For thirty years the world for Paul had been a bazaar stocked with covetable objects. But by the time he reached Paris the counters had lost their fascination. The youthful Minas had been wont to acquire recklessly, then discard, one by one, articles which proved worthless; the mature Minas took only what he was tolerably sure he needed.
He had reached the point where a man rests on his oars, partly because his youthful vigour has subsided, partly because he finds the elusive reflections in the water more arresting than continual change of solid landscape, partly because he is curious to observe how other oarsmen will pull through stretches that have tested him. In Paris he found no lack of contemporaries at grips with issues which he had already settled for himself. Everywhere he met youth who reminded him of himself a few years back, youths who were peering into odd corners in a restless search for their souls. Many were on false scents; nearly all were doomed to find a soul of smaller dimensions than they had taken for granted; some, soul-searching because it seemed to be the clever thing to do, were doomed to find nothing.
Paul watched this game with a sort of tutelary interest. When he offered corroboration and encouragement, the searcher redounded in tributes to his insight; when he adversely criticized, the searcher cried, "But you don't understand!" In either case, when the egoistic possibilities of the discussion had waned, the searcher turned back to his quest, regardless of the interlude, for, as Paul reflected, it is in the nature of youth that it must make mysteries for itself to solve, no matter how lucid a solution you lay before it.
The situation was tinged with paradox. He, who had held his teachers in low esteem, had arrived at the age of thirty to find himself a teacher. His own long process of self-searching had brought him to the pitiable conclusion that the purpose of his existence was to point out to other men the purpose of theirs! He could artistically think—which was to say philosophize—but he could not do. Whilst others performed doughty deeds, he must be content doughtily to theorize. Was that the splendid goal toward which one had so painfully striven? He wondered whether some such let-down were reserved for every man of thirty, or whether the let-down was evidence of his own futility. He classified himself as a creature—like countless other nondescript aliens in Paris—whose body was too heavy for its wings; or rather, a creature all wings and no body, consequently impotent against strong worldly winds.
In any case a failure—except in a limited sense. High time, then, to acknowledge the limitations, and act within one's rôle. He thought of Aunt Verona, his own mentor—Aunt Verona who, like himself, endowed with unusual gifts, had somehow lost heart and sought recourse in teaching, in preparing a prodigy for the destiny she had missed—a destiny which he, in turn, was to miss.
The whole of his property had been realized, and when the final draft had been forwarded he withdrew the money from his bank and deposited it elsewhere, thus removing the last link between himself and the life he had forsworn. He had taken rooms at the top of a bare old house in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and passed for a student—a classification to which his habit of bringing home second-hand books lent a colour of veracity.
The first definite indication of his tutelary vocation came to him after a casual encounter with a young poetaster on the terrasse of the Café du Panthéon. It was an afternoon of late spring, in the year 1920. Paul had just heard in the Sorbonne a lecture on Will and its Role in the Universe, and stopped at the café to sip an apéritif. The professor's theory had been incontrovertible. The world was what its inhabitants chose to make it. A world peopled by the pure in heart would revolve morally on its axis: the same world would revolve frivolously at the behest of knaves. Paul fatalistically accepted his status as that of a believer in l'univers moral, despite appalling evidence to the contrary. And the only honourable course was to live up to the belief—to go on, in the face of unromantic fact, performing romantic deeds. Such a course was impractical, foolhardy, catastrophant—to use a word of his own coining—but it might serve to redeem his failures. If only enough men turned angelic, earth would become heaven; and somebody had to make a start.
As he mused, he observed a gaunt young man scribbling at the neighbouring table, in a corner that might once have been occupied by the needy Verlaine. His face was drawn and his grey eyes seemed to envisage defeat. His clothes were threadbare, but he was clean, whereas he obviously belonged in a category of visionaries who, like Verlaine, their prototype, were usually dirty. Paul saw in the youth a promise which was in danger of belying itself, a brittle spirit which life might easily snap. Another example of the wretched species—the creature all wings.
