? Ah, Noll—what, indeed? The very shadows bent to hear. But, Ho-ho-hey! scoffed the mocking wind. Wherein our Hero dabbles his Hands in the Turgid Waters of Philosophy, and brings up Some Grains of Truth from a Pebbly Bottom. A Chapter that the Frivolous would do well to skip—the Ironies being infrequent, if not wholly wanting; and the Humours lacking in the Comic Interest For days Noll fretted restlessly about his room and the streets of the city. He went back to his old haunts—to the practice of his assiduous idlenesses. But the fever had gone out of his pleasant habits; and the talk of his fellows was become stale. He lingered on—lonesomely but doggedly. So the days passed into weeks; the weeks stole away the months. Noll could not shake off a strange sense of humiliation. Shrug his shoulders as he might at the pathetic silence that had taken the place of Betty’s mellow voice, humiliation nudged elbows with him, peered into his frowning eyes, was not to be rebuffed by his sullen face. He was a prey to self-contempt. The devil of regret takes hard snubbing. And no man lies intelligently to his own conscience. He took refuge in letters. This galling humiliation had set him soul-searching.... Rudderless, aimless, floating on the sea of pleasant tides, he now gazed in tribulation at gulfs that yawned before him and about him and beyond—the Whence and the Why and the Whither of this Present Seeming. And as the learning of old spent itself in the search for the Philosopher’s Stone, so the virile imagination of youth, steeping itself in written wisdom, went a-questing for the secret of life. Everywhere, where men thought at all and were not content with hereditary thinking, the whole concept of life was being shaken to its base. The barbaric Eastern statement of an all-powerful, all-seeing, all-creating, all-wise God as a huge blundering Rejecting the crude and garish guesses, the untenable dogma, the juggling conventions of theology, the young fellow had, with the confidence of youth, relied on the intellect for the solution of the problem of life. Indeed, it is abundantly clear that out of the base metal of untruth, at any rate, the key to the great mysteries of life shall not be forged. So, rightly looking to knowledge as an essential element in the search for the key to the secret of life, the youth had gone further and looked to the intellect to be that key—only to find himself in a blind alley with museums at end. The intellect but labelled and pigeon-holed the facts of life in this museum of consciousness. But he had stumbled in solemn company enough—a goodly bevy of the world’s philosophers stood bewildered in the same chill marble place—the labels were all strictly accurate, but the specimens were dead. Whatever the answer to the riddle of the world, man’s only key is through the doors of the intellect and of the senses. Suspicious of the senses, the youth had relied implicitly on the intellect. It came to him now that the uttermost truth, the secret of life, was beyond man’s reason. Indeed, the priest who thunders the loudest against agnosticism is the greatest agnostic of them all—who, asked for the absolute details that lie beyond the grave, must give for answer, robbed of all vague talk of God and devil and heavens and hells, “I know not.” Nay, when reason outsteps his theologic acceptances, is he not first to stab at reason? The theologian clamours for the law; but his statements of the law are the veriest guesses. The solemn law of one generation may be the laughing-stock of the next—the crimes of the further next. The idols of one church are the derision of another. Men have been burnt for cast-iron gods by others whose sole claim to godliness was in the lacking humour to laugh at cast-iron gods. If there be a God, His majesty shall not be sought in a noisy and blundering travesty of Man. Good Master Paley touched the sublime humour when he made the world designed for man—wholly forgetting even the fleas. Indeed, the veriest savage can show the titles to his most brutal savageries in guesses, when all’s said. And this very solid world that wounds the stumbling foot, is it not but an idea to each? the solid reality dying for us in our dying—to the flab jelly-fish this splendid wayfaring being even in the living not wholly of the same seeming as to you and me and the other. Yet wholly and absolutely sure are we that all is. Whatever madness possess us, we know the Achievement. For he who splits hairs with his reason, and affirms that nothing exists, except in our imagination, is like to him who thrusts his head Knowledge of the intellect has in it no creative power, no vitalizing essence—cannot give life. The meaning of life must be lived. Nay, knowledge of the intellect is not even the incentive to life—not so much as instigator of our most paltry acts. The instincts and the emotions and intuition are the more vigorous masters and compellers of our living—are outside knowledge—independent of it—often opposed to it, overwhelming it, setting it aside at slightest desire carelessly, contemptuously, passionately. And then—— The brutes of the field have not reason; yet are they moved by this same mystery of life; their flame goes out in the same strange mystery of death! That which is the secret of life in man must also be the secret of life in all else.... The youth had been overwhelmed in the darkness that had shown beyond the impotence of the intellect. He was aroused by the literature of Romanticism. He opened the book of the wisdom of Schopenhauer; it led to the page of life to which he had now turned. The German pointed a guiding finger. Even if the brain’s ken were not limited, it is impotent. But, fortunately, there is a secret stair to the mystery of life. Not by way of the intellect, but by way of the emotions may we pierce to the secret of existence. Life expresses itself through the senses. The emotions hold more of the ultimate mystery than all the vapour-filled brains of philosophers, be they priest or schoolmaster—— The youth thought he had discovered the answer to the riddle of life. Searching deep down into his own being, frankly, with the unembarrassed gaze of himself for sole company, fearlessly, candidly, and in the decent silence, peering for the innermost essence of existence, he perceived throughout all seeming incongruities and inconsistencies and warnings, a strange all-compelling energy which this snarling Schopenhauer called the Will to Live—a blind, never-resting, never-satisfied want—a fierce desire for life. He saw that the body is but the earthly habitation for the use of this mystic breath of life whereby alone may life achieve its compelling urging for the fulness of experience. The intellect was wonderful, as were all the body’s functions; heart and belly and the rest; but it and they were only the instruments by which the inspiration of life protected itself from destruction, guiding itself through the dangers that beset it in the substantial world or threatened its continuance—through pain shrinking from the dangers of destruction; through pleasure moving forward eagerly towards a fuller experience; through hope which encourages, and fear which makes to hesitate; through love Everywhere was absolute confirmation. Science, all that was known of the solid world, confirmed it. Experience confirmed it. History confirmed it. The senses confirmed it. Instinct confirmed it. Everywhere, in all, common to man and brute, was this overwhelming, fierce, all-compelling urging to live the fulness of experience. The key unlocked the secret of the very mountains and the waters. Out of the vasty space this mighty urging of life creating itself into the vehicles of worlds, creating itself from worlds into more emotional creatures upon the world, gathers into forms, attracts, repels, coheres into shapes, reaches to the mystery of crystals. Baffled by the rigidity of the rocks, dissipated in the elusiveness of the waters, the mystic life gropes its way towards subtler channels of embodiment. On through the flowers of the field this urging to fuller life gropes towards emotion—and, freed from its root’s anchorage to the rigid soil, behold, out of the yeasty ooze it realizes itself through fish and reptile and bird into beast. On, through the brute, increasing by rebirth, at first blindly seeking to fulness in the humblest sensations, working up from stage to stage, struggling and striving always to feel the fullest emotions, developing for itself bodily organs which shall nourish it and do it service, that it may most fully achieve itself—it essays to fullest experience through brute force and reaches by struggle of the physically fittest to the body of the lion and the tiger and monster—retires baffled from mere bodily force, and, essaying through the cunning of the brain its fuller fulfilment, forms for its embodiment the nimble ape. For its protection and aggrandisement the brain’s cunning gives craft to the hands and sets them to the making of tools, and lo! at a stroke the rushlight of early reason thrusts the savage above the brute. It steps down from the trees, and Man, finding his hands’ use, and straddling on two legs, stands upright and a-wonder. The miracle has happened. Life has become conscious of itself. And, God! what a seething hell of misery it looks upon! The youth shut the second book of the wisdom of Schopenhauer, his brows set, and gazed with sad eyes at the Tragedy of Existence. He was overwhelmed with the sorrow of the world. This untameable never-satisfied urging to fulness of life that stirs at the heart of all things, what had it wrought? Seen glumly through the spectacles of Pessimism the light went out of the heavens. The youth flinched from the welter of the universe. What a welter it was! what a shambles! The hawk preying on the exquisite design that is the body of the small feathered songster—the tiger slaying for daily food the Tssh! the brutality of it! the cursed cruelty of it! the bestiality of it! Success in life! what was it but the record of other hearts broken, other spirits crushed, other homes rendered desolate? Everywhere was aggression, pursuit, sorrow, suffering. The rich trampling down the poor. The beautiful body built only to decay. The love of life given, to be baffled by death. At the end of all our hopes and strivings and ambitions yawns the grave. Everywhere sorrow and pain. We remember pain. The agonies cling in the recollection—the joys are forgot. Health is not realized until it is gone—nor youth—nor liberty. Yet these are amongst the greatest good. Even enjoyment is damped by habit. Opposition and disappointment were sure—and always—and everywhere. This very intellect, that raised man above the brute, and gave the fuller powers in the struggle for life—what happiness did it bring? It dangled hopes and ambitions and joys before the eyes, simply to deceive the passionate urging of life to fiercer struggle for life. The intellect! man’s boast over the brute—it was the crown of thorns. Intellect! which was given as the last plague—the brutes had been spared that. Thought warring with impulse; the love of beauty and of justice fighting the appetites and the body’s yearnings which impel our actions to the brutal struggle for life; contemplation upon the ignobleness of these appetites and base injustices and greeds impotent before the overwhelming lusts and impulses and emotions of the body. Imagination!—to shrink from the seething dunghill of the world. Was there any deliverance from this miserable tyranny of life? Only by boldly standing across the path of life and refusing to share in it. He opened the third book of the wisdom of Schopenhauer, and he found the two means that Pessimism has found, by denial, to accept life in full—art for art’s sake, and the asceticism of religion. By steeping self in the contemplation of the beauty of works of art, outside and aloof from self, in the contemplative pleasure of craftsmanship and artistry we may escape for awhile from the Yes—this Schopenhauer fellow had wisdom. The Youth put his hand upon the book, and by the gods he swore it, he would follow art for art’s sake. He would seek salvation from the tyranny of living in the contemplation of the beautiful. Which sees the Day break in the Tavern of The Golden Sun A misty dark night. The drizzle that slowly drenched the town met with but damp welcome the students and revellers as they poured out of the Bal Bullier at midnight; it sent them swarming into the genial warmth and cheery glitter of the cafÉs on the Boule Miche. And the inhospitable rain, having emptied the streets, slyly took itself off into the outer darkness and passed out of the city, leaving the trees weeping in the blackness. Noll, wearied by the frantic toolings of the students’ Bal Bullier, put up the collar of his coat, and finding that the drizzle no more wet his face, he strolled down the Boule Miche, struck across the cobbles of the riverside quays, and striding into the murk that hung about the river, he found himself on the bridge. He stood and leaned over the parapet, peering into the blackness of the foggy depths that swirled in pitchy fumes below. The yeasty stillness yielded a sob. A young woman’s voice near at hand spoke low. Aubrey’s voice answered her, impatiently. The fog carried every inflection of his drawling irritation and peevish insolence. He pshawed: “Women take love so seriously,” he said—“it is women who spoil it.... Love is the pastime of life, the gaiety of days, a thing to enrich the senses, to give man his recreation—and women filch it of the very essence of its charm by making it the sordid business of life. Robbed of its delicate mysteries, of its butterfly flitting from flower to flower, it becomes—marriage—and the begetting of children—and the clamour of household needs—and milk-bottles—and soiled linen.... Why are you not content to love many men, HÉlÈne, as I have found the rhapsody of life in loving many women?... It is the spiritual——” “The spiritual!” She laughed a little harsh laugh; and added sharply: “Come, master Aubrey—we know each other too well to make it worth while to lie—it deceives neither ourselves nor the other; wherefore then the intention of it?... I would only ask you not to love the other woman before me——” “Come,” she said hoarsely, “this air is killing me—I must have warmth—I am starving, body and soul.” “The tavern of The Golden Sun does not close till daybreak,” he said sullenly. She laughed sadly: “Yes,” she said—“they turn life upside down—the artists—like the religious....” She sighed consent. “All right. We will go there.” They passed Noll, where he leaned against the parapet of the bridge, almost touching him. He roused moodily and followed