He did not go to Elizabeth that night: he walked, in a dream, past Knightsbridge and up Piccadilly, contemplating the fulfilment of all his dreams. Everything seemed possible now. He was a young man—and Ferrol was going to give him Paris; he was a young man—and Elizabeth had given him her love. The sequence of this thought was significant.
It would be very fine to tell her.... At last he was lifted out of the rut into a field of new endeavour. From Paris the path led to other cities, of course—to Petersburg, Vienna, and Rome. One day he would see them all. Life became at once very broad and open.
He walked on, an un-noteworthy figure in the throng of people that moved along Piccadilly, his thoughts surging with the prospects of his new life.
Humphrey Quain ... Paris Correspondent of The Day.
He murmured that to himself. Glorious title! Splendid Ferrol. How noble was this work in Fleet Street, holding out great promises to those who served it well, and sacrificed everything on its altar. How could one abandon a calling where fortune may change in a moment?
He passed through astonishing ranks of women whose eyes and lips simulated love: one or two of them spoke to him in foreign accents. He passed on across the Circus where the lights of the Variety Theatres made a blur of yellow in the nebulous night.
His steps led him again to Fleet Street, and he walked with the joy of a man treading the soil of his own country. It was always the same when he passed the Griffin: deep satisfaction took hold of him at the sight of the signs in all the buildings, telling of newspapers all the world over, in this narrow Street in which the lives of him and his kind were centred. The fascination of the Street was perpetual. It belonged to him. It belonged to all of them. At every hour of the day and night there were always friends to be met.
He turned into the cheery warmth of the Pen Club—friends everywhere and Fleet Street smiling! There was laughter at the wooden counter, where Larkin was telling some story to a group of men.
Well, the next day I thought I'd go up and inquire after his lordship's health. The butler was very kind. 'Come in,' he said. 'His lordship's expecting you.' So up I went, thinking I was going to get a fine story—he was supposed to be dangerously ill in bed, mind you.
Humphrey joined the group and listened. ("Have a drink?" said Larkin, turning to him. "It's my shout.")
Well, continued Larkin, "when I got to the room, there was his lordship in pants and undervest—you know how fat he is—with dumb-bells in his hands and whirling his arms about like a windmill. 'Do I look like a dying man?' he said, dancing lightly on his toes. 'Go back, young man, and tell your editor what you've seen. Good-morning.'"
Talking of funny experiences, said one of the others, "I remember—" And so it went on, story after story, of real things happening in the most extraordinary way. It was all this that Humphrey enjoyed, this inter-change of experiences, this telling of stories that were never written in newspapers, that belonged alone to them.
Presently Tommy Pride came in. "Hullo all!" he said, "Hullo! young Quain—been busy to-day?"
They sat down together, and Humphrey noticed that Tommy's face had changed greatly, even in the last few months. The flesh was loose and colourless, and the eyes had a nervous, wandering look in them.
Ferrol's going to send me to Paris—he told me so to-night, Humphrey blurted out.
Splendid, said Tommy. "Good for you." And then a look of great pathos crept into his eyes, and he seemed to grow very old all at once. "I wish I had all your chances," he said wistfully. "I wonder what will be the end of me.... I hear they're making changes."
Don't you bother, Humphrey said. "Ferrol knows what you're worth.... But, I say, Tommy, you don't mind, do you ... aren't you taking too much of that," he pointed to the whisky glass.
Oh, hell! What does it matter, said Tommy. "What does anything matter.... I'm a little worried ... they're thinking of making changes," he repeated aimlessly.
It was all settled in a few minutes the next morning. The Paris appointment was definitely confirmed: he was to leave immediately. He hastened to Elizabeth to tell her the wonderful news. It never occurred to him that she could be otherwise than pleased and proud at his success. But her manner was recondite and baffling.
Have you accepted the post? she asked.
Why, of course, he said. "How could I refuse such a chance."
She regarded him dubiously. "No—you could not refuse it. I don't blame you for not refusing it. I think I know how you feel...."
It's splendid! Humphrey cried. His voice rang with enthusiasm. "Fancy Ferrol singling me out. It will be the making of me.... It might lead to anything."
But weren't you only going to stay in journalism for another year, Humphrey?
Oh, of course, when I said that, I couldn't foresee that this was going to happen.... Elizabeth, he said suddenly, with a great fear on him, "do you want me to give it up now?"
No ... no, she said in haste. "You don't understand. It's so difficult to make you see. I wasn't prepared for this...." She laughed for no reason at all. "I am glad of your success. I am glad you're happy.... Of course, you don't expect me to come to Paris, like this, at a moment's notice. You must give me time."
He smiled with relief. "Why, of course, I didn't imagine I could carry you away at once.... But after a few months, perhaps. It will take me a few months to get used to the work."
Yes, she agreed, "after a few months. We shall see."
Her face was strangely sorrowful. Her attitude perplexed him. It hurt him to find that she did not share in his rejoicings. It took away some of the savour of his success.
He thought he was the master of his destiny. He could not discern the hand of Ferrol moving him again towards a crisis in his life.
The noise of Paris came to him through the open windows, a confusion of trivial sounds utterly different from the solid, strong note that London gave forth. It was the noise of a nursery of children playing with toys—he heard the continuous jingle of bells round the necks of the horses that drew the cabs, the shouts of men crying newspapers, the squeaking horns of motor-cars, and, every afternoon, at this hour, the sound of some pedlar calling attention to his wares, with a trumpet that had a tinny sound.
At intervals the voice of Paris, modified by the height at which he lived and the distance he was from the Grands Boulevards, sent a shout to him that reminded him of London. That was when a heavy rumbling shook the narrow street which was one of the tributaries of the Boulevards, as a monstrous, unwieldy omnibus, drawn by three horses abreast, rolled upwards on its passage to the Gare du Nord. The horses' hoofs slapped the street with the clatter of iron on stone, and the passing of the omnibus drowned every other sound with its thunder, so that when it had gone, and the echoes of its passage had died away, the voice of Paris seemed more mincing and playful than before.
Humphrey had been in Paris six months now, but the first impression that the city gave had never been erased from his mind.
At first the name had filled him with a curious kind of awe: Paris and the splendour of its art and life, and the history which linked the centuries together; all the history of the Kings of France which he did not know, and the rest that he knew with the vagueness of a somewhat neglected education—the bloody days of the Revolution, the siege, the Commune; Paris, the cockpit of history and the pleasure-house of the world. There was some enchantment in the thought of going to Paris, not as a mere visitor, but as a worker, one who was to share the daily lives of the people.
And he had arrived in the evening of a February day, in the crisp cold, bewildered by the strangeness of the station. The huge engine had dragged him and his fellows—Englishmen chiefly, travelling southwards, and eastwards, and westwards in search of sunshine—across the black country of France, into the greener, sweeter meadows of the Valley of the Loire, with tall poplars on the sky-line, through the suburbs with their red and white houses looking as if they had been built yesterday, to the vaulted bareness of the Gare du Nord. There, as it puffed and panted, like a stout, elderly gentleman out of breath, it seemed to gasp: "I've done my part. Look after yourselves."
To leave the train was like leaving a friend. One stepped to the low platform and became an insect in a web of blue-bloused porters, helpless, eager to placate, afraid of creating a disturbance. It seemed to Humphrey in those first few moments that these people were inimical to him; they spoke to him roughly and without the traditional politeness of French people. The black-bearded ticket-collector snatched the little Cook's pocket-book from his hand, tore out the last tickets, and thrust it back on him, murmuring some complaint, possibly because Humphrey had not unclasped the elastic band. There was bother about luggage too; Heaven knows what, but he waited dismally and hungrily in the vast room, with its flicker of white light from the arc-lamps above the low counters at which the Customs-men, in their shabby uniforms, seemed to be quarrelling with one another, their voices pitched in the loud key that is seldom used in England.
He was required to explain and explain again to three or four officials; something of a minor, technical point, he gathered, was barring him from his baggage. His French was not quite adequate to the occasion; but it was maddening to see them shrug their shoulders with a movement that suggested that they rejoiced in his discomfiture.... It was all straightened out, somehow, by a uniformed interpreter, a friendly man who came into Humphrey's existence for a moment, and passed out of it in a casual way, a professional dispenser of sympathy and help, expecting no more reward than a franc or so for services that deserved a life-long gratitude.
But when the cabman had shouted at him, and the blue-bloused porters (one had attached himself to each of his four pieces of baggage) had insisted on their full payment, and after there had been an exchange of abuse between the cabman and an itinerant seller of violets, whose barrow had nearly been run down, Humphrey looked out of the window and caught his first glimpses of Paris ... of the light that suggested warmth and laughter.
He saw great splashes of light, and through the broad glass windows of the cafés a vision of cosy rooms, bustling with the business of eating, of white tables at which men and women sat—ordinary middle-class people. The movement of their arms and shoulders and heads showed that conversation was brisk during their meal; they smiled at one another.
As the cab sped softly along on its pneumatic tyres, he saw picture after picture of this kind, set in its frame of light. "I shall like living here," he thought. Chance decreed that the Rue le Peletier was being repaired, and the cab swung out of the narrower streets into the vivid and wonderful brilliance of the Boulevard des Italiens.
The street throbbed with light and life. He was in a broad avenue with windows that blazed with splendid colour in the night. The faces of the clocks in the middle of the avenue were lit up; the lamps of the flower and newspaper kiosks made pools of shining yellow on the pavement; and above him the red and golden and green of the illuminated advertisements came and went, sending their iridescence into the night. It was not one unbearable glare that startled the eyes, but a blend of many delicate and fine luminous tints: one café was lit with electric lights that gave out a soft pale rose colour, another was of the faintest blue, and a third a delicate yellow, and all these different notes of light rushed together in a lucent harmony.
Music floated to him as he passed slowly in the stream of bleating and jingling and hooting traffic. He saw the people sitting outside the cafés near braziers of glowing coal, calmly drinking coloured liquids, as though there were no such thing as work in the world.
And that was the thought that gave Humphrey his first impression of Paris. These people, it seemed, only played with life. There was something artificial and unreal about all these cafés: they played at being angry (that business at the Customs office was part of the game), an agent held up a little white baton to stop the traffic—playing at being a London policeman, thought Humphrey. He wondered whether this sort of thing went on always, with an absurd thought of the Paris he had seen at a London exhibition.
The cab veered out of the traffic down a side-street between two cafés larger than the rest, and, at the last glimpse of people sitting in overcoats and furs by the braziers, he laughed in the delight of it. "Why, they're playing at it being summer," he said to himself.
Six months had passed since that day, and he had seen Paris in many aspects, yet nothing could alter his first impression. The whole city was built as a temple of pleasure, a feminine city, with all the shops in the Rue Royale or the Avenue de l'Opera decked with fine jewels and sables. Huge emporiums everywhere, crowded with silks and ribbons and lace; wonderful restaurants, with soft rose-shaded lights and mauve and grey tapestries, as dainty as a lady's boudoir. Somewhere, very discreetly kept in the background, men and women toiled behind the scenes of luxury and pleasure ... those markets in the bleak morning, and the factories on the outskirts of the city, and along the outer Boulevards one saw great-chested men and narrow-chested girls walking homewards from their day's work. But there was pleasure, even for these people: the material pleasure of life, and the spiritual pleasure of art and beauty. The first they could satisfy with a jolly meal in the little bright restaurants of their quarter with red wine and cognac; and of the second they could take their fill for nothing, if they were so minded, for it surrounded them in a scattered profusion everywhere.
Humphrey, in the Paris office of The Day, on the fourth floor of an apartment building in the Rue le Peletier, sat dreaming of all that had happened in the past six months. Wonderful months had they been to him! They had altered his whole perception of things. Here, in a new world and a new city, he was beginning to see things in a truer proportion. Fleet Street receded into the far perspective as something quite small and unimportant; the men themselves, even, seemed narrow-minded and petty, incapable of thinking more deeply than the news of the day demanded.
Humphrey, from the heights of his room in Paris, began to see how broad the world was, that it was finer to deal with nations than individuals, and from his view Fleet Street appeared to him in the same relation as Easterham had appeared to him in London.
