Part 9
“I’m extremely glad you approve of it. Castle Ennui is the Bastille of modern life. It is built of prunes and prisms; it has its outer court of Convention, and its inner court of Propriety; it is moated round by Respectability, and the shackles its inmates wear are forged of dull little duties and arbitrary little rules. You can only escape from it at the risk of breaking your social neck, or remaining a fugitive from social justice to the end of your days. Yes, it is a fairly decent little image.”
“A bit out of something you’re preparing for the press?” she hinted.
“Oh, how unkind of you!” he cried. “It was absolutely extemporaneous.”
“One can never tell, with vous autres gens-de-lettres,” she laughed.
“It would be friendlier to say nous autres gens d’esprit,” he submitted.
“Aren’t we proving to what degree nous autres gens d’esprit sont bêtes,” she remarked, “by continuing to walk along this narrow pavement, when we can get into Kensington Gardens by merely crossing the street? Would it take you out of your way?”
“I have no way. I was sauntering for pleasure, if you can believe me. I wish I could hope that you have no way either. Then we could stop here, and crack little jokes together the livelong afternoon,” he said, as they entered the Gardens.
“Alas, my way leads straight back to the Castle. I’ve promised to call on an old woman in Campden Hill,” said she.
“Disappoint her. It’s good for old women to be disappointed. It whips up their circulation.”
“I shouldn’t much regret disappointing the old woman,” she admitted, “and I should rather like an hour or two of stolen freedom. I don’t mind owning that I’ve generally found you, as men go, a moderately interesting man to talk with. But the deuce of it is... You permit the expression?”
“I’m devoted to the expression.”
“The deuce of it is, I’m supposed to be driving,” she explained.
“Oh, that doesn’t matter. So many suppositions in this world are baseless,” he reminded her.
“But there’s the prison van,” she said. “It’s one of the tiresome rules in the female wing of Castle Ennui that you’re always supposed, more or less, to be driving. And though you may cheat the authorities by slipping out of the prison van directly it’s turned the corner, and sending it on ahead, there it remains, a factor that can’t be eliminated. The prison van will relentlessly await my arrival in the old woman’s street.”
“That only adds to the sport. Let it wait. When a factor can’t be eliminated, it should be haughtily ignored. Besides, there are higher considerations. If you leave me, what shall I do with the rest of this weary day?”
“You can go to your club.”
He threw up his hand. “Merciful lady! What sin have I committed? I never go to my club, except when I’ve been wicked, as a penance. If you will permit me to employ a metaphor—oh, but a tried and trusty metaphor—when one ship on the sea meets another in distress, it stops and comforts it, and forgets all about its previous engagements and the prison van and everything. Shall we cross to the north, and see whether the Serpentine is in its place? Or would you prefer to inspect the eastern front of the Palace? Or may I offer you a penny chair?”
“I think a penny chair would be the maddest of the three dissipations,” she decided.
And they sat down in penny chairs.
“It’s rather jolly here, isn’t it?” said he. “The trees, with their black trunks, and their leaves, and things. Have you ever seen such sumptuous foliage? And the greensward, and the shadows, and the sunlight, and the atmosphere, and the mistiness—isn’t it like pearl-dust and gold-dust floating in the air? It’s all got up to imitate the background of a Watteau. We must do our best to be frivolous and ribald, and supply a proper foreground. How big and fleecy and white the clouds are. Do you think they’re made of cotton-wool? And what do you suppose they paint the sky with? There never was such a brilliant, breath-taking blue. It’s much too nice to be natural. And they’ve sprinkled the whole place with scent, haven’t they? You notice how fresh and sweet it smells. If only one could get rid of the sparrows—the cynical little beasts! hear how they’re chortling—and the people, and the nursemaids and children. I have never been able to understand why they admit the public to the parks.”
“Go on,” she encouraged him. “You’re succeeding admirably in your effort to be ribald.”
“But that last remark wasn’t ribald in the least—it was desperately sincere. I do think it’s inconsiderate of them to admit the public to the parks. They ought to exclude all the lower classes, the People, at one fell swoop, and then to discriminate tremendously amongst the others.”
“Mercy, what undemocratic sentiments!” she cried. “The People, the poor dear People—what have they done?”