the sound of their footsteps in the pitchy murk. He, too, would go to the tavern of The Golden Sun. He turned to his left as he stepped off the bridge, and kept by the river-wall. There came to him now and then through the clammy darkness ahead the sound of the girl’s coughing. This woman was HÉlÈne, the fragile beauty whom Aubrey had filched from her easy-going husband, a young doctor of the commercial quarter across the river. In the letter she had written to bid the honest commonplace fellow farewell (Aubrey had told it at a tavern merry-making amidst the sly laughter of his fellows) she had complained that he had no romance, that the very soles of his thick and clumsy boots were like his own solid soul, an offence to her sense of the subtleties—that she must out into the world to seek romance and the colour of life. The blow had fallen out of a serene day in the face of the poor fellow, and it was matter of common report that he had reeled from it—he, being unpoetical and unappreciative of the picturesque glamour of wickedness, had not even appreciated that he was party to a romance—had taken instead to avoiding his fellows and was walking with Shame—furtively, unheroically. Paris had laughed. And the girl—— She was getting her fill of crude adventure now.... Out of the reek there came again to Noll the pitiful cough. The footsteps stopped for awhile. A quickly suppressed sob. Again footsteps. In the sombre gliding river below, the green lights of vaguely looming blacknesses that were canal-boats, splashed emerald flames in the inky flood. Loomed now across the waters the massive solidity of the twin-towered cathedral, black against the black night; and beyond and low down upon the pitchy tide the pale lights that burn all night in the house of the dishonoured dead gleamed through the window-slats of the Morgue. Noll, hearing the cough again, roused to the sound that the others had left the riverside. He crossed the drenched quays, and leaving the river behind him, struck into a narrow street that was possessed by the spectral wraithes flung down the grimy old walls by the ghostly lamps that hung thereon. Along the gloomy thoroughfare the chill airs, from the river hard by, set the lamp’s flame flickering, and sent dusky shadows moving stealthily out of Their shadowy figures turned into the squalid street that is called the Rue Galande; and Noll closely followed them, they came to a halt before the low arch of a doorway and stepped out of sight. When Noll reached the arch, the red maw of which yawned into the sordid street, he saw by the legend written upon the glass of the battered gas-lamp which hung awry overhead that he was at the threshold of the tavern of The Golden Sun. Across the dark stretch of rudely paved courtyard beyond, the two figures were passing blackly under the yellow flood of a gas-lamp, the restless flame of which showed a flight of steps leading underground. The twain descended into the gloom of the passage and were swallowed in the cellars from which came a gust of song and the sound of music as the doors opened and shut upon them. Noll descended the steps, pushed open the doors at the bottom, and stepped into the tavern of The Golden Sun. He blinked at the lighted room, dim as it was. The heavy air, laden with the fumes of beer, and hazy with the clouds of tobacco-smoke, met him with a pleasant warmth of welcome. Through the haze he saw that the people sat, silently giving their whole attention to a slender youth who stood at the far end of the room declaiming verse, leaning upon a piano—a grey-haired musician touching mellow chords gently and running a light accompaniment of music atune with the speaker’s fine voice. Noll was little in need of the superfluous pantomime of a burly thick-set waiter who made melodramatic signs to him to stand still—to make no sound. As he stood there, listening to the telling accents of the young poet, his eyes ranged over the strange gathering of bohemians who sat about the little round tables. They were shabby enough, some of them, to have been the denizens of a thieves’ kitchen; but there was an atmosphere of culture abroad that took all incongruity from the noble sentiments and subtlety of accent that fell from the lips of the poet in that dingy place. The women who sat at the tables were not the gay butterflies that flitted in silk and satin about the glittering cafÉs of the Boule Miche. Their picturesqueness was of a more subtle kind, and its daintiness shone through the pitiful simplicity of meagre apparel. Here were no rollicking students; here was no frantic fooling; here was a note in the air that Noll had not yet heard sounding in gatherings that laid more strenuous claims to the pursuit of art. His eyes ranging, caught signs from Aubrey to go and sit beside him; and, the poem ending in a dulcet pathetic sigh for the eternal tragedy of life, Noll took advantage of the resulting bravos and Aubrey was frankly glad to see him; and it was soon abundantly clear to Noll that he was as frankly glad to be relieved from the sole entertainment of the pallid woman beside him. HÉlÈne, too, roused to interest in the fine young Englishman—the frown left her handsome brows. The grey-haired musician ran his slender fingers over the keys of the piano; and there stepped on to the little platform on which it stood the only man who seemed out of place in that strange company of dreamers. Burly, powerful, big-headed, with cunning eyes that count profits, slits above baggy underlids, he was of the blonde breed that plans and orders—full-bellied, calculating, of those whose fat hands get money, and, with short grasping pointed fingers, hold it when got. He rang a little bell, and silence followed its tinklings. HÉlÈne leaned over to Noll: “He is The Golden Sun,” she whispered, and laughed low. He had the honour to announce that Madame HÉlÈne would declaim an apostrophe from her last written work. The young woman arose simply, smiled to Noll, and making her way to the piano, took her place before it amidst a salvo of applause; and with a strange thrill in her husky voice, she spoke of the cruelty of Nature, the eyes glowing in the deep shadows of her fine brows that gleamed white amidst the masses of her tawny hair, where she stood below the light, gracefully poised against the piano. She uttered the exquisitely phrased sentences in a well modulated low voice that was vibrant with suppressed passion, without trick, without gesture.... The warfare of life was unceasing, unmerciful. Race struck at race, man lay in wait for man—on the mart, on the field of battle, in love, robbed the one the other of the simplest needs of life.... Everywhere was struggle—everywhere was strenuous rivalry—at the end of all, the grave.... The caged bird, what a thing of pity! Denied the range of life, destitute of its mate, its wings cramped, its functions atrophied—yet—open the door of its narrow prison, let it but fly across the sweet-scented meadows, and a hawk swings out of the heavens, falls from the splendid blue, and strikes with rending claws, and tears out with cruel well-contrived beak the little life from the delicately designed beauty of the songster.... Why flutter against the encaging bars? why struggle ever to be in the winds and the free airs? Tush! wherein was freedom but to flee from death? The little fragile thing had the gift of song; let it be glad that it had the gift of song. She uttered the pity of it in the most caressing tongue that the nations have wrought; and when she had spoken the last word, she bowed to the thunder of applause, came back to the table, and seated herself by Noll with a freedom from conceit that touched him. They came and clasped her hand, and gave her ungrudging The room was gay with banter and laughter, glasses clinked, the waiter sped about busily, bawling orders, and the smoke of cigarettes clouded the ceiling. And, of a truth, the atmosphere of the place had a strange fascination for Noll. Here were no longer the crude essayings, and the more crude aims of fledgling studenthood. He was weary of the fierce partisanship, the shifting foundations, the tentative idols of their passing frenzies, this taking of sides about things that did not matter. These people were out of the years of their apprenticeship to the arts. Here, on the other hand, was no posing at all costs for outrageous originality, no seeking for the eccentric aspect of things, none of the fantastic extravagances that marked the revels of the sordid gatherings in the taverns of Montmartre—for these people had no desire to the breaking of idols, the outraging of the decencies, the mocking at ideals. Art, to these people, was the one serious aim of life. There was scarce a line uttered this night, whether of recited poem or song or criticism, which was not perfect in the expression, exquisite and subtle in the phrasing. There was that air of tactful restraint and of rightness of statement which in manners are called good breeding. And if the emotions uttered were somewhat thin or exaggeratedly sad or tinged overmuch and disproportionately with the grey half-tones of the pathos of life, if vigour and the strenuous music of the bright days and the gaiety of life were almost wholly absent, there was at any rate a feeling for beauty and a sobbing appeal to the pity of the world for such as are overwhelmed by the destiny of tragedy that held something of nobility. These men and women were content, if a neglectful world so ordered it, to live here in obscurity and poverty, their sole incentive to life the worship of beauty. Upon the workaday world they turned careless shoulders—and for them the workaday world, in grim retort, had no uses, no honours. The worst sin to them was to be Philistine. Here they met together at a time when drowsy citizens were getting into their unthinking beds—here they were happy in the companionship of their fellows throughout the long night, exchanging their ideas of the beautiful, their polished gentle wit, their praises—here, shrugging contemptuous shoulders at the conventions of the world, men and women lived and loved as they listed. If the world should one day awaken to the works of their genius, so much the better for the world—if it should clamour for their poesy, their song, their works of art, well and good. They would be glad that the world had taste enough to give them fame. But the world must come to them.... It would make life easier—their clothes would be less shabby—hunger less biting, less insistent. But what had the world to give them better than the love of beauty or more pleasant than the comradeship of them that So said they, gentle-mannered, shabbily attired, simple-hearted, warming their starved blood with brandy and bocks of beer and accursed brain-stealing absinthe, living on each other’s kindliness and praise and genial comradeship, living in dreams, walking on air, wayfarers in cloudland, scorning all meannesses, garnering with difficulty the poorest sustenance for daily bread, cheerful though the frost bit and the hunger thinned their already lean ribs, and penurious want made their blankets few—proud in their dignity, pitiful to every suffering thing. Why heed the sensational events of the day? what mattered that a Minister had fallen? what did it matter that a scandal was washing dirty linen in the streets? Such things were dead and buried and forgot in nine days—but art and music and poetry remained, beauty was eternal. Why compete in the sordid money-grubbing race for wealth? We must all die. Why this strenuous hurrying to the open grave? So they reasoned. And they brought to their meeting no sign or word of their hard struggle for daily bread. They brought to their comradeship only laughter and wit and gentle faces and smiles.... The small hours of the night passed. It was nearing five o’clock, and the room began to thin of its frequenters. Noll called the waiter and paid the reckoning of saucers for himself and HÉlÈne. She arose with him to go; and as they opened the doors and stepped out of the heavy air of the room, the grey dawn had broken and the dingy lamp of The Golden Sun was paling into insignificance in the chill day. As they reached the river, they found, swathed in multitudinous wraps, a stout woman who was selling hot milk and rolls. Noll did not ask the girl, but ordered a couple of bowls of the comforting stuff and a roll. The girl drank the milk gladly; and of the roll she was very careful not to lose the crumbs. Noll took her to her poor room on the fifth story where was her threadbare home. At the threshold she asked him in. He smiled. He took her pathetic face between his two hands, and kissed her upon the wan cheek: “No, HÉlÈne,” he said—“I love another woman.” She turned and went into her room. As he descended the stair she came out to him again: “Will you be at The Golden Sun to-night?” she asked—her lips a little anxious and apart—beautiful lips. He hesitated—pondered—smiled: “Yes,” he said. As Noll crossed the Boule Miche a white mist hung over the river; at the far end of the students’ highway the heavens were chilly grey; all the stars were burnt out of the drab firmament. Wherein our Hero goes out into the Night Noll slept till late into the afternoon, awoke heavy, and loafed aimlessly about his room, hoping to do some work before the dusk fell; but ideas were shy of him, and, as the afternoon wore on, he grew ever more restless. Flinging into an armchair, he opened the book of the wisdom of Schopenhauer which tells of the Refuge from the brutalities of Life in Works of Art—in the contemplation of the Beautiful. And he steeped himself in the pessimistic writings until the light failed. At the coming of the darkness he roused, made himself some coffee, lit the lamp, and getting back to his easy-chair he pored over the gospel of Art for Art’s sake until midnight. At midnight he stretched, yawned, and, putting on his cloak and hat, turned out the light, and drifted to the streets again and so to the tavern of The Golden Sun. HÉlÈne was there, at a table, watching the door for his coming. A pretty flush warmed her pale cheeks as she saw him enter and scan the place for sign of her. She beckoned him to the empty chair beside her—and he went. The handsome young Englishman, virile, frank, gentle in his strength, fascinated her. His attitude towards her interested her, a little piqued her, flattered her, baffled her. All the shafts of her country’s wit against the amourousless habits of his people tickled her to the smiling point; yet she suspected that behind the self-confident eyes strong passions lurked.... She herself thrilled at his touch, would have flung herself upon him, clung to him—would gladly have yielded body