Henry Harland

“ It was a queer life for a girl to live, that happy-go-lucky life of the Latin Quarter, lawless and unpremeditated, with a café for her school-room, and none but men for comrades; but Nina liked it; and her father had a theory in his madness. He was a Bohemian, not in practice only, but in principle; he preached Bohemianism as the most rational manner of existence, maintaining that it developed what was intrinsic and authentic in one's character, saved one from the artificial, and brought one into immediate contact with the realities of the world ”

“ We yearned to unite the cryptic word to his surname by a hyphen; the mere abstract notion of doing so filled us with fearful joy. Chalks was right, I dare say; we were easily amused. And Nina, at these moments of literary frenzy—I can see her now: her head bent over the manuscript, her hair in some disarray, a spiral of cigarette-smoke winding ceilingward from between the fingers of her idle hand, her lips parted, her eyes gleaming with mischievous inspirations, her face pale with the intensity of her glee. ”

“ She had finished her luncheon, and was taking coffee; and if the whole truth must be told, I'm afraid she was taking it with a petit-verre and a cigarette. She wore an exceedingly simple black frock, with a bunch of violets in her breast, and a hat with a sweeping black feather and a daring brim. Her dark luxurious hair broke into a riot of fluffy little curls about her forehead, and thence waved richly away to where it was massed behind; her cheeks glowed with a lovely colour (thanks, doubtless, to Yorkshire breezes; sweet are the uses of adversity) ”

“ It had brought him nothing but old age, solitude, disappointment, and, to-night especially, a sense of fatigue and apathy that weighed upon him like a suffocating blanket. On a table, a yard or two away, stood a decanter of whisky, with some soda-water bottles and tumblers; he looked at it with heavy eyes, and he knew that there was what he needed. A little whisky would strengthen him, revive him, and make it possible for him to bestir himself and undress and go to bed. But when he thought of rising and moving to pour the whisky out, he shrank from that effort as from an Herculean labour ”

“ He was tall and slender, with dark waving hair, a delicate aquiline profile, a clear brown skin, and grey eyes, alert, intelligent, kindly. I fancy the Boulevard St. Michel, flooded with sunshine, broken here and there by long crisp shadows; trams and omnibuses toiling up the hill, tooting their horns; students and étudiantes sauntering gaily backwards and forwards on the trottoir; an odour of asphalte, of caporal tobacco; myself one of the multitude on the terrace of a café; and Edmund and Godelinette coming to join me—he with his swinging stride, a gesture of salutation, a laughing face ”

“ Here she was, scarcely turned thirty, beautiful, brilliant, rich in her own right, as free in all respects to follow her own will as any man could be, with Camille happily at her side, a well grown, rosy, merry miss of twelve,—here was Nina, thus, to-day; and yet, a mere little ten years ago, I remembered her ... ah, in a very different plight indeed. True, she has got no more than her deserts; she has paid for her success, every pennyweight of it, in hard work and self-denial. ”

“ All children are passionately in love with somebody, aren't they? A real grande passion. It began when I was about ten.' He broke off, to laugh. 'Do you care for love stories? I'm a weary, wayworn man; but upon my word, I've never in all my life felt any such intense emotion for a woman, anything that so nearly deserved to be called love, as I felt for Hélène de la Granjolaye when I was an infant. ”

“ We have lost all hope, all self-respect. We are ships that have come to grief, that are foundering, that will presently go down. Yet we are not altogether to be pitied: we know life. To the respectable man, the prosperous, life shows herself only in the world, decently attired: we know her at home in her nudity. For him she has manners, a good behaviour, a society smile ”

“ But Camille? Restaurants, cafés, studios, the Boul' Miche, and this little garret—do they form a wholesome environment? Oh, no, no—I am not a renegade. I am a Bohemian; I shall always be; it is bred in the bone. But my daughter—ought she not to have the opportunity, at least, of being different, of being like other girls? You see, I had my father; she will have only me. And I distrust myself; I have no "system." Shall I not do better, then, to adopt the system of the world? To give her the conventional education, the conventional "advantages"? A home, what they call home influences. ”

“ It is one of the regrets of my life that he died before I had achieved my celebrity. However, I have achieved it. My name is a household word wherever the English language is read. I have written the only novels of my time that are sure to live. They will live not only by virtue of their style and matter, but because of a quality they possess which I must call universal—a quality which appeals with equal force to readers of every rank, and which will procure for them as wide a popularity five hundred years hence as they enjoy to-day. ”

“ To have your orbit in the art world of Paris, and to be recognised there as a star; to be written about in the Revue des Deux-Mondes; to possess the friendship of the masters, to know that they believe in you, to hear them prophesy, 'He will do great things'—all that is something, even if your wares don't 'take on' in the market-place. ”

“ He was one of the institutions of the Latin Quarter, one of the least admirable. He haunted the Boulevard St. Michel, hung round the cafés, begged of the passing stranger, picked up cigarette-ends, and would, at a pinch, run errands, or do odd jobs.
With his sallow, wrinkled skin, his jungle of grey beard, his thick grey hair, matted and shiny, covering his ears and falling about his shoulders, he was scarcely an attractive-looking person. ”