At length the youth set down his pencil and looked away from his bescribbled sheets and empty glass. Paul leaned toward him, addressing him in English.
"Do you mind if I see what you've written?"
The young man shrank. "Not at all," he finally replied, shoving the sheets to the edge of his table.
Paul's curiosity had been aroused by a blend of intensity and fastidiousness that reminded him of himself in days gone by. As he read, this impression was confirmed, for the poem evoked one of his most familiar moods:
An orchestra of voices,
Siphons,
Chaos merging into yellow warmth,
Satiety.
Exquisite,
Gains me.
Yet what may I lament save surfeit?
Surfeit not of sense,
But of a self unshared,
Unsharable.
Ephemeral?
Less so than I, who, brushing every land,
Am at the bidding of capricious winds
Which it knows to resist
Until due Autumn claims it.
Have learned
That leaves once fallen
Never regain their branch;
And, till a new wind stirs
Rest here,
Peering through golden bubbles,
Summer trees,
Into a radiant vault
And say:
'Here is the bourne you seek,
The object of your nameless pilgrimage.'"
The poet's thoughts proceeded far afield, lured by a romantic gleam. Paul read to the end and handed back the sheets.
"You've always expected a good deal from life, haven't you?" he finally commented.
The youth reflected. "I dare say. But life led me on to expect a good deal. If you're born with an imagination, life puts notions into your head."
"But sooner or later people with imaginations must learn to prepare themselves for the meagreness of what life can give. They can't, of course, cease expecting, but they can, while greatly expecting, reconcile themselves to the inevitable little."
The poet shrugged impatiently. "I despise compromise. For me it's everything or nothing."
"What will you do if it's nothing?"
There was no reply.
Paul smoked in silence. Gradually the youth's eyes came round to him again, filled with a new-born doubt. The impatience was gone. "Would you say," he began, "after reading these silly verses, that with me it's likely to end in—nothing? Was that what you meant?"
Paul weighed it. "No. I merely wished to startle you into the thought that some sort of compromise may be inevitable. 'All or nothing' is a brave banner to rally one's forces under—but few men can keep it aloft."
"Life's damnably hard," said the poet, and the remark was obviously more than a platitude.
"Of course it is. That's why I suggested the wisdom of considering its niggardly terms. In that way one to a certain extent disarms life. By yielding on the score of sordid fact, one conserves energy for the promulgation of one's private version of the truth."
"But that's cheating!"
"If you leave all the cheating to fate, what ghost of a chance have you to survive!"
"There are destinies more glorious than mere survival!"
Paul smiled sympathetically. "I used to think so—passionately. Now I honestly wonder."
"Oh well, just because you've lost faith is no reason for expecting me to!"
"Certainly not." This was sincere. "If you can win the battle I've lost, so much the better. As it is, I'm cheering for you—albeit half sceptically."
The youth for the first time was lifted from his egoistic morass. "I say!" he exclaimed. "I believe your sceptical warnings are worth more than some men's headlong partisanship. You really have been through the mill, I dare say."
"I have, and it grinds, exceeding small. That's why I wish to help you."
The poet had a twinge of conscience. "Oh, let's forget me. I was spoiled as a child."
"Then, no wonder you expect so much!"
"I do expect a lot, God help me!"
"Even from God!" Paul laughed.
"Rather only from God. Mortals can't do much for you, except in the way of food and clothing."
"That's something."
"You mean it's more than I'm disposed to acknowledge?"
"Yes."
Paul watched the sensitive mouth harden in scorn for a poverty which was imminent and abject.
"What are your plans?" he asked after some desultory talk.
"I don't know. Paris has lost its glamour. One can't help feeling that somewhere one will find one's level. I've thought of Austria. The Philistines at home have said so much against our former enemies that one feels they must harbour rare virtues, as does everything the Philistines decry! Do you know Vienna?"
