Chapter 8

'Do you realise that it is nearly fifteen years since we have seen each other? The history of those fifteen years, so far as I am concerned, has been the history of a single uninterrupted _déveine_--one continuous run of ill-luck, against every probability of the game, against every effort I could make to play my cards effectively. When I started out, one might have thought, I had the best of chances. I had studied hard; I worked hard. I surely had as much general intelligence, as much special knowledge, as much apparent talent, as my competitors. And the stuff I produced seemed good to you, to my friends, and not wholly bad to me. It was musicianly, it was melodious, it was sincere; the critics all praised it; but--it never took on! The public wouldn't have it. What did it lack? I don't know. At last I couldn't even get it published--invisible ink! And I had a wife to support.'

He paused for a minute; then: 'You see,' he said, 'we made the mistake, when we were young, of believing, against wise authority, that it _was_ in mortals to command success, that he could command it who deserved it. We believed that the race would be to the swift, the battle to the strong; that a man was responsible for his own destiny, that he'd get what he merited. We believed that honest labour couldn't go unrewarded. An immense mistake. Success is an affair of temperament, like faith, like love, like the colour of your hair. Oh, the old story about industry, resolution, and no vices! I was industrious, I was resolute, and I had no more than the common share of vices. But I had the unsuccessful temperament; and here I am. If my motives had been ignoble--but I can't see that they were. I wanted to earn a decent living; I wanted to justify my existence by doing something worthy of the world's acceptance. But the stars in their courses fought against me. I have tried hard to convince myself that the music I wrote was rubbish. It had its faults, no doubt. It wasn't great, it wasn't epoch-making. But, as music goes nowadays, it was jolly good. It was a jolly sight better than the average.'

'Oh, that is certain, that is certain,' I exclaimed, as he paused again.

'Well, anyhow, it didn't sell, and at last I couldn't even get it published. So then I tried to find other work. I tried everything. I tried to teach--harmony and the theory of composition. I couldn't get pupils. So few people want to study that sort of thing, and there were good masters already in the place. If I had known how to play, indeed! But I was never better than a fifth-rate executant; I had never gone in for that; my "lay" was composition. I couldn't give piano lessons, I couldn't play in public--unless in a _gargotte_ like the hole we have just left. Oh, I tried everything. I tried to get musical criticism to do for the newspapers. Surely I was competent to do musical criticism. But no--they wouldn't employ me. I had ill luck, ill luck, ill luck--nothing but ill luck, defeat, disappointment. Was it the will of Heaven? I wondered what unforgiveable sin I had committed to be punished so. Do you know what it is like to work and pray and wait, day after day, and watch day after day come and go and bring you nothing? Oh, I tasted the whole heart-sickness of hope deferred; Giant Despair was my constant bed-fellow.'

'But--with your connections--' I began.

'Oh, my connections!' he cried. 'There was the rub. London is the cruellest town in Europe. For sheer cold blood and heartlessness give Londoners the palm. I had connections enough for the first month or so, and then people found out things that didn't concern them. They found out some things that were true, and they imagined other things that were false. They wouldn't have my wife; they told the most infamous lies about her; and I wouldn't have _them_. Could I be civil to people who insulted and slandered _her_? I had no connections in London, except with the underworld. I got down to copying parts for theatrical orchestras; and working twelve hours a day, earned about thirty shillings a week.'

'You might have come back to Paris.'

'And fared worse. I couldn't have earned thirty pence in Paris. Mind you, the only trade I had learned was that of a musical composer; and I couldn't compose music that people would buy. I should have starved as a copyist in Paris, where copyists are more numerous and worse paid. Teach there? But to one competent master of harmony in London there are ten in Paris. No; it was a hopeless case.'

'It is incomprehensible--incomprehensible,' said I.