“ If they wish to live together under the same roof, let them. If they wish to retain their separate domiciles, let them. If they wish to cleave to each other till death severs them—if they wish to part on the morrow of their union—let them, by heaven. But the couple who go before a priest or a magistrate, and bind themselves in ceremonial marriage, are serving to perpetuate tyranny, are insulting the dignity of human nature.' Such was the gospel which Nina had absorbed (don't, for goodness' sake, imagine that I approve of it because I cite it) , and which she professed in entire good faith. ”

“ I can see him still—his unwashed red hand toying with the stem of his liqueur-glass, or rising from time to time to push his hair from his forehead, over which it dangled in soggy wisps, while, in a dinner-table tone of voice, he uttered these somewhat surprising sentiments.
'You would be horrified, you others, lads of twenty, with your careers before you,—you would be horrified if you thought it possible that you might end your days like Bibi, would you not? You wish to walk a clean path, to prosper, to be respectable, to wear sweet linen, to die honoured, regretted. ”

“ Thrown upon the streets of Paris, without friends, without money, he had not the stuff in him to stand up against the forces that were in operation to drag him down. Which of us can be sure that he would have that stuff? From begging for work whereby to earn money, Kasghine fell to begging for money itself. His pride receiving a thousand wounds, instead of being strengthened by them, was killed. Cleanliness is a luxury, a labour; he began to neglect his person; and, in the case of a gentleman, neglect of the person is generally the first step towards neglect of the spirit. ”

“ It is here that you and she used to play a fugue on each other's names. The spot raises ghosts. Ghosts of your old emotions. And I'm conveniently at hand.'
'If you could see yourself, you'd understand that the influence of places is superfluous. If you could look into my heart you'd recognise that my emotion is scarcely a ghost.'
'There's one thing I should like to see,' she said. 'I should very much like to look into your garden at Saint-Graal.'
'Would you?' he cried eagerly. ”

“ In the window stood a big cage, enclosing the family of white mice.
I remember it as a very big cage indeed; no doubt I should find it shrunken to quite moderate dimensions if I could see it again. There were three generations of mice in it: a fat old couple, the founders of the race, dozing phlegmatically on their laurels in a corner; then a dozen medium-sized, slender mice, trim and youthful-looking, rushing irrelevantly hither and thither, with funny inquisitive little faces; and then a squirming mass of pink things, like caterpillars, that were really infant mice, newborn. ”

“ And, with transitions infinitely rapid, he would be serious, jocose—solemn, ribald—earnest, flippant—logical, whimsical, turn and turn about. And in every sentence, in its form or in its substance, he would wrap a surprise for you—it was the unexpected word, the unexpected assertion, sentiment, conclusion, that constantly arrived. Meanwhile it would enhance your enjoyment mightily to watch his physiognomy, the movements of his great, grey, shaggy head, the lightening and darkening of his eyes, his smile, his frown, his occasional slight shrug or gesture. ”

“ Do you know Granjolaye? The castle? It's worth going over. It used to belong to the Kings of Navarre, you know. We used to play together in the great audience chamber, and chase each other through the secret passages in the walls. At Saint-Graal we confined ourselves to the garden. Her head was full of the queerest romantic notions. You couldn't persuade her that the white irises that grew about our pond weren't enchanted princesses. One day we filled a bottle with holy water at the Church, and then she sprinkled them with it, pronouncing an incantation. ”

“ He that eats of the fruit of the tree of life shares the vision of the gods. He gazes upon the naked face of truth. I don't pretend that the face of truth is beautiful. It is hideous beyond imagination. ”

“ Some of us in the Latin Quarter found the man's egotism insupportable, and gave him a wide berth. Others, more numerous, among them the irrepressible Chalks, made it an object of derision, and would exhaust their ingenuity in efforts to lead him on, and entice him into more and more egregious exhibitions of it; while, if they did not laugh in his face, they took, at least, no slightest pains to conceal their jubilant interchange of winks and nudges.
'If he were only an ass,' Chalks urged, 'one might feel disposed to spare him. A merciful man is merciful to a beast. ”

“ But, in Nina's case, even when I regard it from this distance of time, I still feel, as we all felt then, that the mystery was more than ordinarily obscure. We had fancied ourselves prepared for anything; the only thing we weren't prepared for was the thing that befell. We had expected 'him' to be offensive, and he wasn't. He was, quite simply, insignificant. He was a South American, a Brazilian, a member of the School of Mines: a poor, undersized, pale, spiritless, apologetic creature, with rather a Teutonic-looking name, Ernest Mayer. ”

“ For, with her, filial piety did in very truth partake of the nature of religion; she really, literally, idolised her father. One only needed to watch her for three minutes, as she sat beside him, to understand the depth and ardour of her emotion: how she adored him, how she admired him and believed in him, how proud of him she was, how she rejoiced in him. 'Oh, you think you know my father,' I remember her saying to us once. 'Nobody knows him. Nobody is great enough to know him. ”

“ There was something arch, something a little sceptical, a little quizzical in her expression, as if, perhaps, she were disposed to take the world, more or less, with a grain of salt; at the same time there was something rich, warm-blooded, luxurious, suggesting that she would know how to savour its pleasantnesses with complete enjoyment. ”