The clock struck five. Rivers and Neckinger and Selsey would be going into the conference now in Ferrol's room to discuss the contents of the paper.
Anything big from Paris? some one would be asking, or "What about Berlin?"... And he knew that every night they looked towards Paris, where amazing things happened, and he, Humphrey Quain, was Paris. That splendid thought thrilled him to the greatest endeavour. He was The Day's watchman in Paris, not only of all the news that happened in the capital, but of all the happenings in the whole territory of France.
A pile of cuttings from the morning's papers were on his desk. Here was a leading article on the Franco-German relations from the Echo de Paris—an important leading article, obviously inspired by the Quai D'Orsay. There was a two-column account of the Hanon case—an extraordinary murder in Lyons which English readers were following with great interest. There was a budget of "fait-divers," those astonishing events in which the fertility of the Paris journalist's imagination rises to its highest point. They supplied the "human interest." He had received a wire from London to interview a famous French actress, who was going to play in a London theatre, and that had kept him busy for the afternoon. The morning had been devoted to reading every Paris paper.
At five o'clock Dagneau arrived with the evening papers, bought from the fat old woman who kept the kiosk outside the Café Riche. He let himself into the flat with a latch-key, and appeared before Humphrey, a young man, immaculately dressed, with a light beard fringing his fat cheeks. Humphrey could never quite overcome the oddness of having a bearded man as his junior. Dagneau was only twenty-two, but he had grown a beard since he was twenty; that was how youths played at being men. Humphrey called Dagneau "the lamb."
Hullo, he said. "Anything special?"
Dagneau's pronunciation of English was as bad as Humphrey's pronunciation of French, but in both cases the vocabulary was immense.
They're crying 'Death of the President' on the Boulevards, said Dagneau.
Humphrey leapt up. "Great Heavens! You don't say so!" he shouted, going to the telephone.
Be not in a hurry, mon vieux. (Though Dagneau was his assistant, they dropped all formalities between themselves.) "It is in La Presse."
But—
Calm yourself. La Presse is selling in thousands. The news is printed in great black letters across the front page.
Is it true? gasped Humphrey.
It is true that the President is dead—but it is the President of Montemujo or something like that in South America, and not M. Loubet.
Dagneau laughed merrily and slapped the papers on the table. He took Humphrey by the shoulders and shook him playfully.
I—would I let my old and faithful Englishman down? he asked. The newspaper phrase spoken as Dagneau spoke it sounded delightful.
By George, you gave me a shock, Humphrey laughed. "I thought I'd been dozing for an hour with the President dead. Dagneau, you are an espèce de—anything you like."
Any telegrams from London?
One to interview Jeanne Granier. I've done it Will you go through the evening papers? Look out for the Temps comments on the Persian railway ... they're running that in London. And the latest stuff about the Hanon case. I'll run round to Le Parisien and see what they've got.
He went down the winding staircase, past the red-faced concierge and his enormous wife, who knitted perpetually by the door ("Pas des lettres, m'sieu," she said, in answer to his inquiring look), and so into the street. A passing cabman held up his whip in appeal, and, as moments were precious now, Humphrey engaged him. They bowled along through the side-streets, and at the end of each he saw, repeated, the glorious opal and orange sunset over Paris: those magnificent sunsets that left the sky in a smother of golden and purple and dark clouds edged with livid light behind the steeple of St Augustine. They came to the building of Le Parisien, with whom The Day had an arrangement by which Humphrey could see their proofs evening and night, in exchange for extending the same privilege to the London Correspondent of Le Parisien at the offices of The Day.
He crossed the threshold into the familiar atmosphere of Fleet Street. Hurry and activity: young Frenchmen writing rapidly in room after room. Some of them knew him, looked up from their work and nodded to him. From below the printing-machines sent tremors through the building, as they rolled off the first edition for the distant provinces of France, and for the night trains to every capital of Europe. The same old work was going on here: the same incessant quest and record of news.
He went to the room of Barboux, the foreign editor.
Good-evening, said Barboux, black-bearded, fat and bald-headed. He pronounced "evening" as though it were a French word, and it came out "événandje."
Barboux offered Humphrey a cigarette he had just rolled with black tobacco, and asked him most intimate questions of his doings in Paris, so that Humphrey had either to acknowledge himself a prude or a Parisian.
All the same, said Barboux, "Paris is a wonderful city, hein?"
It is, said Humphrey.
Barboux continued: "Is it not the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the most entrancing city in the world, young Englishman?"
All except London, replied Humphrey.
Rosbif—Goddam—I box your nose, laughed Barboux.
It was a set form of dialogue that took place every night between them, without variation, a joke invented by Barboux.
A man in an apron—a French version of the type in The Day's printing-office—brought in a budget of proofs.
There is nothing that is happening, ain't it? remarked Barboux, who always rendered n'est ce pas in this literal fashion.
Apparently not, Humphrey agreed, glancing through the proofs. "When do they expect the verdict in the Hanon case?"
Barboux touched a bell. A young man appeared. His hair was fair and long, his clothes were faultless to the crease in the trousers turned up in the English style over patent-leather shoes with the laces tied in big bows. Barboux introduced him: "M. Charnac will tell you about the Hanon case."
The young man bowed in a charming manner, and spoke in a soft, delicious French, with a voice that was charged with courtesy and kindness.
They do not expect a verdict to-night, m'sieu. The court has adjourned. I've just had the finish of our correspondent's message.
Merci, said Humphrey.
Pas de quoi, said Charnac, bowing.
Humphrey rose and bowed with the ultra politeness that was now part of his daily life. They shook hands.
Enchanté d'avoir fait votre connaissance, and Charnac bowed once more.
Enchanté, mumbled Humphrey.
Barboux was at the telephone, saying impatiently, "Ah-lo.... Ah ... lo." Humphrey put on his hat, Barboux extended his left hand—the greatest sign of friendship that a Frenchman can give, since it implies that he knows you too well for you to take offence at it.
à demain, said Humphrey, as he went away.
When he came back to the office, work began in earnest. First of all he had to select from the budget of news on his table those items that would be most acceptable to English readers. That was no small matter on days when there were many things happening. It required sound judgment and a knowledge of what was best in news. Then there was always the question of the other correspondents of London newspapers: what were the other fellows sending?
He and Dagneau talked things over, and, finally, when they had decided what to transmit to London, the work of compiling the stories began. It was necessary to build up a coherent, comprehensive story out of the cuttings before him, in which all the points of the different papers should be mentioned. Dagneau helped him, making illiterate translations of leading articles, that needed revising and knocking into shape. Perhaps, even at the eleventh hour, a telegram might arrive from the London headquarters, setting them a new task, rendering void all the work they might have done.
After two hours' writing Humphrey laid down his pen. "Come along, my lamb," he said to Dagneau; "let us go to dinner."
Then they put on their hats and coats and went to Boisson's, a few doors away in the Rue le Peletier, where Père Boisson presided over a pewter counter, spread with glasses and bottles, and Mère Boisson superintended the kitchen, and Henri, the waiter, with a desperate squint, ran to and fro with his burden of plates, covering many miles every night by passing and repassing from the restaurant tables to the steamy recesses behind the door.
This was the part of Paris life that pleased Humphrey most.
They received him with cheery Bons soirs, and Henri paused in his race to set the chairs for them, and arrange their table. Yards of crisp bread were brought to them, and a carafon of the red wine from Touraine, whither M. Boisson went on a pilgrimage once a year to sample and buy for himself.
Little French olives and filet d'hareng saur; soup with sorrel floating in it; fish with black butter sauce; a contre-filet or a vol au vent deliciously cooked; Roquefort cheese, and, to wind up with, what M. Boisson called magnificently Une Belle Poire—this was the little dinner they had for something under three francs, and, of course, there was special coffee to follow, and, as a piece of extravagance, a liqueur of mandarin or noyeau.
This is better than Fleet Street, said Humphrey, inhaling his cigarette and sipping at the excellent coffee. Boisson in his shirt-sleeves and apron came over to them and spoke to them with light banter. He also had a joke of his own: he conceived it to be the highest form of humour to interject "Aoh—yes—olright," several times during the conversation.
Madame Boisson waddled towards them, with an overflowing figure, and said, as if her future happiness depended on an answer in the affirmative, "Vous avez bien diné, m'sieu."
The smell of food was pleasant here: there was no hurry; men and women concentrated all their attention on eating and enjoying their meal. The light shone on the glasses of red and white wine. It was a picture that delighted Humphrey.
And Dagneau was telling him of his adventures on the previous night with a little girl, the dearest little girl he had ever met, kissing the tips of his fingers to the air, whenever his emotions overcame him ... and Humphrey smiled. This was a side of Paris of which he knew nothing. His thoughts went back to London where Elizabeth lived, beautiful and austere. "I must write to Elizabeth to-night," he thought.
At nine-twenty Dagneau caught the eye of Henri and made an imaginary gesture of writing on the palm of his left hand. "That's the way to get a perfect French accent," he said to Humphrey. Henri nodded in swift comprehension and appeared with a piece of paper on which illegible figures were scrawled. They paid and went away, with the Boissons and Henri calling farewells to them. Happy little restaurant in the Rue le Peletier!
They got back to the office just as the telephone bell was making a rattling din. Humphrey sat down and adjusted over his head the steel band that held the receivers close to his ears. Then, pulling the telephone closer to him, and spreading out before him all that he had written, he waited.
And, presently, sometimes receding and sometimes coming nearer above the hum and buzz that sounded like the wind and the waves roaring about the deep-sea cables, he heard the voice of Westgate coming from England. "Hallo ... hallo ... hallo.... That you, Quain.... Can't hear you.... Get another line ... buzz—zz—zz ... oooo. Ah! that's better." Westgate's voice became suddenly clear and vibrating as though he were speaking from the next room. But Humphrey could see the little box in the sub-editors' room, where all the men were working round Selsey, and the messenger-boys coming and going with their flimsy envelopes; he could see the strained, eager face of Westgate, as he waited, pencil in hand ... and he began.
He shouted the news of Paris for fifteen minutes, and at the end the perspiration wetted his forehead, and Westgate's good-night left him exhausted. Sometimes, when the wires were interfered with by a gale, the fifteen minutes were wasted in futile shouting and endeavour to be heard in London; sometimes Westgate would say bluntly: "Selsey says he doesn't want any of that story," when he began to read his carefully prepared notes. Those were desperate minutes, shouting to London against time.
All well? asked Dagneau, when he finished.
I suppose so, Humphrey answered. "Westgate was in great form to-night—he was taking down at the rate of a hundred and twenty words a minute...." He rose and stretched himself. "Will you pay the late call at the newspaper offices? I'll be at Constans in case anything happens."
Out again into the bright glamour of the Boulevards to Constans at the corner of the Place de l'Opera, in the shadow of the opera-house, to meet the other correspondents, and wait on the events of Europe, and drink brandy and soda or the light lager-beer that was sold at Constans.
It was a place where most of the Paris correspondents gathered, and, sometimes, the "Special Correspondents" came also. They were lofty people, who had long since left the routine of Fleet Street; the princes of journalism, who passed through Paris on their way to St Petersburg, to Madrid—to any part of Europe or the world where there was unrest; war correspondents, and special commissioners; men who had letters of introduction from diplomat to diplomat, who talked with kings and chancellors, and interviewed sultans. They flitted through Paris whenever any big news happened, in twos and threes, only staying for a few hours at Constans to meet friends, and then on again by the midnight expresses....
They were a jolly lot of fellows who met in those days at Constans: O'Malley of The Sentinel, the fair-haired scholar who spoke of style in writing, and could speak French with an Irish accent and knew how to ask the waiter to "Apporthez des p'hommes de therrey"; Punter, who represented the Kelmscotts' papers, talked French politics late into the night, and wore a monocle that never dropped from his eye—not even in those exciting moments when Michael, his coal-black eyes and hair betraying his ancestry, crossed his path in argument.
