"No, I never did. But I am a provincial, and I have seen nothing at all. Perhaps in London--"
"No, you would see nothing like it in London," said Regnault decidedly. "Bah! it is not that you are more virtuous than we are.
Who believes such folly? But your vice is grosser, stupider. Lucky for you! You don"t sacrifice to it the best young brain of the nation, as we are perpetually doing. Ah, _mon Dieu_!" he broke out in a kind of despair, "this enigma of art!--of the artist! One flounders and blunders along. I have been floundering and blundering with the rest,--playing tricks--following this man and that--till suddenly--a door opens--and one sees the real world through for the first time!"
He stood still in his excitement, a smile of the most exquisite quality and sweetness dawning on his strong young face.
"And then," he went on, beginning to walk again, and talking much more to the night than to his companion, "one learns that the secret of life lies in _feeling_--in the heart, not in the head. And no more limits than before!--all is still open, divinely open.
Range the whole world--see everything, learn everything--till at the end of years and years you may perhaps be found worthy to be called an artist! But let art have her ends, all the while, shining beyond the means she is toiling through--her ends of beauty or of power. To spend herself on the mere photography of the vile and the hideous! what waste--what sacrilege!"
They had reached the Place de la Concorde, which lay bathed in moonlight, the silver fountains plashing, the trees in the Champs-Elysees throwing their sharp yet delicate shadows on the intense whiteness of the ground, the buildings far away rising softly into the softest purest blue. Regnault stopped and looked round him with enchantment. As for David, he had no eyes save for his companion. His face was full of a quick responsive emotion.
After an experience which had besmirched every ideal and bemocked every faith, the young Frenchman"s talk had carried the lad once more into the full tide of poetry and romance. "The secret of life lies in _feeling_, in the heart, not the head"--ah, _that_ he understood! He tried to express his a.s.sent, his homage to the speaker; but neither he nor the artist understood very clearly what he was saying. Presently Regnault said in another tone:
"And they are such good fellows, many of them. Starving often--but nothing to propitiate the _bourgeois_, nothing to compromise the "dignity of art." A man will paint to please himself all day, paint, on a crust, something that won"t and can"t sell, that the world in fact would be mad to buy; then in the evening he will put his canvas to the wall, and paint sleeve-links or china to live.
And so generous to each other: they will give each other all they have--food, clothes, money, knowledge. That man who gave that abominable thing about St. Francis--I know him, he has a little apartment near the Quai St.-Michel, and an invalid mother. He is a perfect angel to her. I could take off my hat to him whenever I think of it."
His voice dropped again. Regnault was pacing along across the Place, his arms behind him, David at his side. When he resumed, it was once more in a tone of despondency.
"There is an ideal; but so twisted, so corrupted! What is wanted is not less intelligence but _more_--more knowledge, more experience--something beyond this fevering, brutalising Paris, which is all these men know. They have got the poison of the Boulevards in their blood, and it dulls their eye and hand. They want scattering to the wilderness; they want the wave of life to come and lift them past the mud they are dabbling in, with its hideous wrecks and _debris_, out and away to the great sea, to the infinite beyond of experience and feeling! you, too, feel with me?--you, too, see it like that? Ah! when one has seen and felt Italy--the East,--the South--lived heart to heart with a wild nature, or with the great embodied thought of the past,--lived at large, among great things, great sights, great emotions, then there comes purification! There is no other way out--no, none!"
So for another hour Regnault led the English boy up and down and along the quays, talking in the frankest openest way to this acquaintance of a night. It was as though he were wrestling his own way through his own life-problem. Very often David could hardly follow. The joys, the pa.s.sions, the temptations of the artist, struggling with the life of thought and aspiration, the craving to know everything, to feel everything, at war with the hunger for a moral unity and a stainless self-respect--there was all this in his troubled, discursive talk, and there was besides the magic touch of genius, youth, and poetry.