or soul to him—yet she saw that he was in no mood for her surrender. She was burnt, fevered, with the eagerness of reckless passion. Yet his frank liking for her, his friendliness, his charming desire to hear always her criticism of life and of art and of things, his pretty homage and deference to her intellectual point of view, won her to him in a pleasant comradeship that gave new life to her. She had heard of these friendships with men—but Paris had never before offered her such sweets. She would watch him with curious eyes that were lit with a smile when he turned to look upon her. By day he slept; and when he did not sleep he pored over this Schopenhauer’s scheme of evading all thought of the misery of living in the contemplation of the Beautiful—at night he lived it. Time passed. The first freshness wore off. Youth became restless. The contemplation of the beautiful, in works of art, was no deliverance from the striving of the desire to live. Even in enjoying the beauty of craftsmanship the struggle for life and the cruel facts of life could only be put out of one’s thoughts but for a very little while; nay, art even pointed to life; nay, more, this very art is in its essence the emotional statement of nature and of life!... Fool! Life that was beautiful to contemplate in its parts could not be wholly ugly in the living. Youth rubbed awakening eyes. Art as a refuge from life was a failure. He looked round at these faded wits about him. This devotion to beauty of craftsmanship, to mere letters, to paint, to music, to technical achievement—it could only bring passing consolation of delight. It did not, it could not bring perfect rest—absolute contentment. Sordid hours had still to be lived—and, God! what sordid hours! Even whilst they spoke the half-truth that Craft must and should always be beautiful, must aim at perfection of statement, be pleasant, give delight—poor souls—their wan eyes could not wholly put from them that Craft is but the tool of Art; and Art is the expression of all the emotions and sensations—ranges the whole gamut of life, good and bad, ugly and beautiful, tragedy and comedy. Art therefore inspires or it debases; and thus and so stimulates life to fulfil itself—or not to fulfil. Art is good or it is bad—is as powerful for bad as for good—good when it enlarges life; bad when it narrows life. The emotions discover for us far more vasty continents than the eyes of voyagers shall ever behold. Youth awoke. These people about him were Failures—the pallid ghosts of men and women. They were taken up with the shadow. Could this delight in the mere craftsmanship of art be enough? Was this sufficient end? Was it for this the world had been evolved, to this that was set the vast music of the spheres? To this end—to be set down beautifully in man’s handwriting—that the thunders brought the lightnings to the riven oak, that the wondrous mystic seasons took their courses, that the waters leaped hissing to the tornado’s smite, that the angry majesty of the resounding heavens gave place to exultant sunshine and serenest Was delight in craftsmanship enough to live for? Tush! this was absolute, if subtle, suicide—self-killing of the body and intellect and conscience and will and energy. This sipping at the mere pleasantnesses of life—it was emaciating them in mind, body, will, senses. Their very loves were a dandified make-believe. The kiss of a woman’s mouth was become but a passing pleasure. All these shabby little adulteries were without desire for the child beyond—the child when it came was an unlooked-for inconsequence, a burden, a thing of shame. The sweetest thing in life an affair of accident—to be feared—flinched from! Life might be a tragedy. These were making of it a melancholy and a ghastly farce. Noll got up from his place and slipped from the smoke-befogged room amidst the clamorous din of applause that greeted the recital of an Ode in Envy of One who had died Young. He went out into the night. And as he stepped out into the darkness the bitter cold gripped him by the throat and cut into his lungs. He drew his collar about his neck, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and tramped down dingy streets that echoed his footfall along their haunted ways—he thought with a pang of the threadbare coats of these pallid revellers in the beautiful. It was the black hour that goes before the coming of the daybreak; and blacker than the blackness of the night loomed the great bulk of the cathedral of Notre Dame, its towers lost in the reek of the bleak heavens above—there were lights that showed low down and beyond—the lights of the Morgue were not yet burnt out. The youth stood on the bridge and peered at the sighing sound that told of the river below; but his brows were knit upon the destiny of these kindly gentle people he had left behind him. Where was this sorry tragedy of art for art’s sake hurrying these sinking wits? Those dark shadows that slept under the bridges, were they the husks of such human things? Was that the end? To share the dank shelter with the rats that made their litter there! Or perhaps in the black waters icy oblivion would solve their sorry problem of evading the tragedy of living! The Morgue. Nay, how they clung to this despised life, for all its sordidness, for all its misery—even the Failures! Wherein our Hero sets Foot upon the Road to Rome Midnight did not see Noll at the tavern of The Golden Sun. He had failed to find deliverance from the tyranny of living in the contemplation of the Beautiful—in Art for Art’s sake. Still obsessed with the misery and cruelty of the world, he sat beside his lamp and opened the fourth book of the wisdom of Schopenhauer, whose fearless brain had compelled upon him the tragedy of existence; had promised to show him the way out—two ways. One had failed. He now turned eagerly to the other and the steeper road. He climbed the rugged path of Asceticism. The will urged always to Life, but—— Life was a sordid tragedy. Why consent to take part in it? Why indeed? asked scowling Schopenhauer. No man who has seen through the torment of existence, who has grasped the fact of the eternal unsatisfied Want, who has realized the brutalities and the cruelties that are the very conditions of Life, can desire anything but Quiescence—and complete quiescence only comes with Death. The Buddhist and the primitive Christian had done right—both of them. The Buddhist had looked to Nirvana, a state of Nothingness, of eternal calm—the primitive Christian, with the lure of a vague future bliss before his eyes, finding life on earth a designed brutality, had looked on the life of this world as a pitiful thing, and fixed his hopes on the gateway of Death to bring him into the garden of eternal peace. The pessimism of the East had had the seeing eye. Death is the eternal sleep. And it may be met half way, in bouts of contemplation upon Art. But—better—it may be met almost the whole way. Until the will wholly cease in death, its eager impulses, its insistent urgings to self-preservation, self-aggrandisement, may be baulked and rendered futile by deliberately opposing them. In asceticism the eager desires of life could be almost wholly baulked. Through asceticism alone could one refuse to be an accomplice in this designed crime of living—this preying of life upon life. No wonder the medieval churches had gripped the imagination of man! The child need not be born Through a great and profound pity for the suffering and the weak and the losers in the brutal struggle for life, one could oppose one’s self to the cruel order of things. In this sympathy and pity alone could we raise a foundation of ethics that could demand justice against the design—which opposed itself to the triumphant brutality of the life’s struggle. In this great human pity for the down-trodden could one not only find alleviation for the misery of the world, but in it also could we find some balm for the criminal fact of our very existence. The road came out upon the pilgrim’s way. The pessimistic conception of life led to the very gates of Rome. For days Noll haunted the great aisles of the cathedral of Notre Dame—sat within the beautiful interiors of the old medieval churches of Paris—dreamed—brooded over the problem of the Refuge from Life—was thrilled with the thought that the lowly and the meek should inherit the earth.... Amidst the fragrant scent of the swinging incense, to the pathetic sob of the haunting chant, in the emotional atmosphere of prayer, the great pity for all created things welled in his heart and roused in him a passionate desire to be at grips with the cruelty of life. The mystic rites, the emblems, the symbolism of every act of this splendid church—these things held the youth fascinated, drew him, called to him. That a vague, all-seeing, all-creating, all-powerful God, sitting apart somewhere in the blue, had created the worlds out of His omnipotence, had designed this scheme of life that the religious condemned, had designed it from the beginning, and was carrying out phase by phase every detail of it, and was angry with much of the result of His own handiwork—all this was thoroughly atune with the pessimistic conception of things. All these brutalities, were they of God’s deliberate design? Well, there they were. If there had been design, then they were a part. And this being so, the churches had done right to set aside the wrath of this Being, and, instead, to appeal to a redeemer—one who had put himself against the brutalities of this design—who had flung down his life to mitigate the brutalities. It was clear that the salvation from such life was thus to oppose that life—was to be found only in asceticism. The big-browed scowling German had led the brooding youth into the great mysterious precincts of the medieval church, and left him there—it was his last word. And the youth, his ears ecstatically alert to catch the whispers in the reverberant gloom of its sonorous architecture, was overwhelmed with the majesty of the great denial that is the heart of this ancient church. And everything in his temperament urged thereto. The Papist faith is that subtlest, most fascinating form of art for art’s sake—religion for religion’s sake. From the years it has taken boldly all symbolism that rouses the emotions of its own significance—from its pagan altars to the saying of prayers by rote. Whatever of outward pomp and majesty all other worship has known, whatever of mysticism and of craftsmanship and of artistry all other worship has known, this splendid church has taken into itself. It had seized the great pessimistic solace that is a passing refuge from life in the contemplation of works of art. And now, here, too, was a church built to its foundations on the rock of asceticism—on the bold denial of the majesty of life—on the pessimistic, final, and only refuge from the desire for that fulness of experience, from that life that its God had thrust upon it. And it was so well-bred—everything in its place—everything foreseen. It had an air. The music was sonorous, significant, eloquent, mystic. The arts had given of their best. The pathos of the voices that chanted the sad litanies that condemned life filled him with a sense of the sorrow of the world. He lingered in this atmosphere until he was worn out—he came home late at night, weary and famished with his ecstatic fastings, and, having eaten the meanest food, he would seat himself by the lamp and pore over the mystic volumes. He steeped himself in the books of Saint Teresa and others to which he had heard reference made. Slowly the monastic spell cast its glamour over his intellect. Once he had accepted the world as a place of suffering and a punishment, the ascetics filled his imagination—the nuns and priests “athirst for sorrow, drunk with self-sacrifice,” who bury themselves in cloisters or go into life-banishment beyond the outermost pales of civilization. His great pity for the suffering of the world drew his bowed regard to the cloistered orders, the Carmelites and the poor Clares who are chosen by the Christ as victims of expiation, who unite together and gladly accept for their agony the expiation of the temptations of the world outside—who go to the deepest suffering, the prevention of sin by “substitution,” taking the place of them that are too weak to withstand the passions, and taking that place only by going through the full urgings of such passions. Saint Teresa who took the temptations of the soul of a priest who had not the strength to endure them; Sister Catherine Emmerich who took the bodily pains of the sick; Ludwine who “lusted for bodily suffering and was greedy for wounds,” the “reaper of punishments,” he brooded with envy upon the self-inflicted tortures of the Benedictine nuns of the Blessed Sacrament, their austere day, their rising at two in the night to chant, summer and winter, their turns before the tapers of reparation and the altar. He thought of all these orders vowed to obedience, absolute and without reserve—the complete surrender to the superior, of their life, their movements, their actions, their will, their judgment, their bodies, their instincts, their emotions. And when he dwelt upon the contemplative orders, buried alive in their monasteries and convents, he was overwhelmed. These The monastic orders passed before him in sombre pageant. The black robe of Saint Benedict—had not his order kept learning alive? until learning was become dangerous. These men, clad in sombre sable, had been amongst the gentlemen of the world—and its scholars. The contemplative Carthusian, the ascetic Cistercian, the gentle Franciscan. The Jesuit, byword of subtlety and finesse and trickery—it is true he had walked in crooked ways to his goal, but he had had this wondrous church for goal.... The Dominican—no, he shrank back from the accursed white robe of him that had stood before the inquisitorial fires and the like tortures of his hellish devising, holding the sullied crucifix of the great-souled Christ to the agonized eyes of the writhing victims of his foul lust for cruelties. To save from the brutalities of life by inflicting harsher brutalities—this had been to plumb the criminal deeps of filthiness.... Yes, he had his hesitations, the youth. His mind misgave him a little at the conceits and fooleries and the indifferent yawnings of the choristers, at the absent-minded recital of prayers uttered by the often weary priesthood, at the beadles’ sharp eye on the fees. It misgave him still more when he thought upon the death in life which the nuns of the contemplative orders set themselves—when he learnt that the age of twenty-nine was a terrible period for the young woman to pass, that their worst punishment was endured