'But wait--wait till you've heard the end. One would think I had had enough--not so? One would think my cup of bitterness was full. No fear! There was a stronger cup still a-brewing for me. When Fortune takes a grudge against a man, she never lets up. She exacts the uttermost farthing. I was pretty badly off, but I had one treasure left--I had Godelinette. I used to think that she was my compensation. I would say to myself, "A man can't have all blessings. How can you expect others, when you've got her?" And I would accuse myself of ingratitude for complaining of my unsuccess. Then she fell ill. My God, how I watched over, prayed over her! It seemed impossible--I could not believe--that she would be taken from me. Yet, Harry, do you know what that poor child was thinking? Do you know what her dying thoughts were--her wishes? Throughout her long painful illness she was thinking that she was an obstacle in my way, a weight upon me; that if it weren't for her, I should get on, have friends, a position; that it would be a good thing for me if she should die; and she was hoping in her poor little heart that she wouldn't get well! Oh, I know it, I knew it--and you see me here alive. She let herself die for my sake--as if I could care for anything without her. That's what brought us here, to France, to Bordeaux--her illness. The doctors said she must pass the spring out of England, away from the March winds, in the South; and I begged and borrowed money enough to take her. And we were on our way to Arcachon; but when we reached Bordeaux she was too ill to continue the journey, and--she died here.'

We walked on for some distance in silence, then he added: 'That was four years ago. You wonder why I live to tell you of it, why I haven't cut my throat. I don't know whether it's cowardice or conscientious scruples. It seems rather inconsequent to say that I believe in a God, doesn't it?--that I believe one's life is not one's own to make an end of? Anyhow, here I am, keeping body and soul together as musician to a _brasserie-à-femmes_. I can't go back to England, I can't leave Bordeaux--she's buried here. I've hunted high and low for work, and found it nowhere save in the _brasserie-à-femmes_. With that, and a little copying now and then, I manage to pay my way.'

'But your uncle?' I asked.

'Do you think I would touch a penny of his money?' Pair retorted, almost fiercely. 'It was he who began it. My wife let herself die. It was virtual suicide. It was he who created the situation that drove her to it.'

'You are his heir, though, aren't you?'

'No, the estates are not entailed.'

We had arrived at the door of my hotel. 'Well, good-night and _bon voyage_,' he said.

'You needn't wish me _bon voyage_,' I answered. 'Of course I'm not leaving Bordeaux for the present.'

'Oh, yes, you are. You're going on to Biarritz to-morrow morning, as you intended.'

And herewith began a long and most painful struggle. I could persuade him to accept no help of any sort from me. 'What I can't do for myself,' he declared, 'I'll do without. My dear fellow, all that you propose is contrary to the laws of Nature. One man can't keep another--it's an impossible relation. And I won't be kept; I won't be a burden. Besides, to tell you the truth, I've got past caring. The situation you find me in seems terrible to you; to me it's no worse than another. You see, I'm hardened; I've got past caring.'

'At any rate,' I insisted, 'I shan't go on to Biarritz. I'll spend my holiday here, and we can see each other every day. What time shall we meet to-morrow?'

'No, no, I can't meet you again. Don't ask me to; you mean it kindly, I know, but you're mistaken. It's done me good to talk it all out to you, but I can't meet you again. I've got no heart for friendship, and--you remind me too keenly of many things.'

'But if I come to the _brasserie_ to-morrow night?'

'Oh, if you do that, you'll oblige me to throw up my employment there, and hide from you. You must promise not to come again--you must respect my wishes.'

'You're cruel, you know.'

'Perhaps, perhaps. But I think I'm only reasonable. Anyhow, good-bye.'

He shook my hand hurriedly, and moved off. What could I do? I stood looking after him till he had vanished in the night, with a miserable baffled recognition of my helplessness to help him.

A RESPONSIBILITY

It has been an episode like a German sentence, with its predicate at the end. Trifling incidents occurred at haphazard, as it seemed, and I never guessed they were by way of making sense. Then, this morning, somewhat of the suddenest, came the verb and the full stop.