"Well, this is strange!" he said at last, stopping at a point between the Louvre on the one hand and the Inst.i.tute on the other, the moonlit river lying between.--" My friends come to me at Rome or at Tangiers, and they complain of me, "Regnault, you have grown morose, no one can get a word out of you"--and they go away wounded--I have seen it often. And it was always true. For months I have had no words. I have been in the dark, wrestling with my art and with this goading, torturing world, which the artist with his puny forces has somehow to tame and render. Then--the other day--ah! well, no matter!--but the dark broke, and there was light!
and when I saw your face, your stranger"s face, in that crowd to-night, listening to those things, it drew me. I wanted to say my say. I don"t make excuses. Very likely we shall never meet again--but for this hour we have been friends. Good night!--good night! Look,--the dawn is coming!"
And he pointed to where, behind the towers of Notre-Dame, the first whiteness of the coming day was rising into the starry blue.
They shook hands.
"You go back to England soon?"
"In a--a--week or two."
"Only believe this--we have things better worth seeing than "Les Trois Rats"--things that represent us better. That is what the foreigner is always doing; he spends his time in wondering at our monkey tricks; there is no nation can do them so well as we; and the great France--the undying France!--disappears in a splutter of _blague_!"
He leant over the parapet, forgetting his companion, his eyes fixed on the great cathedral, on the slender shaft of the Sainte Chapelle, on the sky filling with light.
Then suddenly he turned round, laid a quick hand on his companion"s shoulder.
"If you ever feel inclined to write to me, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts will find me. Adieu."
And drawing his coat round him in the chilliness of the dawn, he walked off quickly across the bridge.
David also hurried away, speeding along the deserted pavements till again he was in his own dark street. The dawn was growing from its first moment of mysterious beauty into a grey disillusioning light.
But he felt no reaction. He crept up the squalid stairs to his room. It was heavy with the scent of the narcissus.
He took them, and stole along the pa.s.sage to Elise"s door. There were three steps outside it. He sat down on the lowest, putting his flowers beside him. There was something awful to him even in this nearness; he dare not have gone higher.
He sat there for long--his heart beating, beating. Every part of his French experience so far, whether by sympathy or recoil, had helped to bring him to this intoxication of sense and soul.
Regnault had spoken of the "great things" of life. Had he too come to understand them--thus?
At last he left his flowers there, kissing the step on which they were laid, and which her foot must touch. He could hardly sleep; the slight fragrance which clung to the old bearskin in which he wrapt himself helped to keep him restless; it was the faint heliotrope scent he had noticed in her room.
CHAPTER VI
"He loves me--he does really! Poor boy!"
The speaker was Elise Delaunay. She was sitting alone on the divan in her _atelier_, trying on a pair of old Pompadour shoes, with large faded rosettes and pink heels, which she had that moment routed out of a broker"s shop in the Rue de Seine, on her way back from the Luxembourg with David. They made her feet look enchantingly small, and she was holding back her skirts that she might get a good look at them.
Her conviction of David"s pa.s.sion did not for some time lessen her interest in the shoes, but at last she kicked them off, and flung herself back on the divan, to think out the situation a little.
Yes, the English youth"s adoration could no longer be ignored. It had become evident, even to her own acquaintances and comrades in the various galleries she was now haunting in this bye-time of the artistic year. Whenever she and he appeared together now, there were sly looks and smiles.
The scandal of it did not affect her in the least. She belonged to Bohemia, so apparently did he. She had been perfectly honest till now; but she had never let any convention stand in her way. All her conceptions of the relations between men and women were of an extremely free kind. Her mother"s blood in her accounted both for a certain coldness and a certain personal refinement which both divided and protected her from a great many of her acquaintance, but through her father she had been acquainted for years with the type of life and _menage_ which prevails among a certain section of the French artist cla.s.s, and if the occasion were but strong enough she had no instincts inherited or acquired which would stand in the way of the gratification of pa.s.sion.