“Everything. What haven’t they done? One could forgive their being dirty and stupid and noisy and rude; one could forgive their ugliness, the ineffable banality of their faces, their goggle-eyes, their protruding teeth, their ungainly motions; but the trait one can’t forgive is their venality. They’re so mercenary. They’re always thinking how much they can get out of you—everlastingly touching their hats and expecting you to put your hand in your pocket. Oh, no, believe me, there’s no health in the People. Ground down under the iron heel of despotism, reduced to a condition of hopeless serfdom, I don’t say that they might not develop redeeming virtues. But free, but sovereign, as they are in these days, they’re everything that is squalid and sordid and offensive. Besides, they read such abominably bad literature.”
“In that particular they’re curiously like the aristocracy, aren’t they?” said she. “By-the-bye, when are you going to publish another book of poems?”
“Apropos of bad literature?”
“Not altogether bad. I rather like your poems.”
“So do I,” said he. “It’s useless to pretend that we haven’t tastes in common.”
They were both silent for a bit. She looked at him oddly, an inscrutable little light flickering in her eyes. All at once she broke out with a merry trill of laughter.
“What are you laughing at?” he demanded.
“I’m hugely amused,” she answered.
“I wasn’t aware that I’d said anything especially good.”
“You’re building better than you know. But if I am amused, you look ripe for tears. What is the matter?”
“Every heart knows its own bitterness,” he answered. “Don’t pay the least attention to me. You mustn’t let moodiness of mine cast a blight upon your high spirits.”
“No fear,” she assured him. “There are pleasures that nothing can rob of their sweetness. Life is not all dust and ashes. There are bright spots.”
“Yes, I’ve no doubt there are,” he said.
“And thrilling little adventures—no?” she questioned.
“For the bold, I dare say.”
“None but the bold deserve them. Sometimes it’s one thing, and sometimes it’s another.”
“That’s very certain,” he agreed.
“Sometimes, for instance,” she went on, “one meets a man one knows, and speaks to him. And he answers with a glibness! And then, almost directly, what do you suppose one discovers?”
“What?” he asked.
“One discovers that the wretch hasn’t the ghost of a notion who one is—that he’s totally and absolutely forgotten one!”
“Oh, I say! Really?” he exclaimed.
“Yes, really. You can’t deny that that’s an exhilarating little adventure.”
“I should think it might be. One could enjoy the man’s embarrassment,” he reflected.
“Or his lack of embarrassment. Some men are of an assurance, of a sang froid! They’ll place themselves beside you, and walk with you, and talk with you, and even propose that you should pass the livelong afternoon cracking jokes with them in a garden, and never breathe a hint of their perplexity. They’ll brazen it out.”
“That’s distinctly heroic, Spartan, of them, don’t you think?” he said. “Internally, poor dears, they’re very likely suffering agonies of discomfiture.”
“We’ll hope they are. Could they decently do less?” said she.
“And fancy the mental struggles that must be going on in their brains,” he urged. “If I were a man in such a situation I’d throw myself upon the woman’s mercy. I’d say, ’Beautiful, sweet lady! I know I know you. Your name, your entirely charming and appropriate name, is trembling on the tip of my tongue. But, for some unaccountable reason, my brute of a memory chooses to play the fool. If you’ve a spark of Christian kindness in your soul, you’ll come to my rescue with a little clue.’.rdquo;
“If the woman had a Christian sense of the ridiculous in her soul, I fear you’d throw yourself on her mercy in vain,” she warned him.
“What is the good of tantalising people?”
“Besides,” she continued, “the woman might reasonably feel slightly humiliated to find herself forgotten in that bare-faced manner.”
“The humiliation surely would be all the man’s. Have you heard from the Wohenhoffens lately?”
“The—what? The—who?” She raised her eyebrows.
“The Wohenhoffens,” he repeated.
“What are the Wohenhoffens? Are they persons? Are they things?”
“Oh, nothing. My enquiry was merely dictated by a thirst for knowledge. It occurred to me vaguely that you might have worn a black domino at a masked ball they gave, the Wohenhoffens. Are you sure you didn’t?”
“I’ve a great mind to punish your forgetfulness by pretending that I did,” she teased.
