Phyllis Bottome

“ Mademoiselle, I implore you, trust me! Speak to me, tell me what I can do for you, and believe that is the only advantage I will take of your confidence.”
“Help me, Monsieur?” asked Margot, sitting up straight and regarding this strange young man with wide-open, astonished eyes. “Why, what should you do for me? Are you not a friend of de Brances?”
Jean shook his head impatiently. “What difference does that make?” he exclaimed. “Am I not a man and an artist; do you suppose all men are inhuman and monstrous like that crétin who spoke to you just now? ”

“ Jean alone must stay here always to the bitter sound of his own wasted life! He watched himself grow tamely, narrowly old, through the coming years; there would be nothing in him to challenge life. Maurice and his fellow-officers and their fun would go out once more into the merry world, Jean would remain. In time he would cease attending the Lycée, he would come home and farm Ucelles. In the evenings he would play a little if he was not too tired, but never his own music any more! Why should he shame the divine flickering gift within him, which he could never develop, nor yet throw away? ”

“ Maurice is the size of his income, neither larger nor smaller, and I give him his money’s worth, rest assured! Why should I give him more? He is not an object of charity! For myself I am an artist; I should bore myself prettily if I sat and pined all day for your little man of the world! I need a friend who is also an artist. It is you to-day; I remind you, though you do not like it, that there have been yesterdays, and that if you are not very good, there will be to-morrows.”
Jean closed his eyes. He hated what Liane was saying, and he thought if he shut his eyes he might not see her words. ”

“ It was the hour when Paris awoke; rich, expensive, passionate Paris, and launched itself into swift, tireless motors, racing to and fro through the transient pleasure of the night. The Champs Élysées stretched before him like a coil of swiftly flashing jewels. Fire and speed, and the gay faculty of easy living, flamed its message home to the world. It was to this great stream that Madame Torialli belonged—belonged, that is, by birth, by position, by success; but Jean no longer [Pg 294] believed that she shared its life; the gay world was such a small affair. ”

“ It makes the mind go so quickly like the long, quivering, grey band in a threshing machine.
They would pass, Gabrielle and the fat little secretary, in a flying motor, only the next minute to turn in at a lighted café—though they might at the same time be standing on the steps of a house above the street. They even on one occasion leaned out of a window to laugh, and stood just in front of Jean on the pavement simultaneously; but one thing was always the same; they were laughing at Jean because he had not killed Flaubert and because he had not stayed with Gabrielle. ”

“ And as all Liane’s friends were bons enfants and quite acknowledged Liane to be one too, they prepared to listen.
Jean, seeing the keen, impassive attention on the faces before him, felt physically incapacitated to move. There were no young men present, the youngest could not have been under forty. Life and struggle and success were written in the lines of their faces. Liane had more than kept her word to him, these were all des hommes arrivés—the picked brains of Paris, which is the brain of the world. ”

“ He began to think, too, more good-naturedly of Maurice, and less—very much less—proudly of himself; but he still thought that he loved Liane. It takes a great deal to kill love, for after the glory of the individual has faded, there still remains the inmost unquenchable fire—the love of love. Perhaps it would not be true to say that Jean still loved Liane. She had very much disgusted and distressed him, but she could still make him love love, and while she could do that there was no real danger of his escaping her. ”

“ Violence is a mistake, it destroys the senses. In pleasure, my dear boy, as in delicate health, a little and often is the best possible prescription. Now this kind of thing,” said Romain, fingering a blue bead mat, “this kind of thing is very extreme; it leads you nowhere.”
“I must protest, Uncle, once and for all,” said Jean firmly, “that I am not here for my pleasure, and that my connection with Mademoiselle is wholly innocent. I stay here with her and her mother because it happens to be the only possible means of carrying on my career; but music is absolutely the only tie between us.” ”

“ The night was very still; high above the avenue of whispering limes the waning moon slid idly through the sky. She was warped and twisted and out of shape, and silvery pale—she stood to Jean as a symbol of all perverted, tortured lives, his father’s, and his own too, perhaps; who knew what would happen to him in Paris? Not what his Aunt Anne thought, nothing ever happened quite as [Pg 29] she thought, because life always leans a little to the side of the ideal, even in its ugliest moments; but strange things other than Jean could yet imagine? ”

“ Her heart rebelled against this stern catechism. Ah, why could she not take her joy when it came to her? It had come at last—for a moment she let the taste of it fill her whole consciousness, but she did not let Jean see that she had done so; she kept her eyes down and no one knew what Margot looked like when she held her heart’s desire. Then she lifted them and looked into Jean’s eyes as Jean had never seen her look before; it was the terrible implacable look of a human being seeking for truth. ”