"I spent two years there—before the war."
"Tell me about it."
"I daren't, for I was young. Consequently I look back at my sojourn through a treacherously romantic haze. You might do worse than go there, if only for the sake of storing up impressions upon which you, too, can look back sentimentally in days to come. For half the joy of life consists in passionate recollection."
Paul paused a moment, then said:
"Do let me send you to Vienna. I can supply you with enough to keep you going for a year or two."
Instinctively the youth drew back. "It's very kind of you, but of course it's out of the question."
Paul was impatient. "I gave you credit for more consistency," he said.
"What do you mean??"
"My offer in no way reaches your pride—or, if it does, then your pride is an impertinent intruder upon your idealism, You profess to be an 'all or nothing' idealist, yet you hold back because of a scruple bred in a sphere of society where ideals are ignored, like the drains."
The young man was impressed, and visibly tempted. "But I can make no return," he temporized.
"I'm not offering gifts to you, you fool," retorted Paul. "I'm subventioning your soul. Your soul is only a facet of my own, of the universal soul. If you starve, the cause of enlightenment is retarded by so much—that is my misfortune as well as yours"
"It sounds cogent—but I should feel that I had taken a selfish advantage of your generosity."
"Isn't that my lookout? If I have faith in you, you can't have less. Besides, are you so sure I'm not at heart an 'all or nothing' man? What if my idealism can only be expressed in such ways as the material furtherance of other men's idealistic efforts—will you obstruct it?"
There was a pregnant pause. "Do you realize what a thankless mission you're setting yourself?" asked the poet.
"Perhaps some day you'll ask yourself the same question."
The youth sighed. "I've even done so already."
"Eh bien, trève d'explications! If you'll be here at this hour to-morrow I'll have the money for you."
Two days later Paul made the following entry in a fitful diary he had begun to keep:
"Saw George Paddon, the poet, off to Vienna. His haggardness gone, his eyes lit up with a prodigious expectancy, poor devil! But at least he won't expect to find gold cobblestones there, as I did. Strange that, of all the questions he might with profit have asked, he asked none; and strange that he, like most others, should choose the one question I will never answer: 'What is your nationality?'"
For the next three years the diary continued at irregular intervals to reflect Paul's life. No mention was made of his routines, his readings and his return to a half intensive, half dilettantish preoccupation with music, nor of his donations to the needy students, painters, musicians, and writers who kept crossing his path. The entries mirrored picturesque elements in his surroundings which stung him into a philosophic reaction. The charities, for the most part quixotic, went on as long as his small fortune lasted.
Following are extracts from significant entries:
"Drawing-room in Passy, Nov. 5, 1920. Luigi Pessaro says he lives for and by virtue of music, yet his rose-festooned piano, under my fingers, is out of tune, and neither he nor his mother nor the Principessa seems aware of it. Moreover, he has just sung a Scarlatti ditty and sentimentalized it out of all conscience. Then how account for that opera score there, inscribed by the composer himself, a 'cordial souvenir to a magnificent artist?' Was Massenet sub-consciously thinking of the artist's eyes! And are all composers as fallible as Massenet? Did a certain 'vieux musicien' sub-consciously think of Aunt Verona's eyes when he waxed eloquent about her performances? As one grows older one grows into the habit of believing by contraries. In a way that's novel and refreshing; gives one a sense of living one's past backwards."
"Night café, rue St. Marc, 4 a.m., December 3, 1920.
"Last night Suzy showed me two snapshots of her little boy in the country. She swore her only reason for being in such company in such a place at such an hour was the necessity of providing an education and prospects for her baby. She wept and leaned her blond head on the beer-stained table and finally tucked the photographs into her powder-dusted bag among notes from a legion of lovers. I half believed her, 'lent' her fifty francs again, for luck, and helped her on with her satin cloak when the American lieutenant invited himself to her apartment. She danced her way out, wreathed in smiles.