in those hours of agony in the passionate regret for maternity when the barren womb revolts—when he learnt that some nuns, killed by the torpor of the cloisters, languish and die suddenly like the flames of candles blown out by the wind. Nay, he clutched his throat in sudden loathing and disgust and anger as he read Saint Teresa’s order in her Way of Perfection, that the nun who shall be guilty of insubordination should at once and for life be imprisoned in her cell. Yet—— Contemplation, prayer, pity, self-repression, asceticism! The strenuous urging of life did not find a loophole there through which to enter in, with disturbing energetic breath and organic instincts and the jumping blood of adventure. And if these things secured the refuge from the cruel struggle of living, why not accept the whole of the rest, the formalities, the etiquette, the infallibility of its pontiffs, the real presence in the wafer in the priest’s mouth, the confession to the priesthood, the surrender of the body and of the intellect and of the will and the conscience to the Church that “orders the body to be silent and the soul to suffer,” and holds that “true life begins not at birth but at death”? Wherein Foul Things are Plotted with some Glamour of Romance It was in this mental ferment that, one day, idly seating himself at the table where Betty had wrought, and brooding there, Noll put out his hand to one of the small brass knobs of the writing-table, and opened a little drawer. It was fragrant with the atmosphere of freshness and life and sweetness which was a part of her winsome being. It brought the witchery of her brown hair to him, her dainty ways, the beautiful firm gentle hands, the white skin that flushed so easily, the eager loyal lips, the courageous will, the happy eyes, the cheerfulness and gaiety of her glad young womanhood. In the opened drawer lay what looked like the final proofs of the chapter of a book—or had she torn the pages from some magazine? He read the Fragment from The Masterfolk: which ran: “Rid thyself of the pessimistic error that confuses Life with Lust. The duel between the lust of the emotions and the contemplation of Reason is but in the seeming, as the right hand is against the left. The emotions and the reason but hedge in the highway of thy wayfaring to guide the instincts of life along the way to the highest fulfilment. Joy urges life forward to the achieving; pain turns aside from danger; and the reason is the eye of the emotions. Bereft of reason, the emotions are blind; and the blind in soul are not of the Masterfolk. Good and evil are not at duel; these twain are not rigid and separate realities taking sides in a quarrel of the universe; good is the way by which life travels to the achieving of the highest experience; evil is that way by which life falls away from the achieving. There is no other good nor evil....” When Noll laid down the Fragment of The Masterfolk, the evening was well spent. He went to the window and gazed down through the damp night upon the smoke and flare of Paris that steamed in the reek. His mind turned to the busy world at his feet.... As he pulled on his coat, he noticed that there were two volumes in the pockets. He laughed. They were the wisdom of Schopenhauer—of He left them there. “Tush!” said he—“as if life were given to be evaded!” He put on his cloak and hat, and walked down into the streets. As he turned into the great boulevards, the people were swarming out of the theatres, their eyes still smiling at the comedies. There was the shuffle of feet, and hum of conversation, and laughter that punctuated genial waggeries. Bright cafÉs were crowded inside and out with the ranks and array of chattering people. He went under an awning and seated himself in a back row; the waiter at his call brought him a foaming tankard of beer. And he sat and sipped and brooded there alone in the midst of the buzzing of the pleasure-hive. Paris flashed and flamed in the night—that brightly lighted Paris of many lamps that lies between the crazy heights of Montmartre to the north and the students’ quarter beyond the river to the south—the great central world of Paris, that is the ordinary workaday pleasure-seeking-at-the-end-o’-the-day’s-work world that knows little and cares less for the fantastic aspirations and the mockeries of the hill of martyrs, or the artistic aims of the left bank. Here stepped the good citizen of the gayest when not saddest people of the world, in the streets that are his public drawing-room, smiling at life, strutting with wife or mistress his evening stroll, before getting off to his virtuous or unvirtuous bed, living his life by habit and rote, taking it as it comes, turning reflective eyes upon it never. In the highways the great painted omnibuses rumbled past, taking up swarms of home-going folk from their sauntering evening pleasures of the town. The white-hatted and black-hatted hackney coachmen cracked loud whips and urged their nags to the winning of their last fares for the night. Here strolled the sturdy everyday folk, respectable and commonplace and prolific and jovial, who went to their churches of a Sunday or did not go, as their forefathers before them, and for much the same reason of confirmed habit, asked no questions, but came into their religion or lack of it, and of their concept of life, by heredity; even as their hair grew, and they waked and sleeped. Here were no brows troubled with nerve-racking introspection. Anxieties were on far other scores. The women, with skirts held up, frankly showed ankles that were not aimlessly stockinged, and dressed their shapely bodies frankly trusting the men liked it so; here the men turned and as frankly admired them.... Here the world passed and repassed, gaily and genially human. Most had never heard of Shakespeare, few had read him; to nearly all, Homer was as dead as higher mathematics; to most, Dante would have been an intolerable bore; to many, Milton a giver of sleep. Nay, MoliÈre was known to these as master of dull French, that had wearied their school-day youth.... Here were soldiers that slammed steel scabbards upon the flags, and police that yawned because the world must be respectable. “Jean has the commercial flare,” said he, blowing mightily and mopping a perspiring forehead with florid handkerchief. “He has won marbles on a system.” There was raising of admiring hands at the child’s promise. Madame sighed—to think the boy springing up.... There was a pause, and memories of the child’s arms about her neck—her eyes filled with tears—and she spoke of the cares so happily borne—the days that were gone came back to her. “Yvonne had fancied a piece of lace to go with her white gown and veil for her confirmation.” The good dame laughed lightly. “Ah, she herself had worn it—mon Dieu! how many years ago?” He pinched her ear. She bore her old age well, he said; still, he himself was absolutely ancient—nearly forty! And they both laughed. The good man smoked a cigarette; she flipped through an illustrated paper; they sipped liqueurs; called the waiter at last; paid the reckoning; exchanged a jest or so, and departed, he lifting his hat to the house. Others came and went. Noll brooded on. What had been all the frantic ecstasy of art for art’s sake to the world at large? An absolute nothing. And what was this ascetic hatred of life? The aim of life is not to live in poet’s rhyme—nor does our neighbour pass feverish nights fearful of losing immortality. The poet may be shaken with such fears for his verse; the ambitious may see in dreams their names writ in flashing jewels on the face of time, glittering like stars beyond their daily lusting; but the man of the street scratches his poll to no such questionings. He has to live. He asks, and he has the right to ask, that he may live his life in hope and happiness and all becoming jollity. There will be rough stones enough beneath his feet, walk he ever so nicely. Why be jealous of worldly fame? The names and fames of the ancient masters of the world, king and conqueror, are vanished—their very gods have taken wing. There are some chipped relics—the rest is in the spindrift of time.... What was all this abstract pity of the world? what did it affect? What was it but the conceit of sheer egoism? In the darkness beyond the flare of the cafÉ, on the benches that skirted the roadway, sat several shabby fellows—frayed, down-at-heels, haggard. Their pale faces stared out of the darkness at the festive loungers along the cafÉ’s front. Out of the gloom their hungry eyes sullenly followed the shifting figures that passed to and fro across the golden flare of the brightly lighted place. The younger ones scowled, brooding pensively—one now and then muttering a rough jest to the others. But they were mostly silent. The elder, dirtier, and more ragged, with hands deep-thrust The ranks of chairs along the cafÉ’s front began to empty. Noll roused, called to the waiter, paid him, and strolled into the night.... The waiters came out and cleared away the tables and chairs and put up the shutters. The lights went out. The faces that had stared out of the night sank on to drowsy chests, and the wastrels of the boulevards fell asleep on their hard benches. One fellow amongst them arose, yawned, and drowsily shuffled down the road to a bench that was not so crowded; he lay down upon it, and fell asleep. He had scarcely fallen into a drowse when a dim slouching figure came out of the black drizzle that was setting in, and, hesitating near him, peered into his face—put out his hand and touched the sleeping man upon the shoulder: “Comrade,” said he, “it’s going to be a wet night. This is wretched shelter for a master mind.” The other roused, uttered an oath, laughed grimly: “What is it?” he asked. “Gavroche,” said the stooping man in a hoarse whisper—“the mists are rising from the river.” He looked up and down the road cautiously: “There’s a drunken carter has lost his way and is wandering on the quays. Perhaps he would have fallen into the river anyway.” Gavroche roused and sat up: “Ay,” said he, “he has been paid his wage or would not be drunk.... And he is near the river.... What a death, my comrade, to go out of the world with a full skin!... Some rogues have all the luck.... Come.” Wherein our Hero scatters some Pages of the Indifferent Wisdom of the Ages to the even more Indifferent Gulls In the black night, Noll stood on the bridge at the end of the Boule Miche. The cathedral loomed sombrely amid the darkness. But the darkness was resonant with the promise of a mighty music. The youth had awakened. A load was fallen from him. The mists were rising from his soul. He stooped in his eagerness and peered at the years. He began to see the Reality of things. He was filled with a strange excitement. He went back in fancy, and picked up the thread of the unravelling of life where it had dropped from his fingers in his eagerness to follow Schopenhauer’s inert nerveless guidance. The scowling genius of the German had nearly found the truth—that a mighty desire for life was at the core of all existence. And here had slipped the mighty intellect; and the crabbed hands, groping in the half-darkness, missing the little, had missed the all, since that which stirs at the heart of all things is not a will to live, but life—life with an overwhelming urging to fulfil its fullest self. Nay, urging so overwhelming that, to know the fullest life, it lightly takes the risks of death in the achieving. The bitter lips, not given to understatements, had yet understated the whole case. He of the surly shoulders had gone before the youth, beckoning him, until they were stepping along the hard stony ways of unhandsome half-truths that wounded the feet, and straying in the dirty alleys where the refuse is shot, their attention fixed on the cruelties, seeing only the shabby side of life. And, for solace, the worthy German could point but to two ways out of the shabbiness of his destiny—art and asceticism. But this was not life at all. The youth awaked to find the highway of life to be clean and healthy and glorious and beautiful. He stepped back upon it. Up aloft and afar and hard by, the world sang with the joy of life; and the motherhood of the world held out immaculate arms to him. He stood at gaze with life, and he saw that it was not Life is to be lived, not baulked—otherwise we give the godhood within us the lie. There is no virtue in a doleful countenance, nor aught more sacred in solemnity than in delight. For Joy is serious as sorrow; comedy serious as Tragedy; life serious as Death. It came to the youth, standing there in the reek of the night, that he was on the brink of manhood; he faced the prospect; and the whisper of the Masterfolk came to him where he stood. His intellect and his emotions were in a strange thrill—leaping with a new and pulsing energy. Dawning manhood plucked at his sleeve, pointing to life, staring inquisitive glances, rousing him with restless innuendo—took him by the shoulder and said: “Awake, thou hast done with drifting, thou must live, and guide thy life, and choose thy ways.” He began to regard life as a drama in which he was now a player, an important player. He was no longer of the audience—he was compelled on to the stage. He suddenly became aware of this. No matter how ill-dressed for the part, no matter how slip-shod, no matter how stammering his tongue, how dull his art, how ill-prepared to speak his lines, he must answer the call, must play that part. He roused to the fear that he did not know his part—did not know his cues, did not know even what was expected of him. He must search out the book of the play. What a strange tragi-comedy it was! Tshah! pessimism’s refuges from life were but coward’s shrinkings from the exultant thunders of the universe. Life is life, whether it be lived in the full, with the full breath of the heavens in the nostrils, and facing the dangers foot to foot and striving and overcoming, or whether its energy be spent in a vast labour to avoid it through exquisite evasions. Life cannot be avoided, whether a man take all the risks and fall in the risk, or, like the contemplative Grey, stand midst the whispering grasses of a graveyard and sigh the years away. The august and splendid old cathedral loomed out of the murk. And yonder towers that thus rose above the flood! The medieval church that builded them had founded itself on this pessimistic denial of the fulness of life: contemning, spurning the present; yearning for a vague, fantastic immortality. Its litanies, its prayers, its services sounded the misery of life. To the medieval churches this strenuous world was to produce for its highest ideal the barren man and woman, scowling on life in