Yesterday I should have said there was nothing to tell; to-day there is too much. The announcement of his death has caused me to review our relations, with the result of discovering my own part to have been that of an accessory before the fact. I did not kill him (though, even there, I'm not sure I didn't lend a hand), but I might have saved his life. It is certain that he made me signals of distress--faint, shy, tentative, but unmistakable--and that I pretended not to understand: just barely dipped my colours, and kept my course. Oh, if I had dreamed that his distress was extreme--that he was on the point of foundering and going down! However, that doesn't exonerate me: I ought to have turned aside to find out. It was a case of criminal negligence. That he, poor man, probably never blamed me, only adds to the burden on my conscience. He had got past blaming people, I dare say, and doubtless merely lumped me with the rest--with the sum-total of things that made life unsupportable. Yet, for a moment, when we first met, his face showed a distinct glimmering of hope; so perhaps there was a distinct disappointment. He must have had so many disappointments, before it came to--what it came to; but it wouldn't have come to that if he had got hardened to them. Possibly they had lost their outlines, and merged into one dull general disappointment that was too hard to bear. I wonder whether the Priest and the Levite were smitten with remorse after they had passed on. Unfortunately, in this instance, no good Samaritan followed.

The bottom of our long _table d'hôte_ was held by a Frenchman, a Normand, a giant, but a pallid and rather flabby giant, whose name, if he had another than Monsieur, I never heard. He professed to be a painter, used to sketch birds and profiles on the back of his menu-card between the courses, wore shamelessly the multi-coloured rosette of a foreign order in his buttonhole, and talked with a good deal of physiognomy. I had the corner seat at his right, and was flanked in turn by Miss Etta J. Hicks, a bouncing young person from Chicago, beyond whom, like rabbits in a company of foxes, cowered Mr. and Mrs. Jordan P. Hicks, two broken-spirited American parents. At Monsieur's left, and facing me, sat Colonel Escott, very red and cheerful; then a young man who called the Colonel Cornel, and came from Dublin, proclaiming himself a barr'ster, and giving his name as Flarty, though on his card it was written Flaherty; and then Sir Richard Maistre. After him, a diminishing perspective of busy diners--for purposes of conversation, so far as we were concerned, inhabitants of the Fourth Dimension.

Of our immediate constellation, Sir Richard Maistre was the only member on whom the eye was tempted to linger. The others were obvious--simple equations, soluble 'in the head.' But he called for slate and pencil, offered materials for doubt and speculation, though it would not have been easy to tell wherein they lay. What displayed itself to a cursory inspection was quite unremarkable: simply a decent-looking young Englishman, of medium stature, with square-cut plain features, reddish-brown hair, grey eyes, and clothes and manners of the usual pattern. Yet, showing through this ordinary surface, there was something cryptic. For me, at any rate, it required a constant effort not to stare at him. I felt it from the beginning, and I felt it to the end: a teasing curiosity, a sort of magnetism that drew my eyes in his direction. I was always on my guard to resist it, and that was really the inception of my neglect of him. From I don't know what stupid motive of pride, I was anxious that he shouldn't discern the interest he had excited in me; so I paid less ostensible attention to him than to the others, who excited none at all. I tried to appear unconscious of him as a detached personality, to treat him as merely a part of the group as a whole. Then I improved such occasions as presented themselves to steal glances at him, study him _à la dérobée_--groping after the quality, whatever it was, that made him a puzzle--seeking to formulate, to classify him.

Already, at the end of my first dinner, he had singled himself out and left an impression. I went into the smoking-room, and began to wonder, over a cup of coffee and a cigarette, who he was. I had not heard his voice; he hadn't talked much, and his few observations had been murmured into the ears of his next neighbours. All the same, he had left an impression, and I found myself wondering who he was, the young man with the square-cut features and the reddish-brown hair. I have said that his features were square-cut and plain, but they were small and carefully finished, and as far as possible from being common. And his grey eyes, though not conspicuous for size or beauty, had a character, an expression. They _said_ something, something I couldn't perfectly translate, something shrewd, humorous, even perhaps a little caustic, and yet sad; not violently, not rebelliously sad (I should never have dreamed that it was a sadness which would drive him to desperate remedies), but rather resignedly, submissively sad, as if he had made up his mind to put the best face on a sorry business. This was carried out by a certain abruptness, a slight lack of suavity, in his movements, in his manner of turning his head, of using his hands. It hinted a degree of determination which, in the circumstances, seemed superfluous. He had unfolded his napkin and attacked his dinner with an air of resolution, like a man with a task before him, who mutters, 'Well, it's got to be done, and I'll do it.' At a hazard, he was two- or three-and-thirty, but below his neck he looked older. He was dressed like everybody, but his costume had, somehow, an effect of soberness beyond his years. It was decidedly not smart, and smartness was the dominant note at the Hôtel d'Angleterre.