At midnight Dagneau came in with word from the outside world. All was quiet. So Humphrey went back to the hotel in the Rue d'Antin, where he rented a room on the fifth floor by the month for eighty francs, including the morning roll and bowl of coffee. He wrote his letter to Elizabeth: he wanted her to come to Paris and share his life with him.
He wanted her very much to share in the delight of those days. It was all so new and beautiful to him, so different from London. He went about the city, sometimes alone, sometimes with Dagneau for a companion, to the Louvre, where the Venus de Milo filled him with awe and wonder, or to the Luxembourg, with its statuary set among the green trees. In the afternoons, when he had any spare time, he would take a book and read in the Tuileries, or on one of the seats in the Champs Elysées, where the fat Norman and Breton nurses, with their broad coloured ribbons floating from their coifs, wheeled perambulators up and down, or took the children to the Punch and Judy shows. And on Sundays in the season, there were the races at Longchamps, with a drive homewards in the cool of the evening, through the Bois, where his cab was one of a long line of vehicles making a moving pageant of the human comedy, with laughing bourgeois families riding five and six in a cab, and aristocracy and opulent beauty, artificial and real, rolling by in victorias and electric broughams.
Those rides down the Avenue du Bois to the Arc de Triomphe made him feel very poor: the women, lolling back in silken comfort, seemed lifted above the everyday world, away from all thought of squalor and sordidness. They were the rare hot-house flowers of society; the cold wind of life's reality would wither them in a day. So they passed before him, exquisitely beautiful and remote, looking with languid interest at the rest of the people in the incomparable vanity of their silk and lace and diamonds....
Yet again, his work took him behind the scenes of Parisian life, into places that are not familiar to the casual visitor to Paris. He would sit in the Chamber of Deputies to make notes of an important debate, or to watch the rigid semicircle of French legislators break up into riotous factions, with the tintinnabulation of the President's bell adding to the din. This would appear in The Day with the head-line, "Pandemonium in the French Chamber." Perhaps it was necessary to interview a juge d'instruction in his private room at the Palais de Justice, or to pass through the corridors of the Surété—France's Scotland Yard—to inquire into a sensational murder mystery.
And he found, too, that in Paris he had a certain standing as a journalist that was denied him in London. He was registered in books, and the seal of approval was given to him in the shape of a coupe-fil, which was a card of identity, with his portrait and the name of The Day on it—a magic card that enabled him to do miraculous things with policemen and officials; it was a passport to the front row in the drama of life. There was no need in Paris to haggle with policemen, to wink at them, and win a passage through the crowd by subterfuge as in London: this card divided a way for him through the multitude.
So that now, when he felt that he had established himself in his career, when his salary was more than adequate for the needs of two, the strong need of Elizabeth came to him. The brilliant gaiety of Paris swirled about him, and tried to entice him into its joyous whirlpool. He knew the dangers that beset him: he knew the stories of men who had been dragged into the whirlpool, down into the waters that closed over their heads, bringing oblivion.
And he looked towards the ideal of Elizabeth, as he had always looked towards the ideal of the love which she personified, to save him from the evil things that are bred by loneliness and despair.
One Saturday night, when there was nothing else to do, he went up to Montmartre, and walked along the Boulevard de Clichy, past the grotesque absurdities of the cabarets that are set there for the delectation of foreign and provincial strangers: cabarets that mock at death and heaven and hell with all the vulgarity and coarseness that exists side by side with the love of beauty, art and culture in Paris.
For a franc you could watch the old illusion of a shrouded man turning to a grisly skeleton in his narrow coffin; or you could see a diverting burlesque of the celestial realms, and observe how sinners were burnt in a canvas hell with artificial flames. Humphrey had seen all these during his first week in Paris: he had laughed, but afterwards he had been ashamed of his laughter. They were a little degrading....
He passed them by to-night, in spite of the enticing blandishments of the mock mute, the angel and the devil by the doors of their haunts. He wandered aimlessly along this Boulevard, where women crossed his path, looking very picturesque, without any covering to their heads, shawls across their shoulders and red aprons down to the fringe of their short skirts. There was something savage and primitive about these women: they lacked the frankness and gaiety of the coster-girl in London; they were beautiful, with an evil and cruel beauty. Vicious-looking men slouched from the shadows. Their looks could not conceal the knives in their pockets. They were as rats in the night, creeping from pavement to pavement, preying on humanity.
The door of a café chantant opened, as Humphrey came abreast with it, and the sound of a jingling chorus, played on a discordant piano, arrested his steps. The man who was coming out, thinking that Humphrey was about to enter, held the door open for him politely. Something impelled Humphrey forward.
He went inside.
The room was heavy with tobacco smoke; it floated in thin clouds about the lights and drifted here and there in pale spirals as it was blown from the lips of the smokers. His vision was blurred by the smoke at first, and, as he stood there blinking and self-conscious, it was as though he had intruded into some private and intimate gathering. It seemed that every one in the room was staring at him. The impression only lasted a moment. He perceived a vacant chair by a table and sat down, with the bearing of one to whom the place was familiar.
All around him the men and women were sitting. There was an air of sex-comradeship that, in spite of its frankness, was neither indecent nor blatant. The people were behaving in the most natural way in the world. Sometimes a woman nestled close to a man and their hands interlaced; sometimes a man sat with his arm round the waist of a girl. Mild liquids were before them—the light beer of France, little glasses of cherries soaked in brandy, glasses of white and red wine. Their eyes were set towards the small stage at the end of the room, a narrow platform framed in crudely-painted canvas, representing trees and foliage; while at the back there was a drop-scene that showed a forest as an early Japanese artist might have drawn it, with vast distances and a nursery contempt for perspective.
His eye wandered to the walls painted with scroll-work and deformed cupids and panels of nude women, so badly done that they appealed more to the sense of humour than to the sexual. The pictures on the walls seemed to leave the men and women untouched; they concentrated all their attention on the entertainment. The only person in the place who showed any sign of boredom was the gendarme who sat by the door, the State's hostage to its conscience. Nothing, said the State, in effect, can be indecent if one of our gendarmes is there. This was not one of the cabarets where the poet-singers of Montmartre chant, with melancholy face, their witty doggerel or their fragrant pastorals; where people came to hear the veiled obscenities of political satire or allusions to passing events; this was a second-rate affair, a tingel-tangel—a species of family music-hall.
A waiter in an alpaca jacket, a stained apron wound skirt-wise round his trousers, approached Humphrey with an inquiring lift of his eyebrows. He removed empty glasses dexterously with one hand and slopped a cloth over the table with the other.
M'sieu, desire...?
Un fin, answered Humphrey.
The waiter emitted an explosive Bon and threaded his way through the labyrinth of chairs to a high wooden counter, where a fat man, with his shirt-sleeves rolled back to his elbow, stood sentinel over rows of coloured bottles. The light shone on green and red liqueurs, on pale amber and dark brown bottles placed on glass shelves against a looking-glass background, that reflected the bullet shape of the patron's close-cropped head.
Meanwhile the pianist had finished his interlude, and there was a burst of applause as a woman appeared on the stage. She wore an amazing hat of orange and white silk, in which feathers were the most insistent feature. There was something extraordinarily bold and flaunting in her presence. Her neck and shoulders and bosom were bare to the low cut of her bodice, and the cruel light showed the powder that she had scattered over her throat and shoulders to make them white and enticing; it showed the red paint on the lips and the rouge on the cheeks, and the black on her eyelashes and eyebrows. The crude touches of obvious artifice destroyed her beauty. Her waist was compressed into a painful smallness, and her skirt was flounced and reached only to the knees.
She sang a song that had something to do with a soldier's life. "Tell me, soldier," she sang, "what do you think of in battle? Do you think of the glory of the Fatherland and the splendour of dying for France?" And the soldier answers: "I think only of a farm in Avignon, and a maiden whose lips I used to kiss on the old bridge; I think only of my old mother and how she will embrace me when I come home."
When she sang the simple song, though her voice was false, and her gestures stereotyped, the rouge and the powder and the paint were forgotten for a moment. She was one of those unconscious artists belonging to a people who have art woven into the warp and woof of their daily life.
The audience took up the chorus. She nodded to them with an audacious smile. The pianist, with his cigarette stub hanging from his lips, under cover of the volume of voices, forsook the treble for a moment, and reached out with his hand for a glass of beer that rested above the piano.
It was the strange, fumbling motion of his hand that caught Humphrey's eye, trained to observe such details. He looked closer, and saw that the pianist's eyes were closed, and the lashes were withered where they met the cheek. He was blind; he never saw the faces and figures of the women who sang, he only heard the voices; he could see nothing that was harsh and cruel. And the picture of the blind pianist at the side of the garish stage, improvising little runs and trills and spinning a web of melody night after night, stirred Humphrey with an odd emotion.
There was a pause. The door opened and closed as people came and went. Humphrey sipped at the brandy; the fiery taste of it made his palate and throat smart. The price of the entertainment was one franc, including a drink.
Suddenly the pianist struck up a well-known air. A slim girl, in the costume of the district, slouched on to the stage, her hands thrust into the pockets of her apron. Her hair was bundled together in careless heaps of yellow, her eyes were pale blue and almost almond-shaped, her features finely moulded, with a queer distinction of their own. And when she took one hand out of her apron pocket, he saw that the fingers were long and exquisitely tapered, and tipped with pink, beautiful nails that shone in the light. Those finger-nails betrayed her. They were not in keeping with the part.
She started singing, walking the small stage with a swaying motion of her body; her young form was lithe and graceful; her movements tigrine. And as she sang her lilting chorus, her pale eyes gazed from their narrow slits at Humphrey, not boldly or coquettishly, but with an indeterminate appeal, as though she felt ashamed of her song.
"Quand je danse avec mon grand frisé Il a l'air de m'enlacer Je perds la tête 'Suis comme une bête! 'Y a pas chose—'suis sa chose à lui 'Y a pas mal—Quoi? C'est mon mari Car moi, je l'aime J'aime mon grand frisé.
"The audience sang the swinging chorus, and she moved sinuously to and fro with the rhythm of it. Humphrey sat there, and he seemed to lose consciousness of all the other people in the room—the smell of the smoke, and the jingle of the piano, and the ill-painted pictures on the walls faded away from him; all his senses seemed to merge and concentrate on the enjoyment of this moment. She was singing on the stage for him, her narrow eyes never left him.
And her song was a p?an in praise of the brute in man.
She acted her song. Her face was radiant with the joy of being possessed, and her eyes shone as she abandoned herself to the words:
"Quand je danse avec le grand frisé Il a l'air de m'enlacer....
"Then her wonderful hands with their glinting finger-nails went up to her head, and she half-closed her eyes, as though she were swooning:
Je perds la tête....
Now her eyes were opened, and they glared wildly, and her lips trembled, and her slim body quivered with animal hunger:
'Suis comme une bête.
And now, she smiled, and pride was on her face; one hand rested on her hip, and she swaggered up the stage, as the words fitted into the opening lilt:
"'Y pas chose—suis sa chose à lui 'Y pas mal—Quoi? C'est mon mari....
"Her face became at once miraculously tender. She expressed great and overpowering love—a love so strong that it swept everything before it—a love that was without restraint, passionate, fierce and unquenchable. Her arms were outstretched. Her dark blouse, opened at the neck, revealed her white throat throbbing with her song:
"Car moi, je l'aime J'aime mon grand frisé.
"And when she sang "Je l'aime," she invested the words with passion and renunciation.
They clamoured for another verse, crying "Bis ... Bis," in throaty tones, but she only came on to bow to them, and walk off again with that swaying stride.
Eh, bien! said a voice at Humphrey's elbow, "she is very good, our little Desirée, hein?"
He turned half round in his chair. At first he did not recognize the immaculately clothed young man, with the fair, long hair, who smiled at him, and then he recollected that they had met in the office of Le Parisien.
M. Charnac, isn't it? Humphrey asked. "I didn't know you at once.... Yes, she's very good. What's her name?"
Desirée Lebeau, Charnac answered. He looked at Humphrey again, still smiling.
Do you often come here? he asked.
This is the first time.... I was wandering about.... I just dropped in.
