"You know quite well its Lu-chee-ah, and the accent is on the middle syllable, not the first."
"Oh, all right: Lu-CHEE-ah. Ah! what a mouthful! I would rather say Miss Grant!"
"It might be as well if you did," I said, coldly.
Howard looked at me and opened his eyes.
"You are uncommonly sticky to-day," he said, kicking a very old slipper off his swinging foot and catching it on the toe again.
"Well, what about Paris? Let"s hear."
"I am so sick of this rotten, wishy-washy England. They won"t take my things as they stand, and I"m not going to write "Tales of my First Feeding Bottle" to please them. So I"m going over to Paris. I shall turn my MSS. into French and publish them there. The language lends itself to perfect lucidity, and the Paris press allows men to write as men. Besides, the French admire word-painting, which is my particular vein. The English don"t. They like composition. Here an author"s pen must remain always a stick dipped in ink. It must never become what mine is--a painter"s brush, wet, dripping, overflowing with oil colour.
It struck me you might care to come too, and do the same with your verse. If so--come, by all means."
I looked down at his intelligent face and hoped he would come. Selfish, conceited, and self-sufficient as I may be, there is a strand of weakness made up in my composition that forces me to find the companionship of another intellect whenever possible.
"Yes; I"ll come," he answered after a minute, getting on to his feet and thrusting both hands into his pockets with an energetic air. "I"m rather dubious about the books and the translation business; but anyway we can have a high old time in Paris!"
"But look here, Howard," I returned, "whether I succeed or not, I am not meditating having any high old time, or rather what you mean--a low old time. I"m going there to work."
"Oh, we all know you"re a saint!" he said derisively. "But--"A doubtful throne is ice on summer seas!" We shall see how long your virtue lasts at La Scala and in the Champs Elysees, with Lucia safely packed away in England!"
I smiled and raised my eyebrows in silence. The point was not worth discussing. Howard and I looked at some things from such an enormously different level that conversation on them was merely waste of time. It was as if a man upon a cliff started a dissertation with another in a boat lying on the sea beneath. Half the excellent arguments would drift away upon the wind, lost, rendered nil by the mere difference of level in the two planes. The two main chains that bound my whole psychological system--self-control and self-respect--were entirely absent in him. He looked at his every good action from the point of utility, at his every bad one from the point of secrecy. He would do the first if it were useful to him, and the last if it were secret.
These, I believe, were the only two conditions that ever occurred to him. He was weak, even contemptible, in character, and I could not help clearly seeing it, but my friendship to him was won over by his talents, and by a certain good-tempered, easy, pleasant way he had.
Widely different though we were, we had never had a quarrel. We got on together perfectly, and he might say things to me that would have offended me from an other man. Liking! Liking! What is it? It is as difficult to define, as impossible to imprison between the limits of motives and reasons, of "Whys" and "becauses," as Loving. I liked Howard, or rather I liked his society, which is not the same thing.
Often the people who are the most disappointing in the great issues of life are the pleasantest to live with through the trifles of everyday existence and vice versa. I would not have trusted Howard in a crisis for any consideration, but then crises don"t come every day, and he was delightful to discuss a chapter or a sonnet with.
"When are you going, by the way? Not to-morrow, I hope, for behold this room!" and he glanced round helplessly.
It was certainly in the most frightful of literary confusions. Ma.s.ses of loose papers, letters, bills, poems, drifted over the tables; books stood in piles upon the floor; newspapers occupied the chairs.
"No, next week. Shall we say Sat.u.r.day?"
"All right. I"ll be ready by then. Cross--evening, I suppose?"
"Very likely. But I shall see you again," I said, looking at my watch.
"By Jove! close to seven. I must go. Try and get rid of that confounded jaundice. Good-bye!"
Howard extended his hand.
"By the way, what about the tin? Can you manage?"--
"Oh yes! That"s all right," I said.
I was Howard"s bank, upon which he drew fitfully and spasmodically: that is to say, when any expensive little fancy seized him. He always insisted on giving me I.O.U."s and acknowledgments for the sums he borrowed, which I as regularly tore in pieces and put in the fire. I was half way down the stairs when I ran back and opened his door again.
"Howard!"
"Hullo!"
"Have you a copy of that verse? I have not half studied it this evening."
"What?" he said, looking round his chair back. "Your precious Linked Spheres? Yes; take that one if you like."
I took up the paper.
"Thanks!" I said, and re-descended the stairs.
Going down Baker Street, I stopped at the first lamp-post, and read some lines of it again. A glow of admiration, almost of affection, towards the curious lines, full of nascent genius, lit slowly in me.
"Splendid! magnificent!" I muttered. "If not here, I"ll see it"s got out in Paris."
CHAPTER III.
The next week saw myself and Howard installed in Paris. We had two large, comfortable rooms on the second floor, opening into each other, well furnished and upholstered in every way as sitting-rooms, as most of the French bedrooms are.
They faced a corner where several boulevards met and diverged, and there was a constant stream of Paris life flowing beneath our windows every hour of the day. A balcony ran outside, and on this in the evening we used to stand and smoke and flick paper b.a.l.l.s on to the heads of the grisettes and the bonnes pa.s.sing far underneath. On the ground floor of the hotel was a cafe that extended also over the pavement with its chairs and tables, and was open to the general public as well as to those who were staying in the hotel.
Howard and I got on admirably as usual. Although we were so different we had the common ground of a similarity in intellect. On all strictly intellectual subjects, in psychological discussions, on points of artistic merit, we seldom differed. His brain was, when he chose to exert it, singularly brilliant, and in a companion this compensates me for everything else almost that is wanting. I could not certainly have lived in the same intimacy with a fool who had been as high principled, as moral, and as sober as Howard was the reverse of all these. Our mode of life was very different, as naturally it would be, since I had come with a predetermination to do nothing but work, and he with an equally strong one to idle his days away in the most enjoyable manner he could invent. For myself, I was fairly content with the prospect before me.
Work I was accustomed to, and it was easy. A new idea for a ma.n.u.script had begun to hover fitfully before my mental vision, and was gradually absorbing my thoughts into itself. Had I been able to write to and hear from Lucia I should have been satisfied, but my father had made the absence of all correspondence between us a sine qua non of my coming here. When I had heard this I had looked at him with some little amus.e.m.e.nt. Such a stipulation as this seemed to me to have only one interpretation--he hoped and thought I should forget her!
"What is the meaning of this?" I asked. "What can be the benefit of it?
How can the fact of our writing or not writing be of importance? Do you think I shall ever relinquish Lucia? I am resigned to wait as long as must be, but I am utterly determined to have her in the end."
To which my father had answered grimly with a smile,--
"Very well, my dear Victor, see that you get her!"
Which remark had made me grind my teeth and then laugh and shrug my shoulders.
"And you won"t permit a letter a month?"
"No."
"Oh, dressed in your little brief authority!" I thought, looking at him. Then I said--
"Very good--I agree."
"I consider I have your word that you will not write, nor hear from her, directly or indirectly, within this year?"
"Certainly you have."
And so the matter was settled.
When Lucia heard of it, we met each other"s eyes, and she elevated her eyebrows, and a faint smile curved her lips.