“She was rather tall, like you, and she had grey eyes, and a nice voice, and a laugh that was sweeter than the singing of nightingales. She was monstrously clever, too, with a flow of language that would have made her a leader in any sphere. She was also a perfect fiend. I have always been anxious to meet her again, in order that I might ask her to marry me. I’m strongly disposed to believe that she was you. Was she?” he pleaded.
“If I say yes, will you at once proceed to ask me to marry you?” she asked.
“Try it and see.”
“Ce n’est pas la peine. It occasionally happens that a woman’s already got a husband.”
“She said she was an old maid.”
“Do you dare to insinuate that I look like an old maid?” she cried.
“Yes.”
“Upon my word!”
“Would you wish me to insinuate that you look like anything so insipid as a young girl? Were you the woman of the black domino?” he persisted.
“I should need further information, before being able to make up my mind. Are the—what’s their name?—Wohenheimer?—are the Wohenheimers people one can safely confess to knowing? Oh, you’re a man, and don’t count. But a woman? It sounds a trifle Jewish, Wohenheimer. But of course there are Jews and Jews.”
“You’re playing with me like the cat in the adage,” he sighed. “It’s too cruel. No one is responsible for his memory.”
“And to think that this man took me down to dinner not two months ago!” she murmured in her veil.
“You’re as hard as nails. In whose house? Or—stay. Prompt me a little. Tell me the first syllable of your name. Then the rest will come with a rush.”
“My name is Matilda Muggins.”
“I’ve a great mind to punish your untruthfulness by pretending to believe you,” said he. “Have you really got a husband?”
“Why do you doubt it?” said she.
“I don’t doubt it. Have you?”
“I don’t know what to answer.”
“Don’t you know whether you’ve got a husband?” he protested.
“I don’t know what I’d better let you believe. Yes, on the whole, I think you may as well assume that I’ve got a husband,” she concluded.
“And a lover, too?” he asked.
“Really! I like your impertinence!” She bridled. “I only asked to show a polite interest. I knew the answer would be an indignant negative. You’re an Englishwoman, and you’re nice. Oh, one can see with half an eye that you’re nice. But that a nice Englishwoman should have a lover is as inconceivable as that she should have side-whiskers. It’s only the reg’lar bad-uns in England who have lovers. There’s nothing between the family pew and the divorce court. One nice Englishwoman is a match for the whole Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne.”
“To hear you talk, one might fancy you were not English yourself. For a man of the name of Field, you’re uncommonly foreign. You look rather foreign too, you know, by-the-bye. You haven’t at all an English cast of countenance,” she considered.
“I’ve enjoyed the advantages of a foreign education. I was brought up abroad,” he explained.
“Where your features unconsciously assimilated themselves to a foreign type? Where you learned a hundred thousand strange little foreign things, no doubt? And imbibed a hundred thousand unprincipled little foreign notions? And all the ingenuous little foreign prejudices and misconceptions concerning England?” she questioned.
“Most of them,” he assented.
“Perfide Albion? English hypocrisy?” she pursued.
“Oh, yes, the English are consummate hypocrites. But there’s only one objection to their hypocrisy—it so rarely covers any wickedness. It’s such a disappointment to see a creature stalking towards you, laboriously draped in sheep’s clothing, and then to discover that it’s only a sheep. You, for instance, as I took the liberty of intimating a moment ago, in spite of your perfectly respectable appearance, are a perfectly respectable woman. If you weren’t, wouldn’t I be making furious love to you, though!”
“As I am, I can see no reason why you shouldn’t make furious love to me, if it would amuse you. There’s no harm in firing your pistol at a person who’s bullet-proof,” she laughed.
“No; it’s merely a wanton waste of powder and shot,” said he. “However, I shouldn’t stick at that. The deuce of it is.... You permit the expression?”
“I’m devoted to the expression.”
“The deuce of it is, you profess to be married.”
“Do you mean to say that you, with your unprincipled foreign notions, would be restrained by any such consideration as that?” she wondered.
“I shouldn’t be for an instant—if I weren’t in love with you.”
“Comment donc? Déjà?” she cried with a laugh.
“Oh, déjà! Why not? Consider the weather—consider the scene. Is the air soft, is it fragrant? Look at the sky—good heavens!—and the clouds, and the shadows on the grass, and the sunshine between the trees. The world is made of light today, of light and colour, and perfume and music. Tutt’ intorno canta amort amor, amore! What would you have? One recognises one’s affinity. One doesn’t need a lifetime. You began the business at the Wohenhoffens’ ball. To-day you’ve merely put on the finishing touches.”