Humphrey noticed that Charnac was not alone. A pretty girl dressed becomingly in black, with a touch of red about her neck, sat by his side.
Allow me to present a friend, Margot, Charnac said to the girl. "He is an Englishman—a journalist," he added. And to Humphrey he said:
Mlle. Margot Lebeau. She is the sister of our little Desirée.
M'sieu est Anglais, said the dark-haired girl in a piping voice. "Ah! que ?a doit être interessant d'être Anglais."
The entertainment was near its end. A dainty figure came from the heavy curtains that hung from each side of the proscenium and hid the entertainers from the audience. Humphrey recognised Desirée, though she had forsaken her stage-costume and wore a simple dark-blue dress, with a black fur boa held carelessly about her shoulders. She came towards them with a smile, stopping on the way, as one or two men, of a better class than the bulk of the audience, hailed her. She bent down to them, and whispered conversations followed. She laughed and slapped the face of one man—an elderly man with a red ribbon in his button-hole. It was a playful slap, just the movement that a kitten makes with its paw when it is playing with long hanging curtains.
Charnac pushed out a chair for her invitingly. She came to them with a smile hovering about her lips, and a look of curious interest in her pale eyes as she saw Humphrey. She shook hands with Charnac, and kissed her sister Margot, and then, with a frank gesture, without any embarrassment, she held out her hand to Humphrey and said:
Bon soir, p'tit homme.
There was a quality of friendship in her voice; her whole manner suggested a desire to be amiable; she accepted Humphrey as a friend without question, and, as for Charnac, she treated him as if he were one of the family, as a brother. The women in the room stared at the party every few moments, absorbed in the details of Desirée's dress, and the men glanced at her with smiles that irritated Humphrey.
It is a little friend of mine—an Englishman, Charnac said to Desirée.
An Englishman! said Desirée, in a way that seemed to be the echo of her sister's remark a few minutes earlier. "I have a friend in England." She spoke French in a clipped manner, abbreviating her words, and scattering fragments of slang through her phrases.
Is that so? Humphrey said. "What part of England?"
Manchestaire, she replied. "His name was Mr Smith. You know him?"
Humphrey laughed. "I'm afraid I don't—Manchester's a big place, you know."
Is it as big as London?
Oh no. Not as big as London.
I should like to go to London. I have a friend there—a girl friend.
Oh! where does she live?
I forget the name of the street—somewhere near Charing Cross—that's a railway station, isn't it?
Yes.
Silence fell between them while a comedian, dressed as a comic soldier, sang a song that made them all laugh; though Humphrey could not understand the argot, he caught something of the innuendo of the song. Strange, that in France and Germany, in countries where patriotism and militarism are at their highest, the army should be held up to ridicule, and burlesqued in the coarsest fashion. The song gave Humphrey an opportunity of studying Desirée's face. He saw that the yellow hair was silky and natural; her eyebrows were as pale as her hair, and when she laughed, her red lips parted to show small white teeth that looked incredibly sharp. She was not beautiful, but she held some mysterious attraction for him. She was of a type that differed from all the women he had met. Though her face and figure showed that she was little more than twenty, her bearing was that of a woman who had lived and learnt all there was to know of the world. One slim, ungloved hand rested on the table, and he noted the beauty of it, its slender, delicate fingers, and the perfect shape of her pink, shining nails. In the making of her, Nature seemed to have concentrated in her hands all her power of creating beauty.
The song finished to a round of applause.
Il est joliment dr?le, said Desirée to Charnac. "Ah! zut ... I could do with a drink."
We won't have anything here, Charnac said. "They only sell species of poisons. Let's go and have supper at the Chariot d'Or.... Will you join us, Mr Quain?"
Why not? It was a perfectly harmless idea. Every experience added something to his knowledge. And yet, he hesitated. Somewhere, at the back of his mind, a feeling of uneasiness awoke in him. Charnac would pair off with Margot, and he would have to sit with Desirée during the meal. The thought carried with it a picture of forbidden things. Conscience argued with him: "You really oughtn't to, you know." "Why not? What harm will it do?" he urged. Conscience was relentless. "You forget you have a duty to some one." "Nonsense," he said, "let's look at the thing in a broad-minded way. It won't hurt me to have supper with them, surely."
Desirée laid a hand upon his sleeve gently.
Tu viens—oui, she asked, in a low, caressing voice. Their eyes met. He saw the pupils of her narrow eyes grow larger for a second, as though they were striving to express unspoken thoughts. Then they receded and contracted to little, dark, twinkling beads set in their centre of pale blue circles.
Oui, he said, with a sigh.
They came out into the noisy night of the Boulevard. They walked together, Charnac and Margot with linked arms. The lower floors of the night restaurants were blazing with light, but in the upper rooms the drawn blinds subdued the glare, and transformed it into a warm glow. Cabs and motor-cars came up the steep hill from the Grands Boulevards below for the revelry of supper after the theatre. The great doors of the Chariot d'Or were continually moving, and the uniformed doorkeeper seemed to enjoy the exercise of pulling the door open every second, as women in wraps, accompanied by men, crossed the threshold.
They went upstairs into a long brilliant room, all gold and glass and red plush, with white tablecloths shining in the strong light. In the corner a group of musicians, dressed in a picturesque costume—it might have been taken from any of the Balkan States, or from imagination—played a dragging waltz melody.
A dark woman sat by them, wearing a Spanish dress, orange and spangled, the bodice low-cut, and the skirt fanciful and short, showing her thin legs clad in black open-work stockings. She regarded the room with an air of detached interest, unanswering the glances of the men. She was the wife of the first violinist.
Charnac led the way to a table; he placed himself next to Margot on the red plush sofa-cushions, and Humphrey sat with Desirée. While Charnac was ordering the supper and consulting their individual tastes, Humphrey glanced round the room at the men who sat at the little tables with glasses of sparkling amber wine before them, some of them in evening-dress, with crumpled, soft shirt-fronts, others in lounge suits or morning-coats. Not all had women with them, but the women that he saw were luxurious, beautiful creatures, with indolent eyes and faces of strange beauty.
The lights gleamed under rose-coloured shades on the table, on the silver dishes piled high with splendid fruits, on bottles swathed tenderly with napkins, set in silver ice-pails, on tumblers of coloured wines and liqueurs.
It's pretty here, eh? said Desirée.
It's not so bad. I've never been here before. Do you come often?
Oh no! not often: only when Margot brings Gustave to come and fetch me after I've been singing.
She clapped her hands gaily as the waiter set a steaming dish of mussels before them. The house was famed for its moules marinières. "I adore them," she said, unfolding her serviette, and tucking it under her chin. Charnac ladled out the mussels into soup-plates. Their blue iridescent shells shone in an opal-coloured gravy where tiny slices of onion floated on the surface. Her dainty fingers dipped into the plate, and she fed herself with the mussels, biting them from the shells with her sharp white teeth. She ate with an extraordinary rapidity, breaking off generous pieces from the long, crisp roll of bread before her, and drinking deeply of her red Burgundy.
She was simply an animal. Margot ate in much the same way, with greedy, quick gestures, until her plate was piled high with empty mussel shells. And, during the meal, they chattered trivialities, discussing personal friends in a slangy, intimate phraseology.
The sharp taste of the sauce, with its flavour of the salt sea-water, made Humphrey thirsty, and he, too, drank plenty of wine; and the wine and the warmth sent the colour rushing to his cheeks, and filled him with a sense of comfort. The whole atmosphere of the place had a soothing effect on him.
The orchestra started to play a Spanish dance, and the woman in orange rose from her seat, and tossing her lace shawl aside, moved down the aisle of tables in a sidling, swinging dance, castanets clicking from her thumbs, marking the sway and poise of her body above her hips. It was a sexual, voluptuous dance, that stirred the senses like strong wine. Now she flung herself backwards with a proud, uplifted chin. One high-heeled satin shoe stamped the floor. Her eyes flashed darkly and dangerously; she flaunted her bare throat and bosom before them; now she moved with a lithe sinuous motion from table to table, one hand on her hip, and the other swinging loosely by her side.
There was something terrible and triumphant in her dance to the beat of the music with its rhythm of a heart throbbing in passion.
Bravo! bravo! they cried, as the dance finished. "Bis," shouted Charnac, lolling back in his seat with his arm round Margot's shoulder.
She dances well, said Humphrey.
Desirée turned her pale eyes on him. "I can dance better," she said, and before he had realized it, she was up and in the centre of the room, and everybody laughed and clapped hands, as Desirée began to dance with stealthy, cat-like steps. Her face was impudent, as she twined and twisted her thin body into contortions that set all the men leering at her. It was frankly repulsive and horrible to Humphrey; she seemed suddenly to have ceased to be a woman, just as when she had started to eat. She was inhuman when she sang and ate and danced.
The blur of white flesh through the smoke, the odour of heavy scents, and the sight of Desirée writhing in her horrid dance, sickened him. He saw her white teeth gleaming between her lips, half-parted with the exhaustion of her dance, he saw her eyes laughing at him, as though she were proud and expected his applause, and he felt a profound, inexplicable pity for her that overwhelmed his disgust.
She flung herself, panting, into her seat, and pushed back her disordered yellow hair with her hands. "Oh la! ... la!" she cried, laughing in gasps, "c'est fatiguant, ?a ... my throat is like a furnace." And she clicked her glass against the glass that Humphrey held in his hand, and drained it to the finish.
Why did you do that? asked Humphrey, huskily.
Do what?
Dance like that—in front of all these people?
Why shouldn't I, if I want to?
I don't like it, he said, wondering why he was impelled to say so.
Well, you shouldn't have said she dances well, Desirée replied.
I must be going, Humphrey said.
Oh, not yet, Charnac said. "Let's all go together."
No, he pushed his chair away with sudden resolution. "I must go."
But, my dear— Desirée began.
I must go, Humphrey repeated, slowly. It was like the repetition of a lesson. "I must go now."
Oh, well— Charnac said.
The waiter appeared with a bill. "You will allow me to pay?" Humphrey asked Charnac.
Mais non, mais non, mon ami, he replied, good-naturedly. "It was I who asked you to come, wasn't it? Another night it will be your turn."
Another night, echoed Margot, in her high-pitched voice. "J'adore les Anglais, ils sont si gentils."
And why cannot you stop? Desirée asked.
He avoided her eyes. Never could he explain in this room, with its scent and its music and its warmth, that turned vice into happiness and made virtue as chilling and intractable as marble. He only knew that he had to go. He made some excuse—any excuse—work—a headache ... he did not know what he was saying; he was only conscious of those narrow eyes beneath pale eyebrows, and red parted lips, and the soft hand that lay in his—the soft hand with the finger-tips as beautiful as rosy sea-shells.
They were not to blame; they could not be expected to know his innermost life, nor why it was that he felt suddenly as if he had profaned himself, and all that was most sacred to him. But that finer, nobler self that was always dormant within him, as eager to awaken to influences as it was to be lulled to sleep by them, became active and alert....
There was a hint of dawn in the sky as he came out into the empty street, his mind charged with a deep melancholy. But, as the cool air played about his face, he breathed more freely after the stuffy warmth of the room, and he walked with a firm step, square-shouldered, erect and courageous.
Some weeks later there came a letter which brought the reality of things into his own life. It was a short and regretful letter from a firm of Easterham solicitors, announcing the death of his aunt.
They informed him of the fact in a few, brief, dignified words. There was an undercurrent of excuse, as if they felt themselves personally responsible for the sudden demise, and were anxious to apologise for any inconvenience that might be felt by Mr Quain. He gathered that his aunt had lived on an annuity, which expired with her; that a little financial trouble—loans to a brother of whom Humphrey had never heard—absorbed her furniture and all her possessions, with the exception of a watch and chain, which she had willed to Humphrey. The funeral was to take place two days hence—and that was all.
The letter moved him neither to tears nor sorrow. His aunt had been as remote from him in life as she was in death. An unbridgeable abyss had divided them. Never, during the years he had lived in Easterham, after his father's death, had they talked of the fundamental things that mattered to one another. He felt that he owed her nothing, least of all love, for she remained in his memory a masterful, powerful influence, trying to fetter him down to a narrow life, without comprehension of the broad, beautiful world that lay at her doors.
