"But you do," said he.
Paragot was in one of his rare gentle moods. He spoke softly, without a trace of reproach or irony. He spoke, too, lying pipe in mouth on the old rep sofa, instead of walking about the room. He told me his story.
Need I repeat it?
They had escaped a life-long misery, but on the other hand they had lost a life-long dream. She was still in his eyes all that is beautiful and exquisite in woman; but she was not the woman that Berzelius Nibbidard Paragot could love. The twain had been romantic, walking in the Valley of Illusion, wilfully blinding their eyes to the irony of Things Real.
Love had flown far from them during the silent years and they had mistaken the afterglow of his wings for the living radiance. They had begun to realise the desolate truth. They read it in each other"s eyes.
She had been too loyal to speak. She would have married him, hoping as a woman hopes, against hope. Paragot, whose soul revolted from pretence, preferring real mire to sham down, fled from the piteous tragedy.
He might have retired more conventionally. He might have had a dismal explanatory interview with Joanna, and ordered a fly to convey himself and his luggage to the Railway Station the next morning. Perhaps if Joanna had found him in the November Sunday afternoon garden this might have occurred. But Joanna did not find him. His temperament found him instead; and when you have a temperament like Paragot"s, it plays the very deuce with convention. It drew him out of the garden, across the Channel and into the society of Bubu le Vainqueur. But, all the same, in the essential act of leaving Melford, Paragot behaved like the man of fine honour I shall always maintain him to be.
How many men of speckless reputation, though feeling the pinch of poverty, would not have married Joanna for the great wealth her husband left behind? Answer me that.
I know that Joanna wept bitterly over her lost romance. But she has owned to me that the words written on a sc.r.a.p of paper by Paragot and posted from London were tragically true:
"My dear. It is only the shadows of our past selves that love. You and I are strangers to each other. To continue this sweet pretence of love is a mockery of the Holiest. G.o.d bless you. Gaston."
"If you love a Dream Woman," said Paragot, "let her stay the divine Woman of the Dream. To awaken and clasp flesh and blood, no matter how delicately tender, and find that love has sped at the dawn is a misery too deep for tears."
And Paragot, lying unshaven, unwashed, in grimy s.h.i.+rt and trousers, smoked silently and stared into a future in which the dear sweet Dream Woman with "the little feet so adored" would never, never again have a place.
"If I had a coat to my back," said he, after nearly half an hour"s silence, "I verily believe I would go to the Pont Neuf and talk to Henri Quatre."
_Le Fou Rire_ had given me a commission for a front page in colours; and I was deep in the disreputable task on the following evening when Paragot appeared in my attic. He wore a jacket, his bag having arrived from Melford.
"My soul hungers," said he, "for the Cafe Delphine, and my throat thirsts for sociable alcohol. If you can cease the prost.i.tution of your art to a salacious public for an hour or two, I shall be very glad of your company."
"I think it"s rather good," said I complacently, regarding the drawing with head bent sideways. "It"s an old theme, but it"s up to date. At Janot"s they would say it was palpitating with modernity."
"That"s what makes it vile," said Paragot.
We were thrown into immediate argument. One of the flying art notions of the hour was to revive the old subjects which contained the eternal essentials of life and present them in "palpitatingly modern" form. I eloquently developed my thesis. We were sick to death, for instance, of the quasi-scriptural Prodigal Son, sitting half-naked in a desert beside a swine trough. Was it not more "palpitating" to set the prodigal in modern Paris?
"Your moderns can"t palpitate with dignity, my son," replied Paragot.
"Take Susannah and the Elders. Cla.s.sically treated the subject might yet produce one of the greatest pictures of all time. Translate it into the grocer"s wife and the two churchwardens and you cannot escape from b.e.s.t.i.a.l vulgarity."
Conscious of the wide horizon of extreme youth, I sighed at my master"s narrowness. He was hopelessly behind the times. I dropped the argument and hunted for my cap.
We found the Cafe Delphine fairly full. Madame Boin, whom the past few months had provided with a few more rolls of fat round her neck, gave a little gasp as she caught sight of Paragot, and held out her hand over the counter.
"Is it really you, Monsieur Paragot? One sees you no more. How is that?
But it is charming. Ah? You have been _en voyage_? In England? _On dit que c"est beau la-bas._ And where will you sit? Your place is taken. It is Monsieur Papillard, the poet, who has sat there for a month. We will find another table. There is one that is free."
