"_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_" cried he. "It is Gian Bellini"s Doge Loredano. But what made you remember that picture, and how in the name of Board schools could you manage to draw it?"
He walked swiftly up and down the room.
"_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_"
"I used to draw horses and men on my slate at school," said I modestly.
Paragot filled his porcelain pipe and walked about strangely excited.
Suddenly he stopped.
"My little Asticot," said he, "you had better go down and help Mrs.
Housekeeper to wash up the dirty plates and dishes, for your soul"s sake."
What my soul had to do with greasy crockery I could not in the least fathom; but the next morning Paragot gave me a drawing lesson. It would be false modesty for me to say that I did not show talent, since the making of pictures is the means whereby I earn my living at the present moment. The gift once discovered, I exercised it in and out of season.
"My son," said Paragot, when I showed him a sketch of Mrs. Housekeeper as she lay on the scullery floor one Sat.u.r.day night, unable to go any one of her several ways, "I am afraid you are an artist. Do you know what an artist is?"
I didn"t. He p.r.o.nounced the word in tones of such deep melancholy that I felt it must denote something particularly depraved.
"It is the man who has the power of doing up his soul in whitey-brown paper parcels and selling them at three halfpence apiece."
This was at breakfast one morning while he was chipping an egg. Only two eggs furnished forth our repast, and I was already deep in mine. He scooped off the top of the sh.e.l.l, regarded it for a second and then rose with the egg and went to the window.
"Since you have wings you had better fly," said he, and he threw it into the street.
"My little Asticot," he added, resuming his seat. "I myself was once an artist: now I am a philosopher: it is much better."
He cheerfully attacked his bread and b.u.t.ter. Whether it was a sense of his goodness or my own greediness that prompted me I know not, but I pushed my half eaten egg across to him and begged him to finish it. He looked queerly at me for a moment.
"I accept it," said he, "in the spirit in which it is offered."
The great man solemnly ate my egg, and pride so filled my heart that I could scarcely swallow. A smaller man than Paragot would have refused.
From what I gathered from conversations overheard whilst I was serving members with tripe and alcohol, it appeared that my revered master was a mysterious personage. About eight months before, he had entered the then unprosperous Club for the first time as a guest of the founder and proprietor, an old actor who was growing infirm. He talked vehemently.
The next night he took the presidential chair which he since occupied, to the Club"s greater glory. But whence he came, who and what he was, no one seemed to know. One fat man whose air of portentous wisdom (and insatiable appet.i.te) caused me much annoyance, proclaimed him a Russian Nihilist and asked me whether there were any bombs in his bedroom.
Another man declared that he had seen him leading a bear in the streets of Warsaw. His manner offended me.
"Have you ever been to Warsaw, Mr. Ulysses?" asked the fat man. Mr.
Ulysses was the traditional t.i.tle of the head of the Lotus Club.
"This gentleman says he saw you leading a bear there, Master," I piped, wrathfully, in my shrill treble.
There was the sudden silence of consternation. All, some five and twenty, laid down their knives and forks and looked at Paragot, who rose from his seat. Throwing out his right hand he declaimed:
[Greek: "Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polutropon, os mala polla plagchthe, epei Troies Ieron ptoliethron epersen pollon d" anthropon iden astea, kai noon egno.]
"Does anyone know what that is?"
A young fellow at the end of the table said it was the opening lines of the Odyssey.
"You are right, sir," said Paragot, threading his fingers through his long black hair. "They tell of my predecessor in office, the first President of this Club, who was a man of many wanderings and many sufferings and had seen many cities and knew the hearts of men. I, gentlemen, have had my Odyssey, and I have been to Warsaw, and," with a rapier flash of a glance at the gentleman who had accused him of leading bears, "I know the miserable hearts of men." He rapped on the table with his hammer. "Asticot, come here," he shouted.
I obeyed trembling.
"If ever you lift up your voice again in this a.s.sembly, I will have you boiled and served up with onion sauce, second-hand tripe that you are, and you shall be eaten underdone. Now go."
I felt shrivelled to the size of a pea. Beneath Paragot"s grotesqueness ran an unprecedented severity. I was conscious of the accusing glare of every eye. In my blind bolt to the door I had the good fortune to run headlong into a tray of drinks which Cherubino was carrying.
The disaster saved the situation. Laughter rang out loud and the talk became general. The interlude was forgotten; but the man who said he had seen my master leading bears in Warsaw vanished from the Club for ever after.