He could see her now in her dress of some mysterious black pattern, and always a shawl over her shoulder, her white hair plastered close to her heavy gold earrings, her lips thin and compressed, and her eyes hard-set, when she said, "You must Get On." She did not know, when she urged him to go forward, how far he meant to go. Her vision of Getting On was bounded by Easterham—what could she know and understand of all the bewildering phases he had undergone; the bitter heartaches, the misery of failure, and the glory of conquest in a world wider than a million Easterhams.
But, as he thought of her dead, a strange feeling came to him that now she could understand everything, that she knew all, and was even ready to reach out in sympathy to him. Her last pathetic message—a watch and chain! The rude knowledge that he had gained of the secret things of her life—how she lived, her loan to the brother; it seemed that some hidden door which they had both kept carefully locked had been flung open widely—that his eyes were desecrating her profoundest secrets.
It was not the first time that Death had stirred his life, but this was a sudden and unexpected snapping of a chain that bound him with his boyhood. Always he had been subconsciously aware of his aunt's presence in the scheme of things; there had been ingrained in him a certain fear of her, that he had never quite shaken off. Behind the individuality of his own life she had lurked, a shadowy figure, yet ready to emerge from the shadows at a moment of provocation, and become real and distinct and forbidding.
And now he could scarcely realize that she was dead—that he was absolutely alone in the world, though there might be, somewhere, cousins and kinspeople whom he had never seen.
She had not been demonstratively kind to him in life. The watch and chain she left was the first present he could ever remember receiving from her. But he felt that he could not absent himself from her funeral; it would be a sad and desolate business in the Easterham churchyard, with not many people there, yet he knew that he could not pass the day in Paris without thinking of her, lowered into the grave to the eternal loneliness of death.
He sent a telegram to London, and received a reply a few hours later, giving him permission to leave Paris, and the next day he travelled to England.
The collection of papers and magazines rested unread in his lap. He looked from the window on the succession of pictures that flashed and disappeared—a blue-bloused labourer at work in the fields, or a waggoner toiling along a country lane; children shouting by the hedgerows, and the signal-women who sat by their little huts on the railway as the train sped by. He could not read; sometimes, with a sigh, he sought a paper (France had just caught the popular magazine habit from England), turned the pages restlessly, and, finally, leaning on the arm-rest, stared out of the window....
The shuttle of his mind went to and fro, twining together the disconnected threads of his thoughts into a pattern of memories—memories of his youth and his work and his aunt interwoven with the strong, dominating thought of Elizabeth....
His thoughts turned continually to Elizabeth; sometimes they spun away to something else, but always they were led back through a series of memories to that night when he had kissed her for the first time.
It was odd how this absence from her seemed to have changed her in his mind. There had been an undercurrent of disappointment in their relations, of late. Her letters had been strangely sterile and unsatisfying. She had written an evasive reply, after a delay, an answer to his last letter begging her to come to him....
Yet he was eager to see her and to kiss her. He felt that she was all that he had left to him in the world: that she and his work were all that mattered....
A garrulous Frenchman lured him into conversation during dinner; he was glad, for it gave him relief from the monotonous burden of his thoughts ... and on the boat he dozed in the sunshine of a smooth crossing.
Once in England again, the delight of an exile returning to his home provided new sensations. The porters were deferentially solicitous for his comfort; the Customs officers behaved with innate politeness, and the little squat train, with its separate compartments, brought a glow of happiness to him. He saw England as a stranger might see it for the first time: he observed the discipline and order of the railway station that came not from oppression but from high organization and planning. There were no mistakes made; the boy brought his tea-basket and did not overcharge him; the porter accepted sixpence and touched his hat, not obsequiously, but in acknowledgment, without a suggestion of haggling for more. It seemed incredible that he should find this perfection, where a year ago he could not see it....
There were Frenchmen in the carriage, and he sat with the conscious pride of an Englishman in his own country. The train moved out, giving a glimpse of the harbour and the sea breaking in white lines over the sloping beach; and then through a tunnel that emerged on fields. The first thing he noticed was the vivid green of the country, and the way it was cut up and divided into squares and oblongs: the small clumps of low-set trees, the fat cattle, and the peace brooding over the land. And then he noticed the little houses, low-storied and thatched, with a feather of blue smoke waving from their chimneys. The whole journey was a series of new impressions that elated him. Stations flashed and left behind a blurred memory of advertisements, and names that breathed of yeoman England: Ashford—Paddock Wood—Sevenoaks—Knockholt; and then the advertisement-boards stood out of the green fields, blatantly insisting on lung tonics and pills, marking off mile after mile that brought him nearer to London. The houses closed in on the railway line; the train ran now through larger stations of red brick, passing the peopled platforms with an echoing roar; other crowded trains passed them, going slowly to the suburbs they had left behind. A new note seemed to come into the journey as the evening descended, and the world outside was populous with lights.
The memory of the clean, sweet country, with its toy houses, was wiped away by a swift blot of darkness as the train flashed through New Cross, and out into the broad network of rails with which London begins.
He saw the factories and the sidings and the busy traffic of trains overtaking one another, running parallel for a space, and then swaying apart as one branched off to the south-eastern suburbs. He saw the smoke hanging in thick clouds on the far horizon; masts and rigging made spidery silhouettes against the sky; and the tall, factory chimneys thrust out their monstrous tongues of livid fire.
The city was before him right and left, overgrown and tremendous. They ran level with crooked chimney-pots and the scarred roofs of endless rows of houses. The upper windows were yellow with light, and he caught glimpses of women before mirrors and men in their shirt-sleeves. Dark masses of clouds rolled before the moon. Something wet splashed on his cheek.
A silent Englishman sitting next to him, said moodily: "Raining as usual. I've never once come home without it raining." He laughed as though it were a bitter joke.
Fantastic reflections wriggled on the wet, shining approach to London Bridge—a swift vision of bus-drivers, with oilcloth capes glinting in the rain, hurrying crowds, and something altogether new—a motor-omnibus.
Then the train, with a dignified, steady movement, swung slowly across Hungerford Bridge, and he saw the strong, resolute river, black and broad, flowing to the bridges, within the jewelled girdle of the Embankment.
The sense of England's greatness came to him, as the landmarks of London were set in a semicircle before him: the tall dome of St Paul's, the spires of churches, the turrets of great hotels, grey Government offices, culminating in the vague majesty of the Houses of Parliament.
How different the streets were from Paris! There was a force and an energy that seemed to be driving everything perpetually forward. This business of getting to dinner—it was about half-past seven—was a terribly earnest and crowded affair. The throng of motor-cars and omnibuses jammed and flocked together in the Strand, held in leash by a policeman's uplifted hand, and when it was released, it crawled sluggishly forward. Here and there, rare sight for Humphrey, one of the new motor-omnibuses lumbered forward heavily, threatening instant annihilation of everything. There was no chatter of voices in the crowd—no gesticulation—the people walked silently and hurriedly with a set concentration of purpose.
He went to a hotel in the Adelphi to leave his bag. Then he came out, pausing for a moment irresolutely in the crowd. It was too late, as he had foreseen, to go to Elizabeth. He had made up his mind to see her on his return from Easterham.
An omnibus halted by him: he boarded it, and as he passed the Griffin, he breathed deeply like a monarch entering his own domain, for the scent of the Street was in his nostrils and the old, well-known vision of the lit windows passed before him, and a newsboy ran along shouting a late edition. This was the only Street in the world, he felt, that he loved; its people were his people, and its life was his life.
He turned into the Pen Club, to friendship, good-fellowship and welcome. And all the old friends were there—Larkin, retelling old stories, Chander spinning merry yarns, and Vernham making melancholy epigrams. Willoughby, he learnt, was away on a mystery in the north, and Jamieson was at a first night.
By the way, said Larkin, "heard about Tommy Pride?"
No. What's happened?
He's left The Day.
Sacked? asked Humphrey.
Larkin nodded. "Rather rough on poor old Tommy. Married, isn't he?"
A picture of his first visit to the home of the Prides leapt before Humphrey's eyes, and the comfort, the cheeriness, that hid all the hard work of the week. The news hurt him queerly.
What's he doing? he asked.
Well, not much. Tommy's not a youngster, you know. I suppose the Newspaper Press Fund will tide him over a bit.
Larkin dropped the subject, to listen to a story from Vernham. After all, it was the most casual thing in the happenings of Fleet Street to them: it might happen to them any day; it was bound to happen to them one day. And there would always be young men ready to take their places. Nobody was to blame; it was just one of the chances of the inexorable system which made their work a gamble, where men hazarded their wits and their lives, and lost or won in the game.
Humphrey knew more than they did what it meant for Tommy Pride. He heard as a mocking echo now, the old cry, "Two pounds a week and a cottage in the country."...
Have a drink, Larkin said.
He became suddenly out of tune with the place. His perception of Fleet Street altered. He saw the relentless cruelty of it, the implacable demand for sacrifice that it always made. He visioned it as a giant striding discordantly through the lives of men, crushing them with a strength as mighty as its own machines that roared in the night ... a clumsy and senseless giant, that towered above them, against whom all struggles were pitiful ... futile.
One lump or two? asked Elizabeth, holding the sugar-tongs poised over his cup of tea.
One, please, said Humphrey.
Milk or cream?
Milk.
She handed him the cup in silence. There was something in the frank, questioning look in her blue eyes that made him avert his gaze. Their meeting had not been at all as he had imagined it. He did not spring towards her, boyishly, and take her in his arms and kiss her. He had approached her humbly and timidly when she stood before him, in all her white purity and beauty, and their lips had met in a brief kiss of greeting. Her manner had been curiously formal and restrained, empty of all outward display of emotion.
And now they sat at tea in her room with the conversation lagging between them. As he looked round at the room with its chintzes and rose-bowls, its old restfulness reasserted itself. But to Humphrey it seemed now more than restful—it seemed stagnant and out of the world.... Somewhere, in Paris, there were music and laughter, but here, in this quiet backwater of London, one's vision became narrow, and life seemed a monotonous repetition of days. He felt moody, depressed; a sense of coming disaster hung over his mind, like a shadow. Her quick sympathy perceived his gloom.
You ought not to have gone, she said, softly.
You mean to the funeral?
Yes; you are too susceptible ... too easily influenced by surroundings. There was no need to come all this way to make yourself miserable.
I don't know why I went, he said. "We never had much in common, my aunt and I, but somehow ... I don't know ... I couldn't bear the thought of not being present at her funeral. I had a silly sort of idea that she would know if I were not there."
You are too susceptible, she repeated. "Sometimes I wish you were stronger. You are too much afraid of what people will think of you. This death has meant nothing at all to you, but you are ashamed to say so."
It has meant something to me, he said. "I don't mean that I felt a wrench, as if some one whom I loved very dearly had gone ... I felt that when my father died ... but her death has changed me somehow—here—" and he tapped his breast, "I feel older. I feel as if I had stood over the grave and seen the burial of my youth."
It has made you gloomy, Elizabeth said. "I think you would have been truer to yourself if you had remained in Paris."
He reflected for a few moments, drinking his tea. He felt sombre enough in his black clothes and black tie—dreary concessions to conventionality.
Ah, but I wanted to see you, Elizabeth, he said earnestly. "It's terribly lonely without you."
She leaned forward and laid her hand lightly on his, with a soft, caressing touch. "It's good of you to say that," she said, and then, with a frank smile, "tell me, Humphrey, do you really miss me very much?"
I do, he said; and he began talking of himself and all that he did in Paris. Elizabeth listened with an amused smile playing about her lips. He told her of his work and his play, growing enthusiastic over Paris, speaking with all the self-centredness of the egotist.
It seems very pleasant, she said. "You are to be envied, I think. You ought to be very happy: doing everything that you want to do; occupying a good position in journalism."