She pointed to a draughty, unconsidered table by the door. Paragot looked at it, then at Madame Boin and then at his own private and particular table usurped by Monsieur Papillard and his a.s.sociates, and swore a stupefied oath of considerable complication. A weird, pug-nosed, pig-eyed, creature with a goatee beard scarce masking a receding chin, sat in the sacred seat against the wall. His hat and cloak were hung on Paragot"s peg. He was reading a poem to half a dozen youths who seemed all to be drinking _mazagrans_, or coffee in long gla.s.ses. They combined an air of intellectual intensity with one of lyrical enthusiasm, like little owls pretending to be larks. Not one of the old set was there to smile a welcome.
We stood by the counter listening to the poem. When Monsieur Papillard had ended, the youths broke into applause.
"_C"est superbe!_"
"_Un chef d"oeuvre, cher maitre._"
They called the pug-nosed creature, _cher maitre_!
"It is demented idiocy," murmured my astounded master.
At that moment entered Felicien Garbure, a down-at-heel elderly man, who had been wont to sit at Paragot"s table. He was one of those parasitic personages not unknown in the _Quartier_, who contrived to attach themselves to the special circle of a cafe, and to drink as much as possible at other people"s expense. His education and intelligence would have disgraced a Paris cabman, but an ironical Providence had invested him with an air of wisdom which gave to his flattery the value of profound criticism.
This sycophant greeted us with effusion. Where had we been? Why had the delightful band been dispersed? Did we know Monsieur Papillard, the great poet? Before we could reply he approached the chair.
"_Cher maitre_, permit me to present to you my friends Monsieur Berzelius Paragot and Monsieur Asticot."
"_Enchante, Messieurs_," said the great poet urbanely.
We likewise avowed our enchantment, and Paragot swore beneath his breath. The waiter--no longer Hercule, who had been dismissed for petty thievery some time before--but a new waiter who did not know Paragot--set us chairs at the end of the table far away from the great man. We ordered drinks. Paragot emptied his gla.s.s in an absent-minded manner, still under the shock of his downfall. But a few short months ago he had ruled in this place as king. Now he was patronizingly presented to the snub-nosed, idiot usurper by Felicien Garbure. _His_ friend, Berzelius Paragot! _Nom de Dieu!_ And he was a.s.signed a humble place below the salt. Verily the world was upside down.
"Give me another _grog_," said Paragot, "a double one."
The poet read another poem. It was something about topazes and serpents and the twilight and the pink palms of a negress. More I could not gather. The company hailed it as another masterpiece. Felicien Garbure called it a supreme effort of genius. A young man beside Paragot vaunted its witchery of suggestion.
"It is absolute nonsense," cried my master.
"But it is symbolism, Monsieur," replied the young man in a tone of indulgent pity.
"What does it mean?"
The young man--he was very kind--smiled and shrugged his shoulders politely.
"What in common speech is the meaning of one of Bach"s fugues or Claude Monet"s effects of sunlight? One cannot say. They appeal direct to the soul. So does a subtle harmony of words, using words as notes of music, or pigments, what you will, arranged by the magic of a master. These things are transcendental, Monsieur."
"_Saperlipopette!_" breathed Paragot. "My little Asticot," he whispered to me, "have I really come to this, to sit at the feet of an acting pro-sub-vice-deputy infant Gamaliel and be taught the elements of symbolic poetry?"
"But Master," said I, somewhat captivated by the balderdash, "there is, after all, colour in words. Don"t you remember how delighted you were with the name of a little town we pa.s.sed through on our way to Orleans--Romorantin? You were haunted by it and said it was like the purple note of an organ."
"Which shews you my son that I was aware of the jargon of symbolism before these goslings were hatched," he replied.
He drained his tumbler, called the waiter and paid the reckoning.
"Let us go to Pere Louviot"s in the Halles where we can meet some real men and women."
We went, and the Cafe Delphine knew Paragot no more.
After this he took to frequenting indiscriminately the various cafes of the neighbourhood, wandering from one to the other like a lost soul seeking a habitation. Now and again he hit upon fragments of the old band, who had migrated from the Cafe Delphine when it became the home of the symbolic poets. He tried in vain to collect the fragments together in a new hostelry. But the cohesive force had gone. These queer circles of the Latin Quarter are organisms of spontaneous growth. You cannot create them artificially or re-create them when once they are disintegrated. The twos and threes of students received him kindly and listened to his talk; but his authority was gone. Once or twice when I accompanied him I fancied that he had lost also the peculiar magic of his vehement utterances. Cazalet also noticed a change.
"What is the matter with Paragot? He no longer talks. He preaches. _ca ennuie a la fin._"