a narrow cell, shutting out the splendour of living, denying it wholly, apologizing to its God that others dared to live the life He had given, praying passionately that the sin of this life that God had given might be taken upon their own poor shoulders! The free air of heaven, and love, and the joy of life, were things to be And where does the medieval church stand? The master peoples pass its gates. They preached the humble and the lowly; they preached the prince of peace—their hands, their doors, their traditions, their magnificent altars are bespattered with blood. With sonorous chant and opulent prayer and incense and significant symbolism of the worship of non-resistance, they blest the standards of battle. They tortured kings of thought, banned the demi-gods of the imagination, robbing woman of her parallel dignity with man, benumbing her wits, sapping her vitality, stultifying her will, made her a gaping hypocrisy—such women cannot be the mothers of the Masterfolk. Pah! these very stones reeked with the blood of that Eve of St. Bartholomew. The doors of this church were scarlet with crime. Up yonder in the haze across the river hung the bell that had sounded in Christ’s name the cut-throat command to slay all such as worshipped not after her fashion. Asceticism is like the will of one who, fearful of the dangers of the sea, fearful to go out on horseback to his wayfarings in the adventures of living, fearful of tragedies that may lurk in every thicket, became so fearful of the accidents that beset life in the living that he shut himself up in a strong castle, its rigid walls hewn from hardest stone—feared even to marry a wife lest she, wearying for another less fearful than he, should put poison in his cup. And the ship went sailing over the sea, and the horseman went riding over the hills, and the woman married her lover and knew life and became a laughing mother of babes, and—the castle fell into the earthquake’s maw.... To such like strange music jig they who suffer the itch of Asceticism’s distorted ideals—hermaphroditic, nay, wholly neuter. Virginity, the fantastic virtue of virtues! They come to find life’s glorification in the supreme denial of life—the chaste nun, she who stands with frantic eyes at issue with her godhood that says to her: “This is the sure and exquisite music of thy lifesong; this is thy office this; for this thy sweet body, thy fragrant breasts; thy every urging is touched with the finger of delicious shame that thou shouldst know with no common thrill the majesty of thy overwhelming significance—Be thou the mother of children.” Nay, does not the Ascetic even approve the ridiculous lie called Illegitimacy? As though a child shall be illegitimate! As though a woman shall find shame in realizing her godhood! They that strive to be barren, alone, are the illegitimate. Nay, had not the ancient churches even raised to solemn dignity of sainthood one Anthony, whose ridiculous virtue was the dread Wiser far, for all their grey and vasty faults, had been the sturdy old Protesters, rude, clumsy, bungling enough though they were—those wise rough men who had emptied abbey and priory of hermaphroditic ideals so that the monkish cell had given place to the family hearth, and the clatter and whisper of inordinate litanies to the laughter and shout of little children. For the Masterfolk have no fear—neither of birth, nor of life, nor of death. Noll took the books of the wisdom of Schopenhauer out of his pockets, and flung them from him into the river below—the pages fluttered, beating the air, and the books that tell of the Refuge from life in the contemplation of the Beautiful and in Asceticism, fell upon the messy flood and were borne along on the polluted waters of the city that went, bubbling filth, to cleanse themselves in the immensity of the mighty deep. And as the books fell, they struck the body of a dead carter that passed in the darkness upon the tide. There was law—how otherwise the evolving of the Masterfolk? There were the heights. How to reach them? The grey towers of the cathedral took solid shape; and, beyond and low down, the coming dawn flushed up from afar, and the smoky heavens lifted and grew light; the vague world arose into palpable form; and the day gained possession of the steamy city. There was a footfall on the dank quays. The bohemians were creeping home to their dingy beds to sleep away the day, turning life upside down, making day into night, night into day—drab symbol of their misconception of the realities. Wherein the Honourable Rupert Greppel shows Hidalgic In a large shed in the workmen’s quarter, on a platform, under the flare of gas-jets high hung in the dim rafters of the great place, there sat three men at a table; and before them, languid and self-possessed, his frock-coat close-buttoned and his scented being attired in the general air and pose of the dandy, stood a man of pale countenance, who, with the calm measured accents that are the habit of self-possession, spoke to the upturned faces of a dark mass of men that swept in a vast attentive hush from before his feet. He spoke with facile precision of thought and accent, holding himself easily, airily, and with picturesque insolence. There was in the air with which he spoke a quiet indifference as to whether he pleased his hearers or not which had something of that strange distinction that marked everything this man did or said—for Rupert Greppel, whatever his faults, had a conspicuous and sincere belief in his own dignity. He stood there calmly hidalgic, swaggering, self-reliant. He never forgot, nor allowed others to forget, that his mother was a French countess, and of the oldest of the old noblesse. He was speaking the last words of an academic appeal to aristocratic anarchy as the solution of the great human problem. He treated with contempt the aspirations and the beliefs in all socialistic ideals, laughed at the good of the largest number. The masses did not even believe in themselves, said he. The strong man, strong in himself and of the breed of those that had belief in themselves through the habit of generations of tyranny and of rule, was alone fit to govern—— “Down with all aristocrats!” cried an ugly-looking fellow at the back of the great seething mass of listening humanity. Rupert Greppel never so much as frowned. A little smile played about his eye-pits and lips. And he was greeted with a storm of counter-cheers from a group of students and friends, amongst whom sat Myre and Noll and others. “You cannot put out the aristocrat with the breath of a mere shout,” said he calmly. “What does the State know of justice or of equity? There is one law for the strong and one for the weak—and there always will be.” “The State is the triumph of the individual over his fellows, rank by rank, until the poorer spirits labour for the free spirits. Tush! when you have a strike in this so-called Republic, the troops are used for those that are in the right, hein?” He laughed. “I tell you they are drawn up to strike for those that are in power. And they are right. The commonweal demands the public good. I am not for it. I demand rather to play gaily with this life that is mine, as if it were mine, not this one’s, nor another’s—I demand to play it like a gentleman, with dignity, elegantly, artistically, free to serve my own sweet will, lusting when I will, with whom I will, reading pleasant literature when I would rest my body, sleeping when I would, strutting it abroad with my clothes well-fitting, enjoying life, and looking well-dressed for the part—I am aristocrat. As for the people let them be as happy as they may, consistently with toil—let them have bread and amusement on occasion—let them prate of the humanities—but do not rack their grey minds with books. Shut the muddling schools to them. Do not harass their vague minds and make them pale with thinking. We can do all that for them. Let them be industrious and well-behaved. Thought and the riot of living are only for the aristocrat. These things but give the people a gross headache. The peasant has stolen our acres; the burgess has bought our strongholds. And is the world gayer? Is it cleaner in conduct? Is it stronger in men? I say the world is for the aristocrat—and the aristocrat has fallen from the days when, the stag being long in the finding, we hunted a lean peasant instead. The aristocrat being dethroned, the Jew holds all France in his fat and grubbing hands. Is France more splendid than it was? But one thing they have not been able to buy—our countenance. They still have our contempt. And we yet hold the reins of the glorious lordship of war. We still know how to die. And until we die, when we walk abroad let the people see to it that they give us the cleanest place if we condescend to walk the same pavement.... But the dirty rogues encroach. The dirty rabble ape our very vices. The people to-day have even the impertinence to be bored—boredom is the privilege of the aristocrat. They would leave us nothing.” Amidst the laughter and the applause that rose above the swell of the ugly growl which was the sullen voice of the great crowd before him, he descended from the platform. A restless silence fell upon the place. But the massed crowd burst into a roar as a man leaped on to the platform and stepped forward before the people—a rough workman, energetic, vigorous, alert, dirty. This was one of those half-educated men of action, bred by the academic unrest of the literary anarchists—bred by the egoists, Nietzsche and other dainty-fingered gentlemanly persons enough, who would have been alarmed to think that their theories were breeding such volcanoes. Into his blood had eaten their academic trifling with extreme individualism—his fanatic eyes glowed at the very The picture-loving eyes of the world are caught by the theatric glamour of the unflinching courage that sent out the debonnair and scented gentlemen of Versailles, beribboned and careless, to face, with clouded canes for sole weapon, the blood-dripping and weaponed mob of the Revolution—the romantic pulse of the grey world is thrilled at the grim tale of the exquisites who continued their games of cards and dice, regardless of the interruption of rude history and with all the elaborate etiquette and fantastic ceremony of their accustomed habit, until the command came from rough lips that it was the turn of each to step into the jolting tumbrils that lumbered to the scaffold and the guillotine. And indeed theirs was a splendid feminine defensive courage, that dreaded only the indecencies. But courage is not the privilege of a class—the sombre garb of the workman holds often enough habitual acts of courage, persistent and grim as that which on occasion sets the poets rhyming if it be shown by a prince of the blood; and it covers thereby a more virile danger, if roused to it, of turning aggressive hands to the rectifying of its grievances, injustices, and years of sullenly borne insolences. And if the rousing be done by a master wit, what vast significance may be there? or what ghastly catastrophe? This fellow swung back his head to speak—and a shout greeted him from the back of the great hall, where some ugly-looking fellows stood: “Gavroche!” cried they—“silence for Gavroche!” The greeting touched the man’s conceit, and he smiled. He laughed: “That scented fellow is not without eyes,” said he; and a shout of laughter greeted him. His eyes settled on his theme; and when the silence came he burst roughly into his harangue: “Nietzsche has spoken the last word,” said he. “Man has arrived above the world’s shambles by struggle alone—he is the fittest to survive. There is no other law. The strongest shall succeed. Existence is an anarchy; and they alone have rights who make them. Yet man, forsooth, arriving at the top of things by mastery, decides Nature to be brutal, forgets that he is where he is by the ruthless selection of the fittest, and being arrived at supremacy in Nature, he thinks to hold Nature back by overthrowing her supreme law—he refuses to let the weak go to the wall, refuses to leave the sick to die, hangs the strong man who slays the weakling, and flouts the very nature which put him a-top of the brutalities to bestride the world! But Nature is not to be flouted. She proceeds, with contempt of all opposition, to evolve the ultimate over-man, the Beyond-Man—the healthy, strong, ruthless, vigorous overlord. Man is the most splendid brute—at the base of him is the scarlet lust of war. The cultured and the He stepped forward as he ended his fierce apostrophe, and shouted it hoarsely: “Vive l’Anarchie!” The great throats of the workmen flung back the cry with a mighty shout; and the students cried applause, setting their canes rapping upon the floor. The cheers set Gavroche’s conceit jigging. He stood, his heavy face glowing in the down-flung light. The shadows played about his eye-pits and high cheek-bones and broad nostrils and heavy chin, and ran down the deep throat; and the light revealed the strong jaw of the man who carries out his contentions. “Thou fool!” The students shouted with laughter; and the mood of the workmen changed, as a Frenchman’s quick subtle mind will change at a ridiculous situation. The vast crowd burst into merriment. Gavroche came down the platform, and suddenly lost the command of himself that had given him a strange dignity during his oration—he gave way to wild gesticulation and his voice rose to a shrill scream, and at once became as the ravings of a maniac to the judgment of the vast multitude. Loss of temper lost him the ear of the house. The big man, Eustace Lovegood, remained standing in calm self-reliance—a dignity that appeals always to the essential dignity that lies beneath the wits of all workers. One of the solemn Three at the table leaned forward, rang a bell, and asked the pleasure of the house; and when the din had ceased he called out to the big man to go up and speak—Gavroche, said he, had had his say and must go down. Gavroche, recovering his calm, shrugged his shoulders and descending from the platform made his way to a group of workmen at the back of the hall—as Lovegood worked his way up to the tribune.... “Come, comrades,” growled Gavroche to his fellows—“pass the word—this fellow will speak for a full hour—he is like to be on the side of the moralities—and they require some explaining. We can be back here soon after. Slip away and meet by the broken river-lamp. The watchword is Rien-publique—and the countersign Beyond-man.” As Lovegood made his huge way to the platform, there also left the hall the engrossed figure of Quogge Myre. A great idea had come to him. Which treats of the Masterfolk The big man faced the people, and squaring his great