He purred mentally under her praise. Already he felt better; her presence stimulated him; but he could not see, nor understand, the true Elizabeth, for the mists of vanity, ambition and selfishness clouded his vision at that moment. If only he had forgotten himself ... if only he had asked her one question about herself and her work, or shown the smallest interest in anything outside his own career, he might have risen to great heights of happiness.
This was the second in which everything hung in the balance. He saw Elizabeth lean her chin in the palm of her hand and contemplate reflectively the distance beyond him. He marked the beauty of her lower arm, bare to the rounded charm of the elbow, as it rested on the curve of the arm-chair. So, he thought, would she sit in Paris, and grace his life.
And then, suddenly, her face became grave, and she said, abruptly:
Humphrey, I want to talk to you very seriously. I want to know whether you will give up journalism.
He remembered her hint of this far back in the months when she had first allowed him to tell her of his love. He had thought the danger was past, but now she came to him, with a deliberate, frontal attack on the very stronghold of his existence.
Give up journalism! he echoed. "What for?"
All the weapons of her sex were at her command. She might have said, "For me"; she might have smiled and enticed and cajoled. But she brushed these weapons aside disdainfully. Hers was the earnest business of putting Humphrey to the test.
Because I think you and I will never be happy together if you do not. Because, if I marry you (he noticed she did not say, 'When I marry you'), I should not want your work to occupy a larger place in our lives than myself. Because I hate your work, and I think you can do better things. Those are my reasons.
He stood up and walked to the window, looking out on the trees that made an avenue of the quiet road. A man with a green baize covered tray on his head came round the corner, swinging a bell up and down.
Well? she said.
Oh but look here, Elizabeth, he began, "you spring something like this on me suddenly, and expect me to answer at once...."
Oh, no! you can have time to think it over. You've had nearly a year, you know.
How do you make that out?
Have you forgotten? When you were going to Paris—before you were going to Paris even—I tried to show you that I wanted you to give up the work. I remember you promised things. You said you'd write books, or do essays for the weeklies....
But, dear, you can't make a living writing books—unless you fluke, or unless you're a genius; as for essays for the weeklies, frankly, I don't believe I can do them—I'm not brilliant enough.
Yes, you are, Elizabeth urged. (Fatal mistake to make, it smoothed all his vanity the right way.) "I believe in you, Humphrey. If I didn't believe in you, I wouldn't be talking as I am now. And, besides, I've told you before, I have enough for us both."
Though she was offering him freedom; though, if he wished, he could accept her offer and be rid for ever from the torments of Fleet Street, he could not leave its joys.
You don't understand, he said. "You couldn't expect me to live on you...."
Why not? I should be prepared to live on you, if I were poor.
That's different. You're a woman.
She laughed. "We won't go into the side-issues of arguments over ethics," she said. "You need not live on me. You told me that you had saved four hundred pounds. If we lived simply that would keep us both for a start, and you could be adding to your income by writing. Humphrey, don't you see I'm trying to rescue you. I want you to do something fine and noble; I want you to go forward."
Well, I've gone forward, he said. "I've made myself in the Street. You don't know what you ask when you want me to give it up. Nobody can understand it unless he's been in the game. I can't think what it is—it isn't vanity, because all that we write is unsigned; it's sheer love of the work that drives us on."
But you hate it, too.
We hate it as fiercely as we love it... he said, simply. "One day we say to ourselves, 'We will give it up.' That's what I say to you, now. I'm going to give it up, one day."
That you have also promised before, she said, in a gentle voice. "Let us talk it over between ourselves. Why shouldn't you leave now?"
He was cornered: he stood at bay, facing her beauty, but behind it and above it he saw all the struggles and endeavour and splendid triumph that awaited him in the restless years to come, when each day would be a battle-field, and any might bring him defeat or conquest. He saw the world opening before him, and far-off cities close at hand; he saw himself wandering through the years, touching the lives of men; a privileged person, always behind the scenes of life, with a hint of power perhaps.... And, in exchange, she offered him peace and rest, both of which corroded the soul eager for war; peace and rest and love, that would be so beautiful until the years made them familiar and wearisome, until he would be forced to go out again into the thick of the battle ... and by that time his armour would be rusty, and the years of peace would have blunted his sword.
Elizabeth, he said slowly, "I can't live in a room, now. I can't always look out of the window on the same scene. I must keep moving. Each day must bring me a fresh scene, a fresh experience. I have grown so used to change and movement that a week without it makes life dull and unbearable. I'm not fit for anything else but the work I do. I'm born to do that and nothing else. Everything in life now I see from the point of view of 'copy.'" He laughed, but there was a sob in his laughter at his shameful confession. "Why, even at the funeral, as I stood over the grave, and watched them lower the coffin, I felt that I could write a splendid column about it, and instead of feeling the solemnity of it all, I found that I was watching the white surplices against the green trees, and looking at the faces of the people, and painting a picture in my mind...."
He paused. Her eyes were downcast, and her fingers played absently with the loops of the chain that hung from her neck.
It's a habit, he went on. "It's grown on me, so that I see life and its emotions as a series of things to be written about. Why shouldn't I have thought as I did at the funeral? I have been taught to do it, when I go to the funerals of great men that I have to report. I'm a journalist ... a reporter. I've seen men eat their hearts out in a year, after they've left the Street light-heartedly. The reaction comes suddenly. Things are happening all around them, and they're out of it. And they creep back, and try to get a job again. That's what Kenneth himself will do one day.... I don't want to be one of those, Elizabeth. I want to go through with it, right through to the failure at the end of all, and when the failure comes, I'll build up again."
She spread out her hands helplessly. "I see..." she said, "I see...." That was all for a moment, and then, again: "If you were doing something worthy, I could understand; if you were producing art, I could understand, too ... but this"—a copy of The Day was on the table, and she held it in her hand—"this is unworthy. This is all you produce with your infinite labour."
It's not unworthy ... we have our ideals.
She laughed, and her laugh stung him.
Humphrey, you have the ha'penny mind that does not see beyond its own nose. You just live for the day itself. Oh! she cried, "if you knew how I hate your Ferrol, and all that he stands for: all the ignoble things in life, painting everything with the commercial taint of worldly success. There was a beautiful picture bought the other day for the National Gallery. I see it is to be known as the '￡60,000 picture.' That's the spirit behind Ferrol ... we might be crying for great reforms—I have not spoken of my work in all this—we might be lifted up with the power at his command...."
When she spoke of Ferrol, Humphrey remembered all that had been done for him. What could she know of Ferrol's personality, of his splendid force, of the thousand generous acts that remained hidden, while only the things were remembered that blackened his reputation. His admiration for Ferrol was immeasurable. He saw in the indomitable energy of the man something tangible and positive among all the negative virtues of life. Ferrol stood for achievement that crowned the indefatigable years. And with it all, this superman could descend from his loftiness and be human and weave the spell of his humanity about the lives of others.
You don't understand Ferrol, he said. "Very few people do. But he has been kind to me ... there's something in Ferrol that draws me to him. One day you will see he will do all that you expect him to do, but the time is not yet ripe for that. And you speak as if Ferrol were the only man in England who owned a newspaper. What of the others—have any of them done as much good as he has done?"
Whatever good he has done, is done from motives of gain.
I do not look at motives, he retorted. "I look only at the effects of the action. If a bad deed is done from good motives, it does not make the deed anything but bad."
They were standing face to face now.
Come, Elizabeth, he said, moving towards her. "You do not know how I love you, and if you loved me, you would not ask me to give up my work."
Her face was white and beautiful, and her hand went up to her heart with a womanly gesture. She spoke in a low, deliberate voice.
In all that we have said, there has never been a word of what giving up my work may mean to me. Yet you would have me abandon it, and forsake all the good we have tried to build up....
You would have to give it up, one day, Elizabeth. Besides, if you like, he said, desperately, "I'll go to Ferrol and ask him to remove me from Paris back to London. I'll do anything to meet you, I only want to make you happy."
Oh, don't keep on saying that sort of thing, she said; "it irritates me. Those hollow repetitions of set phrases—just because they're the right thing to say."
I think you are unreasonable, he began. "I have worked all these years for success, and now, just when I've won it, you wish me to throw everything away."
I wish you to do nothing against your will. I thought you would have seen my point of view. I thought you would be ready to share in my work, which is the work of humanity.... I am sorry. You see, we clash. We shall be better alone.
He stared at her with dull incomprehension. "We clash. We shall be better alone." The words repeated themselves over and over again in his brain. And his mind suddenly went back to a little room in the Strand and the tears of Lilian....
You mean that, he said, slowly. "You mean that."
She nodded. "Don't you see how impossible it would be?"
You never loved me, he flung forth as a challenge. "You could have helped me and understood me.... I am not so bad as you think I am."
A sad smile answered him. "I understand you so well, Humphrey, that I know I shall never be able to help you."
He looked about him in weak hesitation. "I suppose I must begin again," he said.
You ... you ... all the time it is you, she cried, passionately. "And what about myself; must not I begin over again, too?"
I'm sorry, he said, feeling the inadequacy of his words. He longed intensely to be away from her now, to be out in the open street where he could think. This room was stifling. He went through the horrid methodical business of parting as if it were all a dream. He remembered glancing at the clock in a casual way, and saying, "I'd better be going"; he remembered the ludicrous search for one glove, he murmuring that it didn't really matter, and she insisting on a search with aching minuteness....
He never saw her again; her life had impinged on his, and left its impression, as many others had done. He did not regret her as he had regretted Lilian, for she had outraged his self-respect, and left him abashed and humbled.
He went back to Paris, and a week later the trouble broke out in Narbonne.
At first it did not seem very serious. One understood vaguely that the wine-growers were in revolt. The Paris buyers had been adulterating the vintages—making one cask into a dozen—so that they came to a year when there was such a glut of this adulterated wine on the market, that the wine-growers of the South were left with wine to spill in the gutters, and wine to give to the pigs—but without bread to give to their children.
Then there arose one of those men who flame into history for a few vivid moments. A leader of men, whose words were sparks dropped among straw; who had but to say "Kill," and they would kill, until he bade them stop.
For a time, in a way essentially peculiar to France, the ludicrous prevailed. Municipalities resigned, mayors and all, and there was no giving nor taking in marriage, no registration of births or deaths. Odd stories of the despair of love—sick peasantry at postponed weddings—filled the papers; the Assiette au Beurre published a special number satirizing the situation. It was a good joke in Paris—but at Perpignan and Montpellier twenty thousand vignerons were talking of bloody revolution, and marching with blue and silver banners, and calling on the Government to put a tax on sugar, so as to make adulteration so costly that it should be profitless....
And Humphrey in the Paris office distilled a column a day from the forty columns that the French Special Correspondents sent to their papers, while Dagneau, up at the Ministry of the Interior, garnered facts and official communiqués.
Work was his salvation and his solace. Everything of the past was wiped away from his mind when Humphrey worked. The personal things affecting his own private life became trivial beside the urgent importance of keeping The Day well-informed. And thus habit had fortified his power of resistance to external matters that might have disturbed a mind less trained to make itself subservient to the larger issue of duty. In a week—a brief week—he had gone through every phase of sorrow, anger, self-pity at his rejection. He thought of writing—indeed, he went so far one night as to compose a letter imploring Elizabeth for forgiveness, promising everything she wished ... but, when it was written, he tore it into little pieces. A mood of futile oaths followed. He felt that he had been balked of her by trickery. It led to violent hatred of her cold austerity, her icy splendour. He put away the thought of her from him. After all, what did it matter? They would never have been happy together. Always she was above him, distant and unattainable ... yet those fine moments, when she had stooped down and lifted him up, when gold and brilliance took the place of the dross in his mind! How she filled him with dreams of overwhelming possibilities, of ennobling achievements.... Below the crust of the selfishness and vanity of his life, there was a rich vein of good and strong desire ready to be worked, if she had only known. There were moments when his whole soul ached with an intense longing to be exalted and free from the impoverished squalor of its surroundings. He knew it, and the thought of it made him unjust to Elizabeth. She had not known of those constant conflicts which endured over years that seemed everlasting,—a guerrilla warfare with conscience.