“ Then Cartier said:
“I wish you’d come with me to Russia, Jean; it’s the best place for you to get the taste of Paris out of your mouth! Paris is like this! You won’t get on here. You don’t understand her little ways. You think of things as if they were made of jewels; they’re not: they’re made, for the most part, of paste. When one knows that one pays the price for paste, but to pay as you do is to be ruined.” ”

“ Margot lived in three badly-furnished rooms on a sixième étage. There was the kitchen, sitting-room, dining-room, all in one. It was filled with crude attempts at a useless prettiness and pervaded by an odour of perpetual cooking. Leading out of it was her bedroom and her mother’s, from which there came the unwholesome smell of one of Madame’s hidden bottles. Jean’s room across the passage was furnished with Spartan simplicity, but irritatingly full of Margot’s desire to please him, which took the form of religious pictures and many superfluous small pieces of embroidery. ”

“ The Odéon is a very big theatre—old-fashioned and given up to long passages and bare rooms; it lacks the exquisite arrangements of the first artists’ boudoir, the colour schemes and artistic furniture of the more modern theatres, but to Jean it all seemed magnificent enough, and Liane’s room of white and gold, stiflingly hot and brilliantly lighted, with a small dressing-room leading out of it, astounded him by its importance. Nothing could be too important for her, but he had never known that artists’ dressing-rooms would be the least like this. ”

“ A genius that doesn’t work is like a blood-horse with a broken wind—all very fine for the preliminary canter, but good for nothing after the first fence. You don’t come here with tales like that, I hope, Mademoiselle?”
“Oh, Monsieur,” exclaimed Margot, “first, before I tell you anything, promise me never to let him know that I have been here!”
“Mademoiselle,” laughed Cartier, “I am discretion itself. No one shall ever know of it! Has he become a Barbe Bleue, le petit Jean, in my absence?” ”

“ She loved art, as no artist ever loves it; and she knew the world of human beings as no artist can ever know it; and after being the greatest passion of Torialli’s life, she became his most useful possession; and she accepted her position gracefully, and turned it as she did all the other facts of life—to her own advantage.
“Thank you, Madame,” said Jean simply.
“Voyons,” she said, laughing a little, and even blushing through the careful enamelling of her face. “Even old women have in their hearts a corner where they like to play the young girl! ”

“ The rain came on again, and the short day was closing before Jean realized that the sudden stream of grey houses was after all not going to break again into empty fields, but was Paris herself, the great insignificant fringe of the world’s enigma, the city where there is most pleasure and least happiness—the cleverest thought and the vainest action—where more ideas are born and more perish in their tarnished bloom than any other place on earth. ”

“ Miss Prenderghast shook her head over them; she had a shocked suspicion, not unlike the priest and the doctor, that he might be meeting some woman; but she would have been even more shocked if she had known he was meeting his own soul. A woman would not have prevented Jean from becoming a bank clerk, but no one knows what a man’s soul may prevent him from becoming. It has led him before now to become an artist, and it has even taught him (and this is the hardest thing perhaps for thoroughly good, religious people to understand) to develop into a saint. ”

“ Talent? You will not use it. Beauty? Your friend Maurice with his ox eyes, his butcher’s moustache, his figure enlaced, presents something better to the eye than you. What then? Your wit? My poor Jean, you have just given me, it seems, a specimen. Pardon me if I prefer my own. You have not the sense to see that there are only two things worth having—money and life—and that one pays for the other! ”

“ Jean set himself to please her with an almost feminine gentleness and tact. He did not ask from her refined sensibilities or quick perceptions. He called her to himself a great artist, and he made himself believe that this excused everything.
He was very young and he loved her, and the young cannot love without the divine fire. They must look for their vine to bring forth grapes, and when it brings forth wild grapes they shut their eyes.
They will believe in beauty though they must go blind to keep their vision ”

“ Fortunately, perhaps, Pauline could not follow Torialli’s rapid French; she only understood enough of it to know that Jean had succeeded; and she knew that she herself had never sung so well before.
“I’m right glad you’re pleased,” she said to Torialli. “Monsieur D’Ucelles helped my voice a lot, I know. It’s something to have a man who knows how to play. You don’t suppose I could have sung like that if your secretary had been at the piano.”
Madame Torialli laughed. Her voice was like the deeper note of a silver bell.
“Our poor little Louis!” ”

“ If Miss Prenderghast was not at home in France, Elizabeth was still less likely to be so. Miss Prenderghast regarded it with suspicion, but Elizabeth with open-eyed hostility. Everything was different from what Elizabeth had been accustomed to, and Elizabeth knew that everything which was different was wrong. But all human consistency breaks down somewhere; Elizabeth’s broke down over Jean. When she first saw him he was a little French boy, very French indeed, and a Catholic; and he was not the less French now nor less Catholic at twenty; but Elizabeth was human and she loved him. ”