"To-night, or rather this morning, a chauffeur and a market porter went home with Suzy, and the patronne says Suzy will give them somewhat more than the proceeds of the American's liberality, despite her overdue rent. In the light of that fact, what becomes of Suzy's emotion apropos of the snapshots? More to the point, what becomes of the education and prospects of the little boy in the country? Still more to the point, when shall I learn to distribute my fifty-franc notes to good purpose?"
"Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, May 20, 1921.
"Last night, wandering far afield, I found myself in a deserted street on Montmartre. Abruptly, out of the buried past, came the palpable forms of Lord Henry Shroton and his lady. With them a sister of Freddy, Elsie Shroton, exceedingly pretty. If Gritty had only known, that last night, that Freddy would be shot down before the year was out!
"We proceeded to an expensive restaurant for dinner. Through mazes of comfortable talk, I heard scraps of fact concerning motor routes in sundry corners of Europe, gossip about old acquaintances. How lucky, observed Lady H., tentatively, that I hadn't been killed in the war! Ominous silence. Then we went to a haunt where the niece's desire to be shocked could be decently gratified. She sipped a liqueur on my recommendation, with sidelong violet glances from under a stretched-silk hat brim, and poor Cora watched me, her drooping, cynical lips seeming to say, 'Is that then, your type?'
"On leaving them I strolled away to a dingy studio in an alley on the side of the Butte and sought out Karl Zurschmiede, the little Swiss who paints. With him was an anarchistic Italian-American who has roamed the world on 'freight cars' and cattle boats and who has visions of becoming a second Jack London. At present he shines shoes on a boulevard and secretly hopes somebody will write a story about it for the supplement of a New York Sunday newspaper! So much for the quality of his soul. He made vindictive accusations against the bourgeoisie which grated on my nerves. Middleclass people grate on my nerves equally when they make vindictive remarks about Labour. He gives me the impression of having deliberately chosen to pass his life shining shoes, riding under railway waggons, sleeping in the open, and snarling at the bourgeoisie for keeping him starved and consumptive. I helped him, but felt that his object in life was to arouse sympathy simply that he might have a theatrical occasion to say, 'Damn you and your pity!' And when he departed, tucking his complaints into his cud, the little painter sidled out of his constraint and showed me a series of sketches which proclaimed a painful struggle towards an individuality of expression, which he is scarcely likely to achieve.
"We chatted in a dim candlelight, surrounded by rags and tags, dusty windows, a dilapidated bed and wet canvases, including an agonizing Christ flanked by a Barrabas who suggested a boozing taxicab driver.
"Flavouring it all was Karl's thickish, German-Swiss French, his shiny, round, plain features, his gentle eyes, his simple, warm, considerate sincerity. Not once did he complain of his penury, his chagrins, his amorous betrayals, nor boast of his gift—he merely stated them all, laying his emotions one by one on the table in a hope that I, practised in speech, would build them into an edifice for him; and I did, like a house of blocks for a child. Then he guided me down the steps, through the alley, and I particularly remember the warm, dry, compact stubbiness of his hand, as we parted, the determination in the line of his jaw. The greenish light from a street lamp over his shoulder made a circle around his dimple, and he anxiously told me what to do for my cough. There was a daub of chrome yellow on his nose and he wore no collar.
"I walked home, diametrically across Paris, still keyed up as an effect of the brightness and friendliness of the Shrotons, but mellowed by having acted as Father Confessor in a dingy studio; and I pondered many things.
"Earlier in the evening I had stopped at the Rotonde to drink coffee, and repelled the overtures of a Swedish cinema actress trying to ape the make-up and manner of French tarts—why, God knows! And on my long journey home I had stopped in the Rue St. Marc to have an omelet and a cup of coffee beside a mixed group of thieves, gaming crooks, journalists, public ladies including Suzy, and other noctambules, where the patronne gives me credit and relates the peripéties with which patronnes of blackguardly resorts have to contend.