I was still more or less vaguely ruminating him, in a corner of the smoking-room, on that first evening, when I became aware that he was standing near me. As I looked up, our eyes met, and for the fraction of a second fixed each other. It was barely the fraction of a second, but it was time enough for the transmission of a message. I knew as certainly as if he had said so that he wanted to speak, to break the ice, to scrape an acquaintance; I knew that he had approached me and was loitering in my neighbourhood for that specific purpose. I _don't_ know, I have studied the psychology of the moment in vain to understand, why I felt a perverse impulse to put him off. I was interested in him, I was curious about him; and there he stood, testifying that the interest was reciprocal, ready to make the advances, only waiting for a glance or a motion of encouragement; and I deliberately secluded myself behind my coffee-cup and my cigarette smoke. I suppose it was the working of some obscure mannish vanity--of what in a woman would have defined itself as coyness and coquetry. If he wanted to speak--well, let him speak; I wouldn't help him. I could realise the processes of _his_ mind even more clearly than those of my own--his desire, his hesitancy. He was too timid to leap the barriers; I must open a gate for him. He hovered near me for a minute longer, and then drifted away. I felt his disappointment, his spiritual shrug of the shoulders; and I perceived rather suddenly that I was disappointed myself. I must have been hoping all along that he would speak _quand même_, and now I was moved to run after him, to call him back. That, however, would imply a consciousness of guilt, an admission that my attitude had been intentional; so I kept my seat, making a mental rendezvous with him for the morrow.

Between my Irish _vis-à-vis_ Flaherty and myself there existed no such strain. He presently sauntered up to me, and dropped into conversation as easily as if we had been old friends.

'Well, and are you here for your health or your entertainment?' he began. 'But I don't need to ask that of a man who's drinking black coffee and smoking tobacco at this hour of the night. I'm the only invalid at our end of the table, and I'm no better than an amateur meself. It's a barrister's throat I have--I caught it waiting for briefs in me chambers at Doblin.'

We chatted together for a half-hour or so, and before we parted he had given me a good deal of general information--about the town, the natives, the visitors, the sands, the golf-links, the hunting, and, with the rest, about our neighbours at table.

'Did ye notice the pink-faced bald little man at me right? That's Cornel Escott, C.B., retired. He takes a sea-bath every morning, to live up to the letters; and faith, it's an act of heroism, no less, in weather the like of this. Three weeks have I been here, and but wan day of sunshine, and the mercury never above fifty. The other fellow, him at me left, is what you'd be slow to suspect by the look of him, I'll go bail; and that's a bar'net, Sir Richard Maistre, with a place in Hampshire, and ten thousand a year if he's a penny. The young lady beside yourself rejoices in the euphonious name of Hicks, and trains her Popper and Mommer behind her like slaves in a Roman triumph. They're Americans, if you must have the truth, though I oughtn't to tell it on them, for I'm an Irishman myself, and it's not for the pot to be bearing tales of the kettle. However, their tongues bewray them; so I've violated no confidence.'