shoulders he threw back his cloak and gazed solemnly down upon them: “That is a fool,” he said, “yet he spoke much truth.” There was a shout of laughter, and some mock cries of “Vive l’Anarchie!” “It is perfectly true that they, who are the fittest, survive in the mighty struggle for life. The supreme law of life is the Survival of the Best. The best are the fittest. But mark the law: it is not the individual that survives, but the race. Thus, hadst thou been the most exclusive aristocrat of apes, tracing thy lineage to thy uttermost jibbering beginnings in the ooze, thou hadst still gone under the heel of the most bucolic community of men, though, ape to man thou hadst had the greater body’s strength, the deeper egoism, the harder wish to slay. Dominion goes to the race; it is mightier to be of the commonweal of the Masterfolk than to hold the king’s baubles over weaklings. To be sure, he that is king of a little people is a king—of an Insignificance. But they that are the companions of the Masterfolk are lords of a commonwealth that hath set its heel upon the neck of him who rules so small a parish. The Masterfolk have not their eyes upon whence they came, but on whither they go. This Gavroche fellow speaks of strength as if there were only brute strength. The Masterfolk must be free to live the fullest life. To be free, the Masterfolk must be strong of thew. But this is not enough. If strength of body made the overlord, then the lion had been overlord to man, and the negro overborne the white man. But man’s brain wrought the knit brotherhood of the clan and weapons and wondrous defence and the science of war. So the brain’s strength came to be above the body’s strength. The Masterfolk, to be free, must be free in their thinking. Yet it is not enough. For the strong man may have in body a giant’s strength, and in thinking a giant’s strength, but, foot to foot with them that are of his own strength, he goes down before the overlordship of them that are strong in conduct; for he that hath not The Masterfolk to be free must be strong in conduct. Yet again this is not enough. For the strong man to be free must be strong of will. Yet even this is not enough; for the will that acteth against the conscience becomes a bully’s strength and will reel before it finish. Through the conscience shall each man receive purification in his search, which has been the eternal search, for the godhead within him that leads to the fullest life. Therefore the Masterfolk to be free must be strong in conscience—for instinct is at the mystic centre of life. Yet even to be spiritually free is not enough. For the spirit cannot live but through the body. Therefore the Masterfolk must be strong alike in all the freedoms—for in each is the foundation of the other, and in the failure of each is the obliteration of the other. Strong and alert in body, and in thinking, and in will, and in conduct, and in conscience. That man cannot be wholly free who shall ignore any of these freedoms.”... Wherein the Widow Snacheur comes into her Fortune The chill murk that swept up the narrow cobbled street in the pitchy night, swishing long wreathes of fog across the rare lamp-light, told that the river lay close at hand. It was a bitter night; and the winds buffeted out of unseen blacknesses and squealed in a riot of unkindnesses, smiting the face of things and falling away sullenly to smite again; the dingy alley creaked with the complainings of shutters and lamps that strained and jolted in their rusty hinges and grumbled in their iron sockets. A group of ill-looking fellows that whispered on the kerb under a wall-lamp showed shadowy dark and nearly as intangible and dim in the murky gloom as the ghostly shadows that the few flickering lamps sent stealthily creeping across the narrow cobbled way to join other shadows where lurked the vindictive gusts about the edges of the moaning blackness. A lilt of song and the clack of brisk footsteps came down the alley. The muttering group under the lamp turned towards the sound; their anxious ears caught the refrain of one of Aristide Bruant’s obscene prison songs; relief showed on the coarse faces. “Here comes Gavroche,” said one. And Gavroche came. He glanced sharply at them all. His was the master spirit; yet none of these men were easily given to obedience. He laughed: “It is as I thought,” said he. “Comrade HiÉne is pale—his hand perspires—hold out your hand, HiÉne.” The sullen young giant put out his great hand, palm upwards, and it smoked in the keen air of the night. They all turned and stared at the tall lank youth, and his sullen face had an ugly look, though it was of the pallor of death. “I have drawn the lot to strike,” he said, scowling. “I have never killed—and I do not like it——” Gavroche laughed: “Afraid to kill—even an old woman!” he sneered. “And yet not afraid,” said he. “But ashamed—to kill an old woman.... There is a scoundrel I know that I am not afraid to kill.” Gavroche shrugged his shoulders: “And this for an Overman!... Tshah!” He turned to the others: “I had foreseen this,” he said. “I will do the masterwork.” And he added with contempt: “He shall stand at the door where the girl sleeps—for the old fool locks up the girl at night—but the moment we leave, this fellow that fears to kill a woman must unlock the door. Suspicion will fall on the girl.” He turned again to the scowling HiÉne. “Hast thou the courage to throw suspicion, comrade?” he sneered. The sullen young workman made no sign. One of the others moved uneasily: “Good comrades must not quarrel,” said he. Gavroche laughed: “We must forestall danger,” he said. Gavroche turned to the pale young giant: “Mark you, comrade,” said he—“if the girl rouse, thou must into the room and—kill.”... He smiled evilly. “It is all we ask of thee.” Suddenly he stepped close up to him: “By thunder!” said he—“I think this fellow is too weak a fool for men’s work. We had best leave him out.” The huge young fellow met his regard unflinching, with pale set face: “Where Gavroche goes to-night I go,” said he—“if he and I hang for it. But I do no killing.” There was a long silence between the two men. Gavroche shrugged his shoulders; turned on his heels: “We need have no fear, comrades; the Republic will slit his neck otherwise,” said he. “Come.” The widow Snacheur rose from her chair, looked stealthily about her, lit a second candle-end, and went a-tiptoe to the door of the girl’s room. She listened, cautiously turned the handle of the door to see that the lock held, and returned to her table. She changed her seat so that she could see, from where she sat, the door into the maid’s room. She brought out a bag of loose silver from a pocket in her petticoat, poured the contents upon a piece of felt to prevent its making a noise, and counting it into tens she made the money up into rolls with some scraps of newspaper. There was a strange look upon her withered wizened features in the doing—it might once have been a smile, it was now something between suspicion and greed and satisfaction. The gaunt fingers counted the rolls. Thou poor fool! what avails thee now, or has ever availed, or shall ever avail to thy life’s enrichment, this avid culture of thy sordid isolated self? Hast thou found life in gathering gold, or Hearest thou no stealthy fumblings at the locks of thy outer door? Thy gold then hath not kept thee the alert hearing in thy ears, nor won thee the willing service of the hearing of others! And that poor half-famished slave-girl of thine, with her fifteen years crying out for bread, she, whom thou didst sting with thy bitter coward tongue but this morning—she sleeps in her chill room, heavy with the fatigue of thy overtaxings put upon a frail ill-nourished body; she lies mute with the numbing weariness of hunger—how shall she serve thee with the watch-dog ear of affection to guard thee from harm? There is a stealthy hand at thy door, and the latchet turns slowly within the wards of thy locks. A messenger stands without, and his summons none may question—thou must needs make thy further journeyings without thy dingy hoard, without purse or scrip, by thy lank lean shivering self—alone. Ay, at last thy ears warn! For a moment the old woman turned, and gazed with eyes of terror at the coming of sudden death—and her tongue went dry in her mouth—no sound. At the next there fell the weighted sand-bag swung by Gavroche’s skilled hand of villainy, aimed by his murderous eyes, and struck the ancient skull, sending the old woman’s life jigging into the shabby room and out into the void; and at the stroke the body, half-risen from the chair, fell across the table amongst her moneys, sprawled ungainly midst the coins before it further fell, and sideways lurched in a dead huddle upon the floor. To the door of the sleeping girl stepped HiÉne, and stood, tall, slouching, pallid of countenance. And he so stood whilst they all searched stealthily every nook and cranny of the room. Gavroche rose from his stooping survey of the fallen woman, and glanced at a little mirror he held in his hand. There was no damp of breath upon it. “That is the end of her romance,” said he. He laughed low. He was a man that loved his joke. He signed to the others to bring their plunder; and as they came empty-handed except for papers, he uttered a harsh dog’s laugh that showed embarrassment. Save for the silver that lay about, the rest was the scrip of the widow’s investments! Of considerable value, but—useless—dangerous to them. “Curse it!” said Gavroche. “She had a banking account.” There was a low whistle from the fellow who barred the entrance at the outer door. “Quick!” said Gavroche. “Pocket what there is of money, and we will divide later.” “And you,” said he—“unlock that door, carefully.” HiÉne scowled sullenly, standing pale in the candle’s guttering light; and they saw that he held a revolver in his hand: “Comrades,” said he—“I am the last to go—and this door remains locked.” Gavroche shrugged his shoulders: “It does not matter overmuch,” he said. HiÉne smiled grimly. Gavroche moved towards the open door: “Come, comrades,” he said airily, putting aside a scowl that had threatened—“we must be going. That jabbering moralist over the water must be nearing the end of his garrulous harangue. We had better all be seen there.” When they had all gone, HiÉne let himself out of the door into the courtyard, and stealthily closed the gate into the street. The door into the girl’s room remained locked.... And it was so found in the early morning when the police broke into the place, led by the curious concierge, and roused the sleeping girl. Wherein Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre struts airily towards the Goal of Freedom Mr. Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre climbed the stairs to his rooms at midnight; and all that night he wrote. When the grey of the dawn put out his lamp’s light, that wondrous misspending energy of his had finished the essay that brought him such an uproar of notoriety and made him for awhile again the pet of London drawing-rooms. It was a master-stroke. It accounted Æsthetically, the Nietzschian note, for his past infamies; it gave the philosophic standpoint to the latest and shabbiest infamy he was about to commit—for the first bound copy of his new book lay upon the table, fresh from the publisher. He smiled as he thought of the green eyes of Gabrielle Solignac reading this book, reclining in her catlike grace amongst her little smiling Eastern gods. It was scarce a couple of months since he had read a volume of Nietzsche. It had set his brain on fire. It was a revelation—of his own possibilities. Here suddenly was revelation that his instincts had been masterly—that he had no need for shame. With his accustomed industry, he had forthwith mastered the whole of Nietzsche’s published work—our Quogge was a gluttonous reader. Here was a philosophy that overthrew the whole of the accepted ethics and morals of society—overturned the whole conception of conduct. It made of Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre a splendid hero—whom himself in his inner man even he had more than suspected to be a rather scurvy fellow. His conceit and his egoism jumped with this gospel. He foresaw that the vogue of this aristocratic anarchism must soon spread into England—the decaying hereditary aristocracy would leap at any straw, and here for place of straw was a glittering argosy laden with thrones of gold and purple, and carrying a gaudy diadem for them all. It had begun to thrill the youth of Germany and France. He decided to forestall it in England. His great chance had come. There must be no moment’s delay. There was indeed no time to be lost. His book would be in the hands of the reviewers to-day—it would be publicly sold in a fortnight’s time. This new philosophy robbed its publication of all baseness. It would read as if he had had the courage of his outlook upon life. He rubbed his cold hands together.... He brushed his untidy colourless hair off his forehead and read the clean copy of his essay carefully through—altered a line or two—and folded it with a covering letter to his friend Harry Pollis, the egregious editor of a great London Review, begging urgent publication. There was just time to catch the post. He arose, went out into the early morning, and posted it. Myre’s feet never lagged in his duty to his only god. When he returned to his room he looked at himself in the great mirror over the low mantel, rubbed his hands, and smiled. These two things would make a sensation! He stood and gazed at himself. He took a hand-mirror and looked at himself from every point of view. He wondered if a head like his could not be the front of one as great as Shakespeare—he wondered whether he looked like a man who could top the world. It worried him. He posed so as to see the back of his head and the side-face, to see which of the great men of the past he might be most like.... He could find no sign to guide his destiny. But his gloom was suddenly relieved. His conceit saved him. He smiled a large smile. It came to him with a rush that he was wholly original. He lit a cigarette, posed himself in his gorgeous dressing-gown before the mirror again, and smirked upon a pleasant prospect. He dreamed of exquisite sensations. He saw himself sitting in the smartest drawing-rooms, holding himself with delightful insolence, giving voice to anarchistic destruction of all the moralities. Art for art’s sake would be nothing to this. He had once thought of going over to Rome—but every mediocrity went over to Rome nowadays; it had become positively banal—the extremity of commonplace. The very suburbs did it! People were not even barred for it. You went as to a dentist.... God! how he would frighten the editors—and the women! It was time, too, that he was done with France. Indeed, Mr. Quogge Myre, who had so sworn by the French intellect and French art, who had so flouted the vulgarity of the English nation of shopkeepers, found that there were now so many crossing the Channel to Paris that he realized they were discovering and exploiting the sources of his originality. He looked in the mirror. There was no slightest doubt about it, he was becoming puffy, middle-aged, just a leetle bourgeois! He wondered if he had always looked rather a common fellow. Well, the last Clatter about him had run down. He must start another. Yes, he must strike quickly in England—or they would be discovering this Nietzsche for themselves. Some days after Mr. Myre’s notorious book appeared, he walked into a cafÉ frequented by literary men; and he saw that his coming produced a sensation. He went up to a table where Aubrey sat with Noll and Rupert Greppel and Lord Montagu Askew and others; and putting his hand on Aubrey’s shoulder he said airily: “This book will give my lady her freedom.” He flung the volume upon the table, and called for a bock of beer with carefully rehearsed calm. Noll took up the book, She Whom I Once Loved, and skimmed through the recital, shamelessly and brutally detailed, of this conceited fellow’s relations with women. They were of every class.... “Rather vivid!” said Noll, after Myre had yawed away an hour of time. And he added drily: “Yes; you’ll get your divorce.” “It’s rather daring, I flatter myself,” said Mr. Myre. “We lack an English Casanova.” Noll rose from his seat; flung down the volume: “Faugh!” said he; and kicked it into the street, took up his cigarette from the table, flicked the ash from it, and left the place. Myre’s face was livid with anger. The Honourable Rupert Greppel said: “There’ll be blood spilt over this.” Gaston Latour, who sat at a table near by, laughed immoderately. The proceedings for divorce were begun in the French Courts that day. The silent woman with the green eyes was swift when she decided. She took her freedom. The book had a considerable vogue. Which Essays the High Epic Note The day on which Mr. Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre got his freedom in the divorce-courts of France, he received a challenge from a hot young blood called Solignac, first cousin to Gabrielle. Gaston Latour entered the room, grimly solemn in the conventional frock-coat and trim dress of the man of fashion, and holding a shining silk hat in his hand. He was very careful of the silk hat—he had borrowed it. It had the flattest brim he could find in Paris. He was followed by another solemn youth. They marched in, clicked their heels together, bowed, and presented the letter that held the invitation to face death at daybreak. It was all done with a charm of manner devoid of all offence, and a desire to be referred to two of Mr. Myre’s “friends.” Mr. Myre read the letter; and, as he read, his face became more like the hue of badly-made paste. He was a long time reading it, Gaston Latour’s sleepy eyes never leaving him. He burst into a harsh laugh, and flung the letter into the air: “A challenge, eh? ... ha-ha! ho-ho-ho!... Tell your cousin, Monsieur Latour, that the duel is relegated to the limbo of opera-bouffe. Ho-ho-ho! We do not do these things in England.” He prepared himself for a flight of oratory. Gaston Latour nudged the other youth—they bowed solemnly and withdrew. “Ho-ho! ha-ha-ha!” laughed Quogge Myre. The following morning Mr. Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre’s name was posted in every club in Paris, and struck from the list of those to which he had belonged; so it came about that he had to live his day at cafÉs. And it was as he stood at a table, giving authoritative utterance with loud yawing voice to a group of youths that sat about him, vowing that he had determined to shake the dust of Paris from off his splay feet and to start a great renaissance of the Quilliam O’Flaherty stooping down in confusion to search for the hat, she kicked him violently behind. There was a roar of laughter from the students seated round about, and they tapped the handles of their knives upon the tables, singing: “Opera-bouffe, bouffe, bouffe! Opera-bouffe, bouffe, bouffe! Hey-hey-hey! bouffe-bouffe-bouffe!” Then the girl flogged Quilliam with a horse-whip, thrice: Once for France. Once for womanhood. And once because she liked it. The whip whistled. It was said that he had been seen to strike at her—but she parried the blow with her left, and countered between his eyes with the butt-end of the whip—which was loaded. He fell. It was homeric. It was at this stage, so the scandal went, that he scrambled under a table; but she lugged at his collar to get him out; and as he clung to the leg of the table she gripped him by the moustache so that she pulled off one side of it. But she herself owned this to be as inartistic as it was unintentional, stamping her foot with annoyance at the mischance. Indeed, she apologized most handsomely; for, said she, pathetically, when she had got it she did not know what to do with it. It was an anticlimax. She threw down the whip and said he might now go home. He now went home. There is little reason to doubt that the horsewhipping by Gaston Latour’s sister hastened Mr. Myre’s desire to start the great renaissance of the English drama. As he stood before the mirror in his rooms at his hotel and shaved off the remains of his drooping moustache by the candle’s light, and soothed the aching bumps that were risen upon his face, he sniffed loudly through a swollen nose—he had very tender places—and decided to go to Rouen until the hair grew. Which has to do with Blue Blood and a Jade-handled Cane The duel got upon the town. Rupert Greppel, strutting with hidalgic air, was concerned in bringing about several affairs. No one was hurt. There was much braying of asses. The Lord Montagu Askew, dainty, foppish, in the mode, and the Honourable Rupert Greppel, hidalgic, head in air, stood before a shop window in the Rue de la Paix and gazed at their splendid reflections; whilst past them moved on the pavement or whirled by in barouches the great world of Paris—hig-lif sunning its butterfly wings, honey-questing, sipping at any dew that the gods left lying abroad. Montagu Askew held his jade-handled cane mincingly, and he glowed with a gentleman-like glow, for his dove-coloured little book of poems tinted all the bookstalls. More than one woman of high rank this morning had stopped her carriage to congratulate him on the exquisite lyric wherein the vast firmament at break of dawn was likened to the grey of a woman’s glove—indeed, it became the vogue of the drawing-rooms—people sang it. As a fact, Montagu Askew was acknowledged lord of chamber music. Indeed, in his slender careful verse was no rude hint of the full-blooded Rabelaisian love of life; it was innocent of the suggestion of a large emotion; he played upon the accepted measures and the well-authenticated rhyme; he startled with no surprises; he sounded no new note—Montagu never forgot he was a gentleman. Not for him the uncouthness to fling open loud-clanging gates to a new world. He was pretty and serenely mannered before everything, disdainful of them that skipped a foot to the hot jigging blood, or such as showed a strong disdain; nor was he wanting in contempt for the natural emotions. When he condescended to so low an act as to seek nature, he walked through the well-groomed spaces of the world, well-trimmed parks at the outside, where an elaborate etiquette had made the rules even for the trees to grow in seemliness with a most gentlemanly existence. For him were no disturbing peerings into He moved impatiently now, as impatiently as he might, complaining that the shop-window into which he deigned to cast his reflection was tinted with amethyst. “Come, Greppel,” said he—“let us gaze at ourselves in another window—this is an ageing colour.” Then came the terrible tragedy of a fire at a charity bazaar; a most patrician function with much upper clergy in it was smitten with sudden and awful death. Montagu Askew was in the business. He was one of the few that came out alive. In the rush of the distraught ladies, princesses, duchesses, maids, to the sole outlet of the seething hell, Montagu Askew got caught near the door—frantic hands of terrified women clutched at him for help—he was almost within reach of the free air—could see the sunlight a few paces before him—a frightened girl clung to his arm in the awful crush, then another—women’s skirts got under foot as they made for the door, and they went down. He tried to shake himself clear of the two girls, he was a little slender man.... The heat was hellish.... One of the girls tripped on her skirt and fell, clinging to him. He beat her down with the jade-handled cane—fought his way blindly through the rush of women for the door—stood at last out in the sunlight. Some coachmen were dashing into the fiery furnace, lifting up and bringing out fainting women, whose muslin skirts were in flames. But Monty Askew was frightened. He smoothed his ruffled dress and went home. Montagu Askew, entering a cafÉ with Rupert Greppel one evening, saluted Noll Baddlesmere, where he stood amongst a group of students; and a silence fell upon the place. “That’s a handsome cane, Askew,” said he—“though they tell me the women have a poor opinion of it.” Askew’s little gloved hands trembled, and he turned white with anger—as pale as Montagu Askew allowed himself to turn: “It has belonged to my forefathers for seven generations,” he said—“and every man of them backed his acts with his sword.” Noll laughed; shrugged his shoulders: “If your acts are hereditary, it is an excuse for you,” he said. The following morning, Rupert Greppel and a French cousin called upon Noll; and Rupert stiffly asked if he could refer him to two friends. “No,” said Noll—Doome was with him—“no—I do not associate with men who associate with Lord Montagu Askew.” Rupert Greppel paused, dumbfounded: “I do not think you understand,” he said. “Lord Montagu Askew challenges you to fight him.” “Tell Lord Montagu Askew from me,” said Noll, “that I only brawl with men. Good-morning.” The whisperings at the clubs are said to have hit Lord Montagu Askew harder than a pistol-bullet; but Lord Montagu, from lack of experience, is not an authority on being hit with pistol-bullets. He never takes part in ungentlemanly encounters where people are hit. Indeed, he maintains a wondrous silence, except that he challenged Noll; and the jade-handled cane has joined the ancestors. Wherein a Man of the World commits the Indiscretion of putting his Experiences into Writing “Dear Noll,” writes Horace Malahide about this time, “I have a son. He speaks English as yet with a strong foreign accent—but lack of experience may have more than something to do with it. If you come, I’ll let you play with him. I live in a whirl of tangled emotions in these days. T’other evening I went home, to my father’s marble halls, to seek the old gentleman on an affair of hot urgency. It was in the long hours. I lost some temper—the butler being a sphinx of ducal know-nothingness—so I rang up the housekeeper. Yes, she knew where a telegram would find Sir Pompey if I would leave it with her. I! Leave it! Gods! said I, am I utterly disinherit? Forthwith the heir of this branch of the Malahides demanded the address. It lay at St. John’s Wood! I nodded ‘That will do’ to the twain, and dismissed them; and, they being dismissed, I whistled long. Naughty old gentleman!... The next morning Pa did not return. Mid-day passed. Evening stole on.... The dusk saw me descend at the doors of the address in St. John’s Wood from mine hansom cab. I must preach the decencies; thus I, strengthening the intention as I rang. ‘Sir Pompey Malahide is here,’ said I sternly to the smart maid that opened the door. ‘Yes, sir,’ said she. ‘I desire to see my father,’ said I, and marched boldly towards the furious racket that filled the room near at hand—the paternal roar distinctly discernible, bassoonlike as though he cried small coal. I flung open the door—burst upon the riot—— On the floor lay the Byronic Bartholomew Doome with three children rolling over him—three, no less!—another in his arms—Sir ‘What does this mean, Pa?’ cried I. They gathered themselves up, shamelessly—laughed—ye gods, twittingly, at me! Wholly unabashed, Pa, shaking himself into comfort in his clothes, slapped me upon the back: ‘Horace, my son——’ ‘Don’t be familiar, Sir Pompey,’ said I. ‘You are speaking to the heir to a baronetcy.’ The baronet laughed vulgarly: ‘Mrs. Bartholomew Doome,’ he said—‘allow me to introduce to you Horace, my son—at least, my reputed son.’ Bows, chassÉes, and greetings. ‘Horace—the Misses Doome, Master Horace Doome, and Master Oliver Doome——’ The old gentleman slapped me upon the back again with mighty hand that near drove me down amongst the fire-irons. He dug me in the ribs: ‘The rogue’s been married this seven years,’ cried he; ‘and now he’s signed the deeds as partner in Malahide and Son, and you’re just in the nick of time, the fool of a lawyer is upstairs—only—look here, Horace, you must, like Doome, sign a bond not to touch the business arrangements—you and he would wreck the counting-house in six months....’ Doome took an early opportunity to draw me aside and to whisper to me the grave disappointment it must be to all who respected him if they should discover the real Don Juan, begged me not to expose him, and pointed out the serious loss of prestige he must suffer in the eyes of the British Public; so we sat down together on a sofa and pitied him for his decencies. Luddy, luddy! how the homely virtues will persist! The idol of our youth, the dark, mysteriously wicked man—with feet of honest clay and a clean simple heart after all! Even prolific, and—— Well, damn romance, say I.... Oh, and more! Even the gods fall out—drift apart. Aubrey and the O’Myre go different ways—Aubrey in pain that O’Myre has now discovered that there is no great work of art without a moral purpose—Aubrey holding that Aubrey himself is sufficient purpose. He, Aubrey, avers that he has found himself—nothing matters after that. He must back to Paris. There the women have secular lips and voices of brocade and understand being loved. Tiens! He will in future give his splendid talents to attack the Philistinic brutality of strength and the barbarity of the over-rated glory in mere outdoor delight that to-day holds England in poisonous embrace; in all the pride of effeminacy he I expect he will come back to us occasionally to see what he looks like. The egregious O’Myre also hath descended on London town—stays, however, but a little while—— Yet a wondrous thing of a man, the O’Myre—the most consistent surely of all created things—always wrong. He and The Times. He must have been suckled on half-truths, and nurtured on the Irish Bull; he now browses on false conclusions. But with what an air! Nevertheless, he has it all on the most philosophic basis—has for ever been blaming something for his lack of greatness. It now appears the English drama is dead. The O’Myre will breathe new life into it. Meanwhile, he has laid it down, like a minor god with a throaty tenor voice, that scenery destroys the illusion of the drama—therefore it comes about to-day that if you would be in the vogue with the ladies you must go in state not to the play, but to the dress rehearsal—the bare theatre and the dinginess being alone at back, the low tone and the cobwebs and the like giving mystery to the spoken word that requires for enunciation but beautiful lips. God! how the ducks quack! Thus mews he much monstrous wisdom, sitting like a pale emotional maggot upon the apple of discord that is called the modern drama.”