The next morning when I entered Paragot"s room to wake him I found him reading in bed. He looked up from his book.
"My little Asticot," said he, "leading bears is better than calumny, but indiscretion is worse than both."
And that is all I heard of the matter. I never lifted up my voice in the Club again.
There was a curious black case on the top of a cupboard in his room which for some time aroused my curiosity. It was like no box I had seen before. But one afternoon Paragot took it down and extracted therefrom a violin which after tuning he began to play. Now although fond of music I have never been able to learn any instrument save the tambourine--my highest success otherwise has been to finger out "G.o.d save the Queen"
and "We won"t go home till morning" on the ocarina--and to this day a person able to play the piano or the fiddle seems possessed of an uncanny gift; but in that remote period of my fresh rescue from the gutter, an executant appeared something superhuman. I stared at him with stupid open mouth. He played what I afterwards learned was one of Brahms"s Hungarian dances. His lank figure and long hair worked in unison with the music which filled the room with a wild tumult of movement. I had not heard anything like it in my life. It set every nerve of me dancing. I suppose Paragot found his interest in me because I was such an impressionable youngster. When, at the abrupt finale, he asked me what I thought of it, I could scarce stammer a word.
He gave me one of his queer kind looks while he tuned a string.
"I still wonder, my son, whether it would not be better for your soul that you should go on scullioning to the end of time."
"Why, Master?" I asked.
"_Sacre mille diables_," he cried, "do you think I am going to give you a reason for everything? You"ll learn fast enough."
He laughed and went on playing, and, as I listened, the more G.o.dlike he grew.
"The streets of Paris," said he, returning the fiddle to its case, "are strewn with the wrecked souls of artists."
"And not London?"
"My little Asticot," he replied, "I am a Frenchman, and it is our fondest illusion that no art can possibly exist out of Paris."
I discovered later that he was the son of a Gascon father and an Irish mother, which accounted for his being absolutely bilingual and, indeed, for many oddities of temperament. But now he proclaimed himself a Frenchman, and for a time I was oppressed with a sense of disappointment.
At the Board School I had bolted enough indigestible historical facts to know that the English had always beaten the French, and I had drawn the natural conclusion that the French were a vastly inferior race of beings. It was, I verily believe, the first step in my spiritual education to realise that the G.o.d of my idolatry suffered no diminution of grandeur by reason of his nationality. Indeed he gained accession, for after this he talked often to me of France in his magniloquent way, until I began secretly to be ashamed of being English. This had one advantage, in that I set myself with redoubled vigour to learn his language.
So extraordinary was the veneration I had for the man who had transplanted me from the kicks and soapsuds of my former life into this bewildering land of Greek G.o.ds and Ariels and pictures and music; for the man who spoke many unknown tongues, wore a gold watch chain, had been to Warsaw and every city mentioned in my school geography, and presided like a king over an a.s.sembly of those whom as a gutter urchin I had been wont to designate "toffs"; for the beneficent being who had provided me, Gus Smith alias Asticot, with a nights.h.i.+rt, condescended to eat half my egg and to allow me to supervise his bedchamber and maintain it in an orderly state of disintegration, hair-brushes from b.u.t.ter and tobacco-ash from fish; for the man who, G.o.d knows, was the first of human creatures to awaken the emotion of love within my child"s breast--so extraordinary was the veneration I had for him, that although I started out on this narrative by saying it was Paragot"s story and not my own I proposed to tell, I hope to be pardoned for a brief egotistical excursion.
Like the gentleman in Chaucer, Paragot had over "his beddes hedde" a shelf of books to which, careless creature that he was, he did not dream of denying me access. In that attic in Tavistock Street I read Smollett and Byron and somehow spelt through "Nana." I also found there the _De Imitatione Christi_, which I read with much the same enjoyment as I did the others. You must not think this priggish of me. The impressionable child of starved imagination will read anything that is printed. In my mother"s house I used to purloin the squares of newspaper in which the fried fish from Mr. Samuel"s had been wrapped, and surrept.i.tiously read them. Why not Saint Thomas a Kempis?
I have in my possession now a filthy piece of paper, dropping to bits, on which is copied, in my round Board School boy handwriting, the eleventh chapter of the _De Imitatione_.
It runs:
"_My Son, thou hast still many things to learn, which thou hast not well learned yet._"