They had not mattered. She had given his soul back to him, to do as he liked with it; she had forsaken him before he was strong enough to stand alone....
The telephone bell rang. He adjusted the metal band over his head. "Londres," said the voice of the operator. His ears heard nothing but the voice of The Day calling to him; his eyes saw nothing but the sheets of writing at his side, and everything else faded from his mind but the news of the night....
He put the receiver down, and almost immediately the telephone bell rang, and he heard a voice telling him that it was Charnac.... "Where have you been?" asked Charnac. "One has missed you." Humphrey explained his absence.
Can you come to supper to-night, Charnac called. "Your little Desirée will be there." His voice came out of the depths of space, calling Humphrey to the gaiety of life. "Your little Desirée...." It brought to him, vividly, her thin, supple figure; those strange blue eyes that looked widely from beneath the pale eyebrows; and the lips of cherry-red. The song that she had sung that night had been lilting ever since in his mind:
"... Je perds la tête 'Suis comme une bête.
"He saw her in all her alluring languor, secret, and mysterious. And it was the eternal mystery in her that attracted him. For a few moments he hesitated, indeterminately, at the telephone. "Eh bien, mon vieux," called Charnac's voice. "Will you come? 11.30 at the Chariot d'Or."
I'll come, said Humphrey.
It was ten-thirty. Ripples of unrest stirred his mind; he felt deeply agitated. He knew that he was on the brink of a new and complex development in his life; and the future stretched before him, vague and impenetrable, full of a promise of mournful and fierce delights, of happiness inconceivable, and sorrow inexperienced. No scruples retarded him now, and the voice of conscience was stilled, but despite all this, an indefinable mist of melancholy clouded his soul.
Dagneau came briskly into the office. Humphrey ceased brooding, and swung round in his chair.
Lamb, he said, "I'm going out to supper to-night."
Oh! la! la! Dagneau laughed. "Who's the lucky lady?"
Not for the likes of little lambs that have to stay in the office and keep the fort.
Dagneau made a grimace. "I suppose it isn't safe for both of us to leave," he said.
No fear, Humphrey replied. "There's no knowing what these fellows mayn't be up to in the South. Anyhow, if anything urgent happens, come along to me. I shall be in the Chariot d'Or until one o'clock."
Dagneau was a good fellow, thought Humphrey, as his cab climbed the hill to Montmartre. It was jolly decent of him not to mind. He forgot the office now, and thought only of the night's adventuring. There was fully a half-hour to spare, so he idled it away on the terrace of a café sipping at a liqueur. Every variety of street hawker came to persuade sous from him: they had plaster figures for sale, or wanted to cut his silhouette in black paper, or draw a portrait of him in pastels, or sell him ballads and questionable books, bound in pink, pictorial covers. The toy of the moment, frankly indecent, yet offered with a childlike innocence that made it impossible for one to be disgusted with the vendors, was thrust before him fifty times. They showed him how it worked, and when he refused, they brought from inner pockets picture-postcards which they tried to show him covertly, until he drove them away with the argot he had learned from Dagneau.
At the time appointed a cab climbed the steep Rue Pigalle, and drew up before the Chariot d'Or. Charnac sat in the middle comfortably squeezed in between Margot and Desirée. They waved a cheery greeting as they saw Humphrey, and he helped them down. Without any question he linked his arm in Desirée's, and led her up the brilliant scarlet staircase to the supper-room. Her meek acceptance of him, and the touch of her, gave him a strong sense of possession. This woman acknowledged his right of mastery over her, without a word being spoken, without any pleading, or the bitter pain of uncertainty. From that moment he felt she was his completely and unquestionably. There was no need to woo her and win her; she was to be taken, and she would yield herself up, as women were taken and women yielded themselves up in the earliest days of the earth.
They went to their table. He had no eyes for anyone but Desirée. She threw off her wrap, with a gesture of her shoulders, and as it tumbled from them, they shone white and shapely, and a rose was crushed to her bosom, making a splash of scarlet on her white bodice. She laughed and looked at him frankly, as if there were to be no secrets between them, and once, while the supper was being ordered, her thin hand rested in his, and he was stirred to wild, delicious emotion. Yes, she was all as he had imagined her; she had not changed at all, and her yellow hair and pale eyebrows and thin face culminating in her pointed chin, reminded him of an Aubrey Beardsley picture—those slanting eyes, and red lips eternally shaped for a kiss, and the slender throat that rippled below the white surface of its skin when she spoke, the thin bare arms, and her hands, balanced on delicate wrists—those hands with their long dainty fingers and exquisite finger-tips. The sight of her inflamed him.
Their conversation was commonplace. Why, she wanted to know, did he run away the last time they met. He lied to her, and pleaded a headache.
And you won't run off this time? she asked, with a childish note of appeal in her voice.
He sought her hand and held it in his own. She drew it away with a little grimace. "You're hurting me," she said.
Occasionally Margot cut into their conversation. She lacked the beauty of her sister, her figure was stouter, and her face was not well made-up. She treated Charnac with good-natured tolerance.
During the supper—again the famous mussels—Desirée asked Humphrey many questions about himself—they were not questions which penetrated deeply into his private life, indeed, she showed no desire to pry into his surroundings. She wanted to know his tastes, and his likes and dislikes, and when, sometimes, he said anything that showed that they had something in common, she laughed delightedly at the discovery.
Her eyes held a wonderful knowledge in them, but the boldness of their gaze did not suggest immodesty to him. Her eyes seemed to say: "There are certain things in life we never talk about. But I understand them all, and I know that you know I understand." It made him feel that there was nothing artificial about their friendship; in one bound they had attained perfect understanding, and it was miraculous to him.
It was miraculous to him to sit there, with the music surging in his veins, and to look upon this delicately-wrought creature, beautiful, perfect in body, knowing that when he wished he could take her in his arms, and she would give herself to him without any hesitation. She was utterly strange to him, and yet, by this miracle, their lives were already commingled in swift intimacy. He thought of the other two women who had influenced his life: though he had kissed them, and spent long hours with them, they seemed now irrevocably distant from him, and never had he penetrated to the stratum of full comprehension that lay below the surface of misunderstandings....
He looked back on the years that were past, and he could only see himself struggling and pleading and breaking his heart to win that which was won now without any contest at all. Was it love or passion that he wanted from them. Ah! if we would only be frank with ourselves, and admit that there is no love without passion, there is no passion without love: that by separating passion from love, it has become a degraded and hidden thing.
And Humphrey wanted love: the desire for love, love inseparable from passion, had made a turbulent underflow beneath the stream of his life. Twice he had tried to grasp love, twice it had eluded him. He had been despoiled by circumstance ... cheated by his own conscience.
It was miraculous to him now, that he should be able to wrest his prize from life with so little struggle after all. He looked at Desirée, and her eyes smiled—how incredibly near they seemed to one another, how the unattainable drew close to him and smiled....
He became aware of his name spoken aloud, and he looked up and saw a waiter looking round the room, with Dagneau at his side. Dagneau's face was strained and anxious. He seemed out of breath. Suddenly he caught sight of Humphrey, and hurried towards him. He raised his hat to the group. "Pardon, mad'm'selle," he said to Desirée, as he put a telegram before Humphrey.
The blue slips pasted on the paper danced before his eyes.
Qu'est que c'est? Margot asked, fussily.
Ferrol wants you to go to Narbonne, Dagneau said. "There's been shooting there.... I looked up the trains. You can catch the one o'clock from the Gare d'Orsay if you hurry."
Humphrey stared stupidly at the telegram, and Desirée touched him with her hand.
C'est quelque chose de grave? she asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Narbonne," he said to Charnac, laconically.
Oh! nom d'un nom—to-night? asked Charnac. "C'est embêtant, ?a."
And, suddenly, Humphrey grew peaceful again, and all the turbulence of his thoughts calmed down and flowed towards the one desire that he had made paramount in his life—the desire of the journalist for news, the longing of the historian for history.
Fleet Street called to him from those blue strips with their printed message. "Go Narbonne immediately cover riots," and the signature that symbolized Fleet Street—"Ferrol"—held in it all the power that had made him a puppet of Fate.
But Narbonne.... From all parts of Europe the Special Correspondents would be converging on the town. There would be great doings to describe, new interests to make him forget rapidly.
Dagneau helped him on with his coat. "Send on my bag," he said, glancing at his watch. "I'm awfully sorry," he added to Charnac. "You'll understand. Explain to them, won't you? Dagneau, stop and finish my supper."
He forgot everything else ... what else mattered?
Dis donc, Desirée said, "are you going again?" How surprisingly unimportant she seemed at this moment. Her expression was half-suppliant, half-petulant. "If you go," she said distinctly, "I will never speak to you again—never."
As if she could hold him back when others had failed! But he was moved to show her tenderness. A momentary pang of regret shot across him because he had to leave her. "Don't be cross," he whispered. "I shall be back in three days."
She turned her head away impetuously. And he realized that there never had been, nor ever could be, anything in common between them.
Once, when he was dozing in the train speeding southwards to Bordeaux, he woke up and laughed as he remembered the ludicrous amazement on the face of Desirée as he left her suddenly and gladly to take up his work.
The matters that occupied his mind belonged only to his work. In the early morning at Bordeaux, when he had to change, he bought a budget of morning papers, and read them in the refreshment-room over his roll and coffee. The news was alarming enough: people were fleeing from Narbonne and the neighbouring towns. Seven had been shot in a riot on the previous night; the soldiery was in charge of the town, and martial law had been proclaimed.
The French journalists excelled themselves in superlatives ... their stories were vain accounts of personal emotions and experiences, for it is the fashion with them to thrust their personality in front of the news.
Thereafter, on the journey to Narbonne, Humphrey wondered how he was going to get his telegrams out of the town, if it were besieged. He bought a map of the district and studied it: it might be necessary to send a courier to Perpignan, or back to Bordeaux, or, if things were very bad indeed, there were carrier pigeons; the Spanish frontier at Port Bou was not very far away also ... perhaps, he could find some one to whom to telephone. It was his business to get any news out of Narbonne, and there would be no excuse for failure.
The people in his carriage were talking of the shooting.
I shouldn't like to be going there, one said.
It will be worse to-night, another remarked. "Those Southerners lose their heads so quickly."
It seemed odd to Humphrey that while they were talking of it in this detached way, he alone, probably, out of the whole train-load, was about to plunge into the actualities of revolution of his own free will. For the next few days he would be living with the grievances of the wine-growers, learning things that were unknown to him now. He would have to record and describe all that happened. His was the power to create sympathy in English households for the wrongs of these people starving in the midst of their fertile vineyards.
The brakes jarred the carriages of the train. Heads were put out of the window. On the up-line a goods train carrying flour had met with an accident. The engine lay grotesquely on one side, powdered with white flour, and the vans looked as if they had been out in a snow-storm. The melancholy sight of the shattered train slid past, as their own train jolted slowly on its journey.
What is it—have they wrecked the train? some one asked.
No, another said, pointing to a paragraph in the paper, "it was an accident. The engine ran off the metals last night. It's in the Depêche de Toulouse."
They all chattered among themselves. It was a trivial affair, then—one had thought for a moment that those sacred Narbonnais...!
But there was something sinister in that wrecked train with its broken vans and its engine covered in a cloud of white. It seemed to presage disaster, as it lay there outside the door of the town.
The train stopped. "Narbonne" cried the porters. Humphrey descended as though it was the commonest thing in his life to enter garrisoned cities. The platform was full of soldiers, some standing with fixed bayonets, others sleeping on straw beside their stacked arms. Officers strolled up and down to the clank of their swords; outside, through the door of the station, itself guarded by an infantryman in a blue coat, with its skirts tucked back, he caught a glimpse of horses tethered to the railings.
Nobody stopped him but the ticket-collector: in the midst of all this outward display of militarism, the business of the station went on as usual. Trains steamed in and departed; expresses pounded through on their way to Paris; porters were busy with parcels. The hotel buses were drawn up outside, just as if nothing in the world had happened to disturb the life of the town. He chose the Hotel Dorade omnibus, and away they went.