"The point, is, I don't know to which category I, by nature, belong: to the facetious, aristocratic and opulent, or the starkly, grimly, obstacle-ridden idealistic. I like good cheer at a scintillating table surrounded by the socially and sartorially impeccable, the playfully-minded leisure class—I shouldn't, but I do. Their point of view is unaccountably familiar and natural to me. I disapprove of the Bolshevist fellow's shallowness. I disapprove even of Karl Zurschmiede's griminess, of his cluttered floor, of his uncomplaining acceptance of squalor. Yet I instantly respond, for, as he would modestly say of a well-drawn sketch, 'Il y a du caractère dedans,' and I know I would forego many a good dinner, many a reunion with old acquaintances who show me off at my most amiable, in the interest of the principle that makes the young Swiss, for instance, struggle on in the hope of being able one day to paint a Christ that won't look like half-melted putty."
"Night café, rue St. Marc, 4 a.m., July 8, 1922."
"'You remember that woman who was sitting in your corner here yesterday morning?' asks the patronne, and I have to think back to the dawn before.
"'She was short, thick, black, with wildly disordered hair, rouge-daubed cheeks, a dirty blouse, stubby fingers, magnificent teeth. She was drinking little glasses of rum, and reminded one of a gay, hearty murderess. She was thirty-seven and had just been beaten by a boy of eighteen whom she seduced five years ago. She showed me the bruises and told me how brutal he was—and laughed, a wickedly infectious laugh. She said life was a long series of deceptions. Her young lover forced her to give him money, and spent it on others, and yet she couldn't do without him; and she laughed, and I laughed. She said at that rate her lover would end by stabbing her, or she would stab him, and we laughed and laughed, until the tears came.'
"'Yes,' I replied, 'I remember her.'
"'Ben, mon petit, she's desperately in love with you. She came back here last night with diamonds in her ears, to find you. She says she can't do without you. She showed me a roll of hundred-franc notes with which she proposes to tempt you. She was in a terrible state.'
"'Did she laugh when she confessed herself?'
"'Laugh! She was filled with nine thousand green devils, and each one was shrieking with laughter.'"
"Night café, rue St. Marc, February 1, 1923.
"After an absence of months I stopped in to listen to the patronne's latest peripéties. On my last visit Suzy, in the name of sweet respectability, 'borrowed' twenty francs. She told me she was going to Rouen to attend the marriage of her young sister and was 'making economies' in order to put up a good front before the family.
"Heavens knows what Suzy has done in the meantime, but the patronne assures me that the agents broke into her flat and caught her red-handed. As a result Suzy's curls are drooping in the prison of Saint-Lazare, and the family at Rouen will have one more mysterious silence to add to the long list of gaps in their general information about Suzy.
"Her little dog has been taken in charge by her friend Berthe, who once pulled out half Suzy's back hair in this very room. He seems disconsolate, as though he knew Suzy were languishing. It reminds me of a ditty which Luigi Pessaro used to sing:
Assis nonchalament,
Du mieux qu'il pouvait faire
Disait, le regardant:
L'amour me fait languir,
Lon la!
L'amour me fait,
Lon la,
Me fait mourir.'"
"Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, September 5, 1923.
"Across the court there lives a girl whose hair is the colour of new copper wire. Sometimes she hangs her gloves at the window to dry in the sun. Sometimes she sits there polishing her nails. Every day she sketches at a life class in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière around the corner. When we meet in the court, or on the terrasse of the Rotonde, she nods without smiling. I bore her. Her name is Germaine. Her ami is a medical student who wears loose collars and baggy trousers. Late at night, when the concierge's gate clicks open in response to Germaine's knock, her friend crawls through beside her on all fours, so the concierge won't see him through the window. Germaine is more careful of her reputation than most girls who 'go in for' art.