“Oh, then I am the woman you met at the masked ball?” she cried.
“Look me in the eye, and tell me you’re not,” he defied her.
“I haven’t the faintest interest in telling you I’m not. On the contrary, it rather pleases me to let you imagine that I am.”
“She owed me a grudge, you know. I hoodwinked her like everything,” he confided.
“Oh, did you? Then, as a sister woman, I should be glad to serve as her instrument of vengeance. Do you happen to have such a thing as a watch about you?” she inquired.
“Yes,” he said.
“Will you be good enough to tell me what o’clock it is?”
“What are your motives for asking?”
“I’m expected at home at five.”
“Where do you live?”
“What are the motives for asking?”
“I want to call upon you.”
“You might wait till you’re invited.”
“Well, invite me—quick!”
“Never.”
“Never?”
“Never, never, never,” she asseverated. “A man who’s forgotten me as you have!”
“But if I’ve only met you once at a masked ball........”
“Can’t you be brought to realise that every time you mistake me for that woman of the masked ball you turn the dagger in the wound?” she demanded.
“But if you won’t invite me to call upon you, how and when am I to see you again?”
“I haven’t an idea,” she answered, cheerfully. “I must go now. Good bye.” She rose.
“One moment,” he interposed. “Before you go will you allow me to look at the palm of your left hand?”
“What for?”
“I can tell fortunes. I’m extremely good at it,” he boasted. “I’ll tell you yours.”
“Oh, very well,” she assented, sitting down again: and guilelessly she pulled off her glove.
He took her hand, a beautifully slender, nervous hand, warm and soft, with rosy, tapering fingers.
“Oho! you are an old maid after all,” he cried. “There’s no wedding ring.”
“You villain!” she gasped, snatching the hand away.
“I promised to tell your fortune. Haven’t I told it correctly?”
“You needn’t rub it in, though. Eccentric old maids don’t like to be reminded of their condition.”
“Will you marry me?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Partly from curiosity. Partly because it’s the only way I can think of, to make sure of seeing you again. And then, I like your hair. Will you?”
“I can’t,” she said.
“Why not?”
“The stars forbid. And I’m ambitious. In my horoscope it is written that I shall either never marry at all, or—marry royalty.”
“Oh, bother ambition! Cheat your horoscope. Marry me. Will you?”
“If you care to follow me,” she said, rising again, “you can come and help me to commit a little theft.”
He followed her to an obscure and sheltered corner of a flowery path, where she stopped before a bush of white lilac.
“There are no keepers in sight, are there?” she questioned.
“I don’t see any,” he said.
“Then allow me to make you a receiver of stolen goods,” said she, breaking off a spray, and handing it to him.
“Thank you. But I’d rather have an answer to my question.”
“Isn’t that an answer?”
“Is it?”
“White lilac—to the Invisible Prince?”
“The Invisible Prince.... Then you are the black domino!” he exclaimed.
“Oh, I suppose so,” she consented.
“And you will marry me?”
“I’ll tell the aunt I live with to ask you to dinner.”
“But will you marry me?”
“I thought you wished me to cheat my horoscope?”
“How could you find a better means of doing so?”
“What! if I should marry Louis Leczinski...?”
“Oh, to be sure. You would have it that I was Louis Leczinski. But, on that subject, I must warn you seriously——”
“One instant,” she interrupted. “People must look other people straight in the face when they’re giving serious warnings. Look straight into my eyes, and continue your serious warning.”
“I must really warn you seriously,” said he, biting his lip, “that if you persist in that preposterous delusion about my being Louis Leczinski, you’ll be most awfully sold. I have nothing on earth to do with Louis Leczinski. Your ingenious little theories, as I tried to convince you at the time, were absolute romance.”
Her eyebrows raised a little, she kept her eyes fixed steadily on his—oh, in the drollest fashion, with a gaze that seemed to say “How admirably you do it! I wonder whether you imagine I believe you. Oh, you fibber! Aren’t you ashamed to tell me such abominable fibs?”...