On the contrary, her reasoned opinions so far as she had any were all in favour of _l"union libre_--that curious type of a.s.sociation which held the artist Theodore Rousseau for life to the woman who pa.s.sed as his wife, and which obtains to a remarkable extent, with all those accompaniments of permanence, fidelity, and mutual service, which are commonly held to belong only to _l"union legale_, in one or two strata of French society. She was capable of sentiment; she had hidden veins of womanish weakness; but at the same time the little creature"s prevailing temper was one of remarkable coolness and audacity. She judged for herself; she had read for herself, observed for herself. Such a temper had hitherto preserved her from adventures; but, upon occasion, it might as easily land her in one. She was at once a daughter of art and a daughter of the people, with a cross strain of gentle breeding and intellectual versatility thrown in, which made her more interesting and more individual than the rest of her cla.s.s.
"We are a pair of Romantics out of date, you and I," she had said once to David, half mocking, half in earnest, and the phrase fitted the relation and position of the pair very nearly. In spite of the enormous difference of their habits and training they had at bottom similar tastes--the same capacity for the excitements of art and imagination, the same shrinking from the coa.r.s.e and ugly sides of the life amid which they moved, the same cravings for novelty and experience.
David went no more to the "Trois Rats," and when, in obedience to Lenain"s recommendation, he had bought and begun to read a novel of the Goncourts, he threw it from him in a disgust beyond expression.
_Her_ talk, meanwhile, was in some respects of the freest; she would discuss subjects impossible to the English girl of the same cla.s.s; she asked very few questions as to the people she mixed with; and he was, by now, perfectly acquainted with her view, that on the whole marriage was for the _bourgeois_, and had few attractions for people who were capable of penetrating deeper into the rich growths of life. But there was no _personal_ taint or license in what she said; and she herself could be always happily divided from her topics. Their Bohemia was canopied with illusions, but the illusions on the whole were those of poetry.
Were all David"s illusions hers, however? _Love!_ She thought of it, half laughing, as she lay on the divan. She knew nothing about it--she was for _art_. Yet what a brow, what eyes, what a gait--like a young Achilles!
She sprang up to look at a sketch of him, dashed off the day before, which was on the easel. Yes, it was like. There was the quick ardent air, the southern colour, the cl.u.s.tering black hair, the young parting of the lips. The invitation of the eyes was irresistible--she smiled into them--the little pale face flushing.
But at the same moment her attention was caught by a sketch pinned against the wall just behind the easel.
"Ah! my cousin, my good cousin!" she said, with a little mocking twist of the mouth; "how strange that you have not been here all this time--never once! There was something said, I remember, about a visit to Bordeaux about now. Ah! well--_tant mieux_--for you would be rather jealous, my cousin!"
Then she sat down with her hands on her knees, very serious. How long since they met? A week. How long till the temporary closing of the Salon and the voting of the rewards? A fortnight. Well, should it go on till then? Yes or no? As soon as she knew her fate--or at any rate if she got her _mention_--she would go back to work.
She had two subjects in her mind; she would work at home, and Taranne had promised to come and advise her. Then she would have no time for handsome English boys. But till then?
She took an anemone from a bunch David had brought her, and began to pluck off the petals, alternating "yes" and "no." The last petal fell to "yes."
"I should have done just the same if it had been "no,"" she said, laughing. "_Allons_, he amuses me, and I do him no harm. When I go back to work he can do his business. He has done none yet. He will forget me and make some money."
She paced up and down the studio thinking again. She was conscious of some remorse for her part in sending the Englishman"s sister to the Cervins. The matter had never been mentioned again between her and David; yet she knew instinctively that he was often ill at ease. The girl was perpetually in Montjoie"s studio, and surrounded in public places by a crew of his friends. Madame Cervin was constantly in attendance no doubt, but if it came to a struggle she would have no power with the English girl, whose obstinacy was in proportion to her ignorance.
Elise had herself once stopped Madame Cervin on the stairs, and said some frank things of the sculptor, in order to quiet an uncomfortable conscience.
"Ah! you do not like Monsieur Montjoie?" said the other, looking hard at her.
Elise coloured, then she recovered herself.
"All the world knows that Monsieur Montjoie has no scruples, madame," she cried angrily. "You know it yourself. It is a shame.