"Her sketches are rather less than mediocre, and she must know it. Why will women waste time in search of a soul they don't possess, when all they need do, to become incandescent, is to hold themselves before the light of a man's soul—the right man! At her best a woman is a vacuum tube reflecting in rays of dazzling violet, the spiritual current passed through her; at her worst: she's a chameleon; when she tries to be the spiritual currents, herself, or the dye-stuffs, she's either a mannish woman, or just a fraud. Good women there are—the world abounds in them—but they smother you. Conscienceless women are fascinating, and if you're not wary you become addicted to them. The others simply pass by in indifferent clothes, indifferently made up.
"The Germaine who has imbibed enough feministic theories to be useless to herself and the world goes daily to the sketch class. The girl who sits polishing her nails in the sun is the real Germaine. I can't be bothered with the former, but I catch myself peeking through my window rather too often for a glimpse of the latter."
"Rue N. D. des C., November 28, 1923.
"It has been a day of little running waves of imaginative pleasure checked and drawn back into the ocean of fact by an undertow of fear. Illness has something to do with the palpitation—but not everything.
"I'm on a threshold and dare not cross it, lest the abode prove dark, cold and bare in contradiction to its alluring exterior. I'm grateful to be able to forestall desolation by stating it in this way. Many people haven't the anæsthetic of words for their aches. While reason points out the circumstances conspiring against an enduring friendship with the woman who obsesses my vision, my emotions are flowing towards it in a cascade, and one might as well try to cure a drunkard as try to cure me of emotional excess. It's useless to offer me the substitute tisane of studio gregariousness and hail-fellowship for the potent distillation of passionate companionship, flavoured with loyalty. That intensifies life, brings oblivion of minor cares, creates an illusion of energy and health. Yet it belongs to a category of things I've forsworn. The old Adam dies hard. And Eve, this time, ascended my rickety stairs, not with an apple, but with a packet of thermogene!
"What deft fingers, what a way of tucking in blankets that always slide off in the middle watches, what a voice to let oneself sink into—a voice which laves feverish thoughts like a cool river. Hair of glowing copper silhouetted against my brown walls! Some suggestion of jade—the eyes. Translucent jade—a risky amulet.
"Like the drunkard I'm sorry for myself in a maudlin way, but don't wish to be cured. I want earthly love once more, only once. I want it neat. Yet with the glass before me, inviting, I'm afraid. Courage, I know only too well, will come with the first sip, the treacherous courage that bears you on the crest of warm waves, mounting, roaring, rolling with an irresistible momentum, the courage that abandons you at the impact, leaving you numb and weak for the arduous recovery."
"Rue N. D. des C., January 19, 1924.
"A convalescent torpor, grey clouds and wet pavements, an unheated hovel and a cough, growing penury—my own fault, but no matter—and the thought of having to commence some routine of daily-breadwinning. I feel as though my soul, as well as my body, had had an attack of double pneumonia.
"I can fight any number of odds and win, if the odds will do me the favour of being above-board and aggressive. But if they are insidious and passive, if they are merely sandbags, mines, and entanglements, I have no resource but to lay down my firearms and ardently envisage the state of affairs I would substitute.
"Germaine desires to see Italy and Greece. She has saved my worthless life. The return is small enough. We may manage it on my balance at the bank. If we can't—well, one might as well try conclusions with the gods in Athens as in Paris."
"Lake Leman, February 2, 1924.
"A few months ago I was telling the patronne of the blackguardly café in the Rue St. Marc that I longed to escape the blights of a northern winter. When I coughed she recommended her most expensive liqueur! A few weeks ago I was tossing and turning in delirium in the ugliest and coldest little room in Paris. To-day I am sitting on the deck of a white steamer on a blue lake, gazing at sun-gilded, snowy mountaintops, breathing air which stings like rum. Germaine is throwing cakes to the birds and watching them swoop into the icy water.
"A few miles away is Clarens, the enchanted bosquet of Rousseau's Julie and St. Preux. Byron and Shelley once came to visit it. Poor silly pilgrims."