“ You suppose yourself to be a musician already, it seems, and you are not, you are nothing! I take you away from your cows in the country, I lift you to an honour many men would perish for, yes, and have perished for in vain! and I have to see you in my own theatre treating a woman of my position to the very last indignity—the very last, I would have you know, Jean, that a woman of my spirit will put up with. Selba indeed!” She flung her powder-puff across the room, and touched up her left eyebrow in a dramatic but carefully measured fury. ”

“ It occurred to Margot once to mention very timidly the fine uncle of the motor and the fur overcoat, as a possible source of supply, but when Jean said that he would rather settle the question with the Seine she dropped the subject.
“After all,” Jean would sometimes say carelessly, “look what a time it gives me for your voice; it would be almost a pity, chérie, to take up anything else just now!”
It was true Margot did wonders with her new singing master; he put his whole soul into Margot’s voice, he polished it like a careful jeweller polishes his favourite jewel. ”

“ You cannot know a man for thirty years and be entirely ignorant of his favourite idea, especially when he has not got more than one. The Curé wished Jean to become a priest, and the doctor hated the idea with all his heart. He was a Socialist, you must remember, a Radical and a cynic, so of course he wanted Jean to become a grand seigneur—a man of the world, and at the same time noted for his domestic happiness, with a large family of sons. ”

“ In half an hour’s time he felt he would be eternally disgraced in his own eyes and in Liane’s. Then he began to play some of the Russian music he had just been learning by heart in his rooms as a hermit. In a moment he realized that the music expressed Liane, expressed the wonder of her, the sacred beauty, the incredible force and joy! He was not nervous any more after that, the music became a communication between them, and he let himself go. Jean’s music was an original and instinctive note. He had spoken the truth when he had told Liane it was the only thing for which he cared. ”

“ Paris is very fond of Revues—so many things can be put in a Revue that sound quite harmless when they are sung, without being nearly as harmless as they sound; and that is what Paris likes, because half the charm of a bad thing would cease to exist if it could not be made to resemble a good one. To appear to be what you are bores Paris. She would always dress her peasants to look like kings and queens, and her kings and queens to look like peasants.
To make the Revue a success Flaubert had obtained the consent of Prince Ivan and Prince Rudolph to appear in it. ”

“ Monsieur Moncet, the jeune premier, had sent her to ask Monsieur Picot to begin the rehearsal, as he had an urgent appointment to keep and had waited an hour already.
It is a curious thing that the more depraved and cold-hearted human beings are, the more passionately sentimental they become. Liane was incorrigibly sentimental, and Margot owed her dismissal entirely to the bunch of violets. It had been Jean’s custom to present Liane with violets every day, and for Jean’s sake Liane had temporarily thrust aside all the more expensive tributes which besieged her door. ”

“ But Margot’s turn was over; she had slipped away with her arms full of flowers.
Jean put his hand on Cartier’s shoulder.
“No! no!” he said. “I will not go round, mon vieux! Cela suffit—we have already parted!
“But to-morrow you and I will go to Russia. I feel to-night as if after all I might do something—who knows—life is not over at twenty-five. Something has made a new man of me to-night, and I have an idea that this new man will make a little music. Mon Dieu! broken music, perhaps, but one cannot have everything complete! At the bottom of all beauty I find that there is grief.” ”

“ It was not her natural voice, and she looked at Jean with a soft enclosing look which seemed to shut out the world.
No woman is very dangerous to a man unless she is a little self-conscious, and Liane was so completely self-conscious that she could afford to be perfectly natural. She knew herself as an artist knows his picture or a captain his ship.
“I think you have fallen from heaven!” she said, sinking into a chaise longue and patting the cushions left and right of her into a suitable background. “Or if you have come from the other place that will be more amusing still! ”

“ Do not be startled, my dear Jean, and above all do not be precipitate. I daresay you wonder what the fair Pauline should see in you. To tell the truth, I fancy she does not see very much, but you have a certain value—you are my nephew, you have a good old name, and (for these Americans are so like children) it appears that your little title is not indifferent to her, and then there is your aunt. The poor girl considers your aunt to be the ideal French grande dame. They have such an infallible instinct, these young persons, for breeding and the right ton. ”

“ It was not easy for Jean to explain to Maurice about his vocation now, but Maurice was, after all, only another man, and Jean was not a coward.
“This is not the kind of life I have been living,” he began lamely. “You see, Maurice, I am bound to say so, I don’t like the—the ways of Paris.”
“No?” said Maurice cheerfully. “Well, that is a pity! Still, if you have been leading a dull life and not mixing with clever people like ourselves—one understands. We must alter all that, you know; I’ll talk to Liane about it. Au revoir, Jean.” ”