The streets were lined with soldiers bivouacking on the pavements. The avenue from the station was a long line of stacked rifles, and soldiers in blue and red lounging against the walls, smoking cigarettes, or lying on the pavement, where beds of hay had been made. Many of the shops were shuttered. He looked up, and the flat roofs of the houses were like barracks, with the képis of soldiers visible between the chimney-pots. The bus passed an open square—cavalry held it, and another street, broad and long, leading from it, was a camp of white tents.
Sentries guarded the bridges across the river, and though the main Boulevard was free of soldiers, he saw a hint of power in the courtyards of large houses. The walls were placarded with green and yellow posters, addressed to "Citoyens," urging them to resist the Government. The soldiers read them idly.
And, in the midst of all this, the people of Narbonne sat outside the cafés in the sunshine, under the red and white striped awnings, drinking their vermouth or absinthe!
Later, after he had taken his room at the Hotel Dorade, he walked about the town through the ranks of the soldiers. Groups of people stood here and there, with grim faces and stern-set lips; they looked revengefully at officers and mounted police, and whenever a regiment marched into the town to the music of its drums and bugles, it was greeted with hoarse shouts of derision, and mocking cries of "Assassins!"
At the corner of a street of shops he came upon a little mound of stones set round a dark stain on the cobbled road; a wreath was laid there, and a night-light still burned under a glass cover. A piece of white cardboard, cut in the shape of a miniature tombstone, rested against a brick. He read the ill-written inscription on the card:—
Cross
René Duclos
agé de 29 ans
assasiné par le gouvernement.
There were seven other little memorial mounds in the neighbourhood. Each one of them marked where a victim had fallen to the soldiers' ball cartridge. One of the cardboard tombstones bore a woman's name. Her death was one of the inexplicable accidents of life: she was to have been married on the morrow. On her way she had been carried along in the crowd which was marching towards the Town Hall ... and in a minute she was dead.
These signs of tragedy made a deep impression on Humphrey's journalistic sense. He saw that the soldiers had not dared to move the mounds that reminded the people of the dreadful happenings in their midst. And they were surrounded by little silent crowds, who spelt out the inscriptions, sighed, and departed with mutterings.
A man with bloodshot eyes, and unkempt hair, his chin thick with bristles, lurched across the road, and stood by Humphrey, regarding him with a curious, persistent gaze. Humphrey moved away, and the man edged after him. He made for the main Boulevards where the crowded cafés gave him a sense of safety. He turned round, and saw that he was still being shadowed.
A voice hailed him from a café: he turned and saw O'Malley, the Irishman of The Sentinel.
Hallo, said O'Malley, "been here long?"
Just arrived, Humphrey said. He was glad to see a friend. That unkempt man who had followed him made him feel uncomfortably insecure.
Where are you stopping? O'Malley asked.
At the Dorade.
I'm there too: there's a whole gang of French and English fellows here. Been having no end of adventures. My carriage was held up outside Argelliers yesterday, and they wanted to see my papers. As bad as the flight to Varennes, isn't it? He laughed, and they sat down to drink.
The unkempt man took up his position against the parapet of the bridge opposite.
Humphrey noticed that O'Malley wore a white band round his arm with a blue number on it, and his name, coupled with The Sentinel, written in ink that had frayed itself into the fabric.
You'll have to get one of these, O'Malley explained. "It isn't safe to be a stranger here. They're issued by the People's Committee to journalists who show their credentials. A lot of detectives have been down here, you see, posing as journalists, and asking questions in the villages, getting all sorts of information; that's how they managed to arrest the ringleaders in the villages."
It was a pretty mean trick, Humphrey said.
Mean—I should think it was. They nearly lynched Harridge, the photographer, yesterday, and they chased another so-called journalist to the river, and he had to swim for his life, while the mob fired pot-shots at him from the bridges. So now they've placarded the town to explain that every real journalist has a white armband with a number on it.
Humphrey looked at the shaggy man opposite. "Good Lord!" he said, "that's why that fellow's been shadowing me...."
Yes. He's one of the Committee's spies.
I'd better get that armband quick.
No hurry. You're all serene in my company. We'll finish our drink and stroll up together.
On the way O'Malley told him some of the latest developments. The chief ringleader, the man whom the wine-growers hailed as the Redeemer, was still at large, and nobody knew where he was. Picture-postcards of the bearded man with a halo round his head and a bunch of grapes dangling from a cross that he held in his right hand, were selling in thousands at two sous each.
To-morrow there are the funerals, remarked O'Malley. "Seven funerals at once. It ought to make a good story."
They came to a dingy house, where there were no soldiers. Humphrey followed O'Malley up a narrow, twisting staircase to a little room. The walls were plastered with the posters he had seen on the street hoardings. Five men sat in the room, smoking cigarettes. The air was full of the stale reek of cheap tobacco. They sat in their shirt-sleeves with piles of papers before them.
One of them, a gross man with a black moustache straggling over his heavy under lip, spread out his fat hands in inquiry. Another, thin, undersized and dirty, with a rat-like face, peered at them with blinking red-rimmed eyes.
What do you want? he asked, gruffly.
O'Malley, in his best Irish-French, explained his business and presented Humphrey. The hollow farce of polite phrases, which mean nothing in France, was played out. They wanted to see his carte d'identité and all the credentials he had. Humphrey unloaded his pocket-book on them. Finally, they made him sign a book, and they gave him a white armlet; he pinned it round his arm, and walked forth a free man. The unkempt man stood on the opposite side of the street still watching him.
And now, as he walked along the streets of Narbonne, with the white armlet of the revolutionaries giving him protection, he smiled to see the soldiers guarding the streets.
Look here, he said to O'Malley, "who's going to give me anything to prevent the soldiers bayoneting me?"
Yes—I've thought of that too, O'Malley answered. "Funny, isn't it, that we've got to fly for a safeguard to the People's Committee? By the way, don't you get talking to strangers more than you can help. They're down on spies. I'm going to get my copy off now. See you at the post-office."
Humphrey went back to the Dorade, and wrote his message, a descriptive account of all that he had seen, in abbreviated telegraphese. Other correspondents were there, war correspondents used to open campaigns, prepared for all emergencies; others had come from the Fleet Streets of Spain and Belgium and Germany. There was an American, too, who had travelled from Paris: as he had not yet obtained his armband, he remained in the hotel, writing very alarming telegrams.
The Englishmen dined together—a jolly party—at a large round table, and, afterwards, they all went out to look at the town at night under arms. Once, during their walk, the sound of firing came to them, and they ran helter-skelter up the Boulevard right into the arms of a young lieutenant, who laughed and told them that nothing serious had happened. He invited them all to a drink in a café, and just to satisfy them, Humphrey went reconnoitring and found that all was peaceful.
He had no time to think of anything but his work. At midnight he went to bed and slept deeply.
On the second day the "Redeemer," whom every one had imagined to be captured, suddenly appeared in Narbonne, and was whisked away in a motor-car to Argelliers, his native town. Bouvier, of the Petit Journal, saw him, dashed into a motor-garage, and hired a car in an instant.
Viens, he shouted, as Humphrey strolled down the Street. "The 'Redeemer' has come back. You can share my car." Humphrey, knowing nothing except that Bouvier was very excited, and that, by a chance, some big news had come under his notice, jumped into the car, and away they whirled into the open country.
The Southern landscape was vivid in the hot sunshine of the late autumn; they left clouds of dust behind them as the car raced along to overtake the car of the "Redeemer." They passed the spacious vineyards, where the grapes grew like stunted hop-fields, twining round their little sticks; they sped through avenues of poplars, and almond trees and ilex; through villages where old women cheered and pointed down the long road.
We're catching him up, Bouvier grunted. "They must have heard the news of his coming somehow."
A bend in the road, and a bridge with the blue river running beneath its arches; farmhouses and boys driving cattle home; children swinging on a gate, and old men plodding towards the sunset, on sticks that could never straighten their bent backs: the country came at them and receded from them in a succession of pictures framed in the hood of their car. Vineyards, and again vineyards, with the ungathered grapes withering in the sun, and people crying to them, "He's come back: the brave fellow."
As the road led nearer to Argelliers they overtook yellow coaches, full of people, and country carts swinging along. The drivers pointed their whips ahead, and shouted something, but the words were lost in the rush of the wind as the car rushed by them.
The whole countryside seems to know that he's escaped. There'll be thousands in the Market Place, Bouvier said.
It'll be a fine story, Humphrey agreed. "Those other fellows must have missed it." He was drunk with the excitement and the happiness of hunting a quarry.
They came to the Market Place of Argelliers, and the sight amazed him.
Left and right the people crushed together—a rectangular pattern of humanity. People of all ages had been drawn there by the magnetism of this man who had stirred up the South to revolt. The caps and dresses of the women and girls gave touches of colour to the sombre crowd of men, and, as he stood up in the motor-car for a better view, he saw row upon row of pink, upturned faces, parted, eager lips, and eyes that strained against the sunshine to see the black-clad figure of a man standing on the low roof of the People's Committee. Boys had climbed the trees round the Market Place—their gaping faces shone from the dark branches; and on the outskirts of the vast crowd men and women stood up in carts and waggonettes—horses had been harnessed to anything that ran on wheels.
There was not a soldier in sight. The sun shone fiercely on the Market Place of Argelliers, where two thousand people were thinking of their wrongs. And the man on the roof talked to them. His voice, strong and sonorous, came to them urging them to be of good cheer. They flung back at him cries of encouragement, and called him by name.
I'm going into the crowd, Humphrey said.
Better stop here, urged Bouvier. "They're an excitable lot."
I must hear what he's saying.
Humphrey climbed out of the car, and pushed his way into the middle of the crowd. There was a loud shouting over some remark that the speaker had made. He found himself wedged in tightly between heavy, broad-shouldered men, with black eyes and swarthy faces. He heard the man on the roof speak about those who had been attacking him, and a voice close to Humphrey yelled, "La Depêche de Toulouse," and immediately another voice cried out, "Conspuez la Depêche de Toulouse." He turned at the voice and saw, with a sudden shock, the shaggy-haired man with the bloodshot eyes who had dogged his footsteps that first day in Narbonne. Their glances met. Humphrey thrust back into his pocket the pencil with which he had been making furtive notes.
Conspuez les autres! cried the man with the bloodshot eyes, "conspuez les mouchards."
He was conscious of a new note in the crowd: he saw anger and hatred passing swiftly over all the faces around him. They turned on him with relentless eyes. He saw the shaggy-haired man shouldering his way, and scrambling towards him with crooked fingers that clawed at the air. In one quick second he realized that he was in danger.
Conspuez les autres. The cry rose all about him swelling to a roar of confusion.
En voilà un! shouted the shaggy man, pointing to Humphrey's white armband. They surged against him, and he was swept from his feet. He heard the shriek of women, and the babble and a murmur that ran like an undercurrent through the storm of noisy voices. The black figure on the roof was wringing his hands, and trying to calm the mob.
Humphrey turned to escape. "What a fool I was to come into the thick of it," he thought. Once, in the struggle, he saw Bouvier standing with a white face in the motor-car, probably wondering what the row was about.
And then, they came at him suddenly and determinedly. Remorseless and menacing faces were thrust close to him. He struck out and a thrill went up his arm as his fist met a hard cheek-bone.
Something fell on his arm with a heavy, aching blow that left it numb and limp, and at the same moment an excruciating spasm of self-pity swept upward from his soul, as he saw, as in a red mist, uplifted, clenched hands struggling to meet him. This was real life at last. He had ceased to be an onlooker; the game was terrible and earnest, and he was, for the first time, the principal figure in the play. His agony did not last long.
The hot breath of the men was on him, and the evil, bloodshot eyes of the shaggy-haired man who had denounced him, loomed terribly large, like great red-veined moons.
And, in that last moment, before all consciousness went from him for ever, as he swayed and fell before the trampling mob, in that supreme moment when deliverance came from all the tribulations that life held for him, an odd, whimsical idea twisted his lips into a smile as he thought:
What a ripping story this will make for The Day.
The End