"Hotel Porta Rossa, Florence, February 18, 1924.
"For her the picturesque, the romantic, the idealistic are elements with which life is garnished. For me they are the dish, and the garnishing is what is commonly known as fact. 'I'm so glad it's you who are taking me on this trip,' she says. Which merely means that the excitement of travel is for her the present dish, and my society the garnishing. Somehow I was unable to tell her that her society is the present dish for me, that Italy and Greece and a whole geography-full of lands to be traversed are merely the garnishing, and even overseasoned for my present strength; for she should know it.
"This morning, while Germaine stayed in to polish her nails, I rode in a dusty tram-car to the summit of Fiesole. There I saw pointed hills ringed with gardens and stroked with cypresses, and a Roman theatre whose ruined walls were bescribbled with communist slogans. Roses and oranges tranquilly flourished near, as they flourished when the walls were built.
"I also saw a cab-horse whose tail had grown threadbare through long service in swishing off flies, while bracing himself for the ascents of Vallombrosa. His master had tied on a new tail with red ribbon, but it hung motionless from a weary stump. For Dobbin had come to the dispirited conclusion that fine tails do not make fine horses. I have a presentiment that he will lie down on a steep hill and die before the summer flies arrive. Then that luxuriant false tail will be untied and combed and reutilized, and Dobbin will be cast into a pit and covered with earth. 'Vanitas vanitatum serait bien le fond de tout!'
"We've been looking at lovely, long, bent-necked Botticelli virgins, and to-morrow we pack our bags again. Whither is it leading? I've gone far enough on the path of self-realization to know that the life of a man bent on that supreme adventure is like a cake, with highly-flavoured little accidents for raisins, and soft, leavened loneliness for dough. It's baked in an oven of intense meditation, and some one, presumably, will eat of it. Will anyone smack his lips in the eating of my cake? I fear it will be done to a cinder."
"Hotel Helvétia, Rome, February 27, 1924.
"Cold airs are creeping in under the doors of the abode. And just what can be the status of this man who has turned up again—the man with whom she danced in the Kursaal at Geneva? Is he garnishing or dish? A little 'high' I should imagine, whichever."
"Pensione Grimaldi, Capri, April 18, 1924. Five weeks in bed, By this time Germaine and her captivating (literally enough) dancing man must be well on the way to India. After all, she wished to see strange lands! One can almost be thankful she ran away when she did, for if she had seen the present collapse she might have remained out of pity—which would have been intolerable. As it is, she has even a sense of moral advantage—at a stretch of imagination which she is equal to. The fact that I failed to keep pace with her up that beastly hill—the mountain of Tiberius—will remain for her an evidence of sulkiness on my part. For all her former care of me, she had forgotten the doctor's warnings. If one were cynical one would wonder whether she ever listened to them."My only quarrel with Germaine is that she didn't pay me the compliment of being honest—I think that's the only quarrel I have with anybody. But the boat was ready to leave for Naples and, even if she had had a vision of me prostrate on a deserted mountain path, there was no denying the fact that our funds were running low. The other man had to catch his steamer to Port Said. Opportunity knocks only once. Germaine answered. Grand bien lui fasse! At least she's not spoiling perfectly good canvas!
"I've been less clever than Germaine. I've sent word out to Opportunity, in the phrase that Aunt Verona taught me: 'He's not at home.' That, she said, was one of the few fibs in the world that might be told, a mere façon de parler. A grim façon, on the whole—sinister and symbolic. Opportunity doesn't call nowadays; knows it's useless; and I've only to crawl back to Paris. It's just possible that one day even Germaine, if she makes a good thing out of life, will look back and say, 'He wasn't a bad sort; he once gave me a leg-up.' But, if she plays her cards wrong, she'll say, 'It all started with him; if I'd only stuck at my sketching!'
"One's life is at best a melody soaring above the dissonances of life, but even the worst solo has some coherence, a beginning and a logical end. It doesn't just trail off—surely."