The knowledge that my young man was a baronet with a place in Hampshire somewhat disenchanted me. A baronet with a place in Hampshire left too little to the imagination. The description seemed to curtail his potentialities, to prescribe his orbit, to connote turnip-fields, house-parties, and a whole system of British commonplace. Yet, when, the next day at luncheon, I again had him before me in the flesh, my interest revived. Its lapse had been due to an association of ideas which I now recognised as unscientific. A baronet with twenty places in Hampshire would remain at the end of them all a human being; and no human being could be finished off in a formula of half a dozen words. Sir Richard Maistre, anyhow, couldn't be. He was enigmatic, and his effect upon me was enigmatic too. Why did I feel that tantalising inclination to stare at him, coupled with that reluctance frankly to engage in talk with him? Why did he attack his luncheon with that appearance of grim resolution? For a minute, after he had taken his seat, he eyed his knife, fork, and napkin, as a labourer might a load that he had to lift, measuring the difficulties he must cope with; then he gave his head a resolute nod, and set to work. To-day, as yesterday, he said very little, murmured an occasional remark into the ear of Flaherty, accompanying it usually with a sudden short smile; but he listened to everything, and did so with apparent appreciation.

Our proceedings were opened by Miss Hicks, who asked Colonel Escott, 'Well, Colonel, have you had your bath this morning?'

The Colonel chuckled, and answered, 'Oh, yes--yes, yes--couldn't forego my bath, you know--couldn't possibly forego my bath.'

'And what was the temperature of the water?' she continued.

'Fifty-two--fifty-two--three degrees warmer than the air--three degrees,' responded the Colonel, still chuckling, as if the whole affair had been extremely funny.

'And you, Mr. Flaherty, I suppose you've been to Bayonne?'

'No, I've broken me habit, and not left the hotel.'

Subsequent experience taught me that these were conventional modes by which the conversation was launched every day, like the preliminary moves in chess. We had another ritual for dinner: Miss Hicks then inquired if the colonel had taken his ride, and Flaherty played his game of golf. The next inevitable step was common to both meals. Colonel Escott would pour himself a glass of the _vin ordinaire_, a jug of which was set by every plate, and holding it up to the light, exclaim with simulated gusto, 'Ah! Fine old wine! Remarkably full rich flavour!' At this pleasantry we would all gently laugh; and the word was free.

Sir Richard, as I have said, appeared to be an attentive and appreciative listener, not above smiling at our mildest sallies; but, watching him out of the corner of an eye, I noticed that my own observations seemed to strike him with peculiar force--which led me to talk _at_ him. Why not to him, with him? The interest was reciprocal; he would have liked a dialogue; he would have welcomed a chance to commence one; and I could at any instant have given him such a chance. I talked _at_ him, it is true; but I talked _with_ Flaherty or Miss Hicks, or _to_ the company at large. Of his separate identity he had no reason to believe me conscious. From a mixture of motives, in which I'm not sure that a certain heathenish enjoyment of his embarrassment didn't count for something, I was determined that if he wanted to know me he must come the whole distance; I wouldn't meet him half-way. Of course I had no idea that it could be a matter of the faintest real importance to the man. I judged his feelings by my own; and though I was interested in him, I shall have conveyed an altogether exaggerated notion of my interest if you fancy it kept me awake at night. How was I to guess that _his_ case was more serious--that he was not simply desirous of a little amusing talk, but starving, starving for a little human sympathy, a little brotherly love and comradeship?--that he was in an abnormally sensitive condition of mind, where mere negative unresponsiveness could hurt him like a slight or a rebuff?

In the course of the week I ran over to Pau, to pass a day with the Winchfields, who had a villa there. When I came back I brought with me all that they (who knew everybody) could tell about Sir Richard Maistre. He was intelligent and amiable, but the shyest of shy men. He avoided general society, frightened away perhaps by the British Mamma, and spent a good part of each year abroad, wandering rather listlessly from town to town. Though young and rich, he was neither fast nor ambitious: the Members' entrance to the House of Commons, the stage-doors of the music halls, were equally without glamour for him; and if he was a Justice of the Peace and a Deputy Lieutenant, he had become so through the tacit operation of his stake in the country. He had chambers in St. James's Street, was a member of the Travellers Club, and played the violin--for an amateur rather well. His brother, Mortimer Maistre, was in diplomacy--at Rio Janeiro or somewhere. His sister had married an Australian, and lived in Melbourne.