They stood still, eyeing each other thus, for something like twenty seconds, and then they both laughed and walked on.
P’TIT-BLEU
P’tit-Bleu, poor P’tit-Bleu! I can’t name her without a sigh; I can’t think of her without a kind of heartache. Yet, all things considered, I wonder whether hers was really a destiny to sorrow over. True, she has disappeared; and it is not pleasant to conjecture what she may have come to, what may have befallen her, in the flesh, since her disappearance. But when I remember those beautiful preceding years of self-abnegation, of great love, and pain, and devotion, I find myself instinctively believing that something good she must have permanently gained; some treasure that nothing, not the worst imaginable subsequent disaster, can quite have taken from her. It is not pleasant to conjecture what she may have done or suffered in the flesh; but in the spirit, one may hope, she cannot have gone altogether to the bad, nor fared altogether ill.
In the spirit! Dear me, there was a time when it would have seemed derisory to speak of the spirit in the same breath with P’tit-Bleu. In the early days of my acquaintance with her, for example, I should have stared if anybody had spoken of her spirit. If anybody had asked me to describe her, I should have said, “She is a captivating little animal, pretty and sprightly, but as soulless—as soulless as a squirrel.” Oh, a warm-blooded little animal, good-natured, quick-witted, full of life and the joy of life; a delightful little animal to play with, to fondle; but just a little animal, none the less: a little mass of soft, rosy, jocund, sensual, soulless matter. And in her full red lips, her roguish black eyes, her plump little hands, her trim, tight little figure—in her smile, her laugh—in the toss of her head—in her saucy, slightly swaggering carriage—I fancy you would have read my appreciation justified. No doubt there must have been the spark 01 a soul smouldering somewhere in her (how, otherwise, account for what happened later on?), but it was far too tiny a spark to be perceptible to the casual observer. Soul, however, I need hardly add, was the last thing we of the University were accustomed to look for in our feminine companions; I must not for an instant seem to imply that the lack of a soul in P’tit-Bleu was a subject of mourning with any of us. That a Latin Quarter girl should be soulless was as much a part of the natural order of creation, as that she should be beardless. They were all of them little animals, and P’tit-Bleu diverged from the type principally in this, that where the others, in most instances, were stupid, objectionable little animals, she was a diverting one. She was made of sugar and spice and a hundred nice ingredients, whilst they were made of the dullest, vulgarest clay.
In my own case, P’tit-Bleu was the object, not indeed of love, but of a violent infatuation, at first sight.
At Bullier, one evening, a chain of students, some twenty linked hand in hand, were chasing her round and round the hall, shouting after her, in rough staccato, something that sounded like, “Ti-bah! Ti-bah! Ti-bah!”—while she, a sprite-like little form, in a black skirt and a scarlet bodice, fled before them with leaps and bounds, and laughed defiantly.
I hadn’t the vaguest notion what “Ti-bah! Ti-bah! Ti-bah!” meant, but that laughing face, with the red lips and the roguish eyes, seemed to me immensely fascinating. Among the faces of the other young ladies present—faces of dough, faces of tallow, faces all weariness, staleness, and banality, common, coarse, pointless, insipid faces—it shone like an epigram amongst platitudes, a thing of fire amongst things of dust. I turned to some one near me, and asked who she was.
“It’s P’tit-Bleu, the dancing girl. She’s going to do a quadrille.”
P’tit-Bleu.... It’s the fashion, you know, in Paris, for the girls who “do quadrilles” to adopt unlikely nicknames: aren’t the reigning favourites at this moment Chapeau-Mou and Fifi-la-Galette? P’tit-Bleu had derived hers from that vehement little “wine of the barrier,” which, the song declares, “vous met la tête en feu.” It was the tune of the same song, that, in another minute, I heard the band strike up, in the balcony over our heads. P’tit-Bleu came to a standstill in the middle of the floor, where she was joined by three minor dancing-girls, to make two couples. The chain of students closed in a circle round her. And the rest of us thronged behind them, pressing forward, and craning our necks. Then, as the band played, everybody sang, in noisy chorus:
“P’tit-Bleu, P’tit-Bleu, P’tit-Bleu-eu,
Ça vous met la tête en feu!
Ça vous ra-ra-ra-ra-ra,
Ça vous ra-ra-ravigotte!”