... The rest of the letter is a matter of affection and goodwill. A man is always ridiculous about his first-born—exaggerative, egotistical. As though he had invented the business. Whereas, like heredity, immortality, and the latest fashion, it is thrust upon us. Wherein our Hero, and Another, go Home The sunlight that had painted the white face of Paris with a hundred hues all day had given place to a gentle drizzle as the twilight fell; and the steady downpour had driven Noll into a restaurant which he was not in the habit of frequenting; it had kept him there in its bright rooms until he knew every face and every trick of gesture of the people who sat about him. The night was well advanced when he sallied out into the light rain; turning up his collar, he strode homewards. He paid small heed to the rain; and as he turned out of the well-washed street into the courtyard where he had his lodging, and climbed the stairs to his room, he scarcely noticed that he was wet. The rustle of women’s petticoats was in his ears, and when he walked abroad in these days he was aglow with the sense of the warm regard of women’s eyes, that glanced upon him from the dark shadows of rakish hats; the walk and movement of women found a rhythmic echo in his thinking. The warmth of the coming summer was in his blood. His instincts were jigging to the dancing measure of the season. As he flung off his wet clothes he was seized with a whim to go to the tavern of The Golden Sun; and he decided to humour the whim. He lit a candle and flipped through a book until it was close on midnight. But he was restless—and he arose eagerly when it was time to go.... As Noll, reaching the bottom step, fumbled at the door that led into the tavern of The Golden Sun, a young woman in black came languidly down the stairs, and he held the door open for her to pass in. The light fell on the delicate features of Madelaine. She smiled with pleasure, seeing him. They entered and stood together—a song was being sung—and as the last chords were struck, she slipped her hand within his arm; and he left it there. She shared the cordial greeting that Noll received from the faded poets and frequenters of the place. She “Madelaine,” said he—“you look as if you wanted food.” She sighed sadly: “Ah, yes—for years,” she said. He called for a drink and some biscuits for her; and whilst they were being brought, he asked her: “What became of you, Madelaine—after the old widow Snacheur was killed?” She sighed sadly: “I went to work in a millinery shop.” She shrugged her slender shoulders. “They starved me too,” she said—“just like the widow Snacheur. So——” She slipped her hand through his arm, laid her head against his shoulder, and smiled: “But do not let us think of these things—it is so warm here.” The touch of the affectionate hands, the childlike caress of the girl, the confidence and the clinging of her warm body to him, thrilled him. She was in all the fresh beauty of her young womanhood; and the simple black gown, threadbare and worn as it was, only enhanced the beauty of her skin and pronounced the delicacy of her colour and the richness of her splendid hair. The girl increased the restlessness that had possessed the youth all day. She brought to him the sweet whiteness and the subtle grace of Betty—filled his senses with the atmosphere of the handsome girl who had filled all his dreams from boyhood. It brought to him the most importunate craving of man, the love of woman. Noll sat brooding for awhile. Yet even in the vigorous lust of life that held his young years, even as he sat there in the thrill of his sweetest memories, he vaguely felt the gentle presence of these simple faded artistic folk about him; and he realized how indelibly the word Failure was written across them all. The coats were, if anything, more faded; the shoes more worn; the eyes alone lit up with the wonted glow of delight in art. A little praise was their rich barmecidal feast. The greybeards, and the youths, and those between, they were all still hoping to create the masterpiece—there was not, amongst them all, energy enough to create more than the delicate measure of a gust of chamber-music. A burst of applause followed the recital of a poem. Noll roused with a start: “Come, Madelaine,” said he—“this heavy air is making you faint. Come with me and we’ll have some supper.” She gathered her skirts with wonted grace of gesture and took his arm; and they made their way out of the room almost unnoticed. As the doors closed on them, she turned in the dim ill-lit passage, drew down his face to her between her two hands, and kissed him. She clung to him: She was trembling. “You are tired, Madelaine,” he said. She nodded: “I have had no sleep for three nights.” “What have you been doing?” he asked. “I walked about the streets,” she answered simply. “Come,” he said, “we must first sup.” She gathered up her skirts, and slipped her hand through his arm. They climbed up to the courtyard, and so into the street, and out into the night. Madelaine sat on the side of the bed and undressed. It was a sadly simple undressing. She was languid with sleep. Noll went and looked out of the window, where Paris lay below him, blinking her thousand eyes.... He roused and went to the bed. The dark head on the pillow lay very still. The girl was fast asleep. Noll went back to the window—it was the window from which Horace had gazed down upon the world the night before Noll and Betty had come to Paris. And as Noll so stood, his brows hard knit upon the problems of his life, the night slowly passed. The rustle of a woman’s skirt had been in his ears all day—in his blood. This girl had brought back to him, of a sudden, the fragrance of his marriage. And this beautiful winsome girl—what was to be the end? The very question sobered him. Suddenly it was as though he had left the din of the noisy thoroughfare of life and had entered the majestic silence of a mighty cathedral; and from the great mysterious deeps a whisper came to his ears, each syllable roundly phrased, clear, unhesitating, a chapter of this strange book of life that he had so lately read—the book that had fired his blood and aroused his energy. The breath of these pages seemed to give him decision and free air, where before he had been drifting aimlessly, going he knew not whither, caring not overmuch. This book had braced him—it was a call to battle. He had had enough of beds of roses and daffodils and idyllic trances. The phrasing of The Masterfolk came to him now: “Nature has ordered that certain things shall be; and to him who disobeys her ordering she is cruelly merciless. She has decreed that he shall be most dominant, shall breed the fittest race, shall know the fullest life, shall achieve the highest destiny, who abides by the woman he loves. And him who is unclean she flings upon the dunghill—him and his seed for ever. Of the love of man for woman, Nature has spoken with no uncertain voice; and Nature’s judgment is final. He that fears to love a woman sets There is no sin in the love of man and woman. The woman has committed no sin in loving—she has but accepted the overwhelming urging of life. It is her chiefest glory. Man has committed no sin in loving; his life has ordered it; and the Masterfolk obey life. It is his chiefest glory. Who so glum a dullard but smiles to see lovers meeting! But he sins foully who is guilty of the repudiation—foully against the woman, criminally against his race, blasphemously against his godhood, and damnably against his manhood. Such are not of the Masterfolk. They of the inferior manhood, lacking in the force of character necessary to the full acceptance of the duties of the Masterfolk in love, have not the virile force to abide by a woman of the Masterfolk; and these come out when the lamps are lit and there are shadows in the land, and skulk about the by-lanes, and commit mean adulteries with frail women, and have the habit of repudiating debt. Such cannot breed the Masterfolk. They shall not. For these cower from the strengthening risks that dog a strenuous life; they would have the delight of marriage without the courage....” Noll opened the window. There came from the street below the hoarse cry of a prostitute. He went into the room, lit a candle, and sat down at his desk. Everything in the place whispered of Betty this night. He wrote a letter:
And when he had sealed this letter he wrote another:
Noll sealed the letter and wrote a third—to the concierge:
He stole to where Madelaine slept, and on the chair by her bed he put her letter and some banknotes. He collected clothes from about the room, packed them into his large leather kit-bag, and carried it to where the candle gave light. From the walls he took down the portraits of Betty and one or two trinkets, and very carefully wrapped them up. They too went into the bag. He was near singing more than once. The place was astir with the sound of Betty’s skirts, the echo of her gaiety, the sound of her light footstep. The air was sweet with the breath of her uncomplaining good-nature. He shut up the bag, tied a label upon it, put on his cloak and hat, blew out the candle, and softly let himself out of the room. In the darkness Noll stood upon the bridge at the end of the Boule Miche, the pleasant highway of youth. But he now knew no indecisions. He realized that his mere intellect had led him into the veriest pedantries—had nearly led him into irretrievable blunders. He saw that man’s highest was rooted in the body, that heaven was no fantastic dream, but here and now for the winning on this healthy He realized that the emotion felt was nearer to the centre of life than all thought. He cast from him the devil of mere intellect, and it went out of him demurely into the darkness, like some poor thin-souled nun, who crushes down into barrenness the splendid emotions of the life within her which are her very godhood, in fantastic hope to win an eternity of vague bliss, she who by the very act shows her inability to enjoy bliss—for, heaven and hell and all the eternities shall yield her no such bliss as the dear human loves may do—the Æons of immortality shall never bring her the delight that she might know in an hour of a lover’s embrace or the dear touch of a nestling child at her lean breasts. As the awakened youth stood there, the black night passed over the edge of the populous city, and its smoky shadow slowly followed it. The lights of the lamps paled in the dawn; the stars went out; and out of the daffodil east the day came up—and there was light in the world. Before the day was well begun, Noll went home. ****** In the still grey dawn, in dripping drizzle, Gavroche the anarchist slouched forth from prison-cell to his harsh doom. He was dejected. He missed the band, the public eye, the shouts of the comrades. What, Gavroche! this is thy dramatic moment—thou hast the stage all to thy sole swaggering self—and though thou roused at daybreak from thy broodings to lilt a braggart song with all thy best intent to play the reckless swashbuckler, the florid eager pressman can only report that thou didst sing “somewhat palsily.” Tush, man! Is it thus thou goest to thy end? Hath thy desire to be Ruthless Overman brought only this about—that thou art to become no better than manure? Where is now thy dream of Ruthless Overman? Nay, what avails at all now thy Overmanhood, Gavroche? does not thy neck feel rather with unpleasant shiver of discomfort the overlordship of the Commonweal? The aristocrat despised it yesterday, and thou to-day. Hast thou, even thus late, a glimmering that thy vaunted Ruthless Brutality is to be snipped by the might of this Commonweal, thy unspeakable windpipe slit at a stroke of the ordered shear that falls on the bidding of that overwhelming force which is the public good—the Yet, if the insignificance of thy little petty self irk thy conceit at this moment, what of the scented, gloved, and dandified gentlemen who write the anarchic words that have led thy conceit to seek some shabby fame in flinging a bomb amongst innocent people! What of them whose lyric pens have pointed the way to the Uselessness of the old and sick and far-too-many and superfluous ones! What of them that go scot-free—whose philosophies led thee to kill the old miser-woman and to slay the drunken carter to thine own Egoism’s enrichment? Tsh! thou wert but a tool after all, thou with all thy strange gabble of Ruthless Overman, putting to the touch of practice what the gloved gentlemen were content to prate of—Might being Right and the rest. Well, thou goest to thy dunghill alone—they to their social triumphs. And, when all’s said, the aristocratic ideal has brought rich harvests as well as the shearing of necks to its idolaters—and they have had their emotional moments in intervals of starving the race and filching from the poor and from the widow and the fatherless. Nay, doth not Europe, bereft of protestations, bow, hat in hand, to the Almanach de Gotha? And the fine gentry therein, weak-knee’d and inbred and ridiculous, do they not claim divine rights and special places reserved in church and the tribute of the Formalities all set and square to their comical little greatnesses? And multitude of lackeys!... Gods! are they not even Envied! Verily, Gavroche, thou hast been lacking in the diplomacies. It is that which has been thy chief offence against thyself. These others bray as loudly—but the accent is more tuneful. So, the same dawn, the self-same lamp of day, sees us all going each on our so different way. |
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