Part 15

He never went to Europe again although, shortly before he died, he talked of a voyage to Spain. He visited his mother at Toledo several times and he had planned a trip to Florida, the climate of which he found particularly soothing to his malady, in January, 1920. Occasionally he just disappeared, returning again, somewhat mysteriously, without any explanation, without, indeed, any admission that he had been away. I knew him too well to ask questions and, to say truth, there was something very sweet about these little mystifications. Privacy was so dear a privilege to him that even with his nearest friends, of which, assuredly, I was one, perhaps the nearest in this last year, it was essential to his happiness that he should maintain a certain restraint, a certain reserve, I had almost said, a certain mystery, but, curiously, there was nothing theatrical about Peter, even in his most theatrical performances. Just as by the fineness of his taste, Rembrandt softened the hideousness of a lurid subject in his Anatomy Lesson, so the exquisite charm of Peter's personality overcame any possible repugnance to anything he might choose to do.

During this last year in New York, he lived in an old house on Beekman Place, that splendid row, just two blocks long, of mellow brown-stone dwellings, with flights of steps, which back upon the East River at Fiftieth Street. We often sat on the balcony, looking over towards the span of the Queensboro Bridge, Blackwell's Island, with its turreted and battlemented castles so like the Mysteries of Udolpho, watching the gulls sweep over the surface of the water, the smoke wreathe from the factory chimneys, and the craft on the river, with cargoes "of Tyne coal, road-rails, pig-lead, fire-wood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays," of the city, but seemingly away from it, with our backs to it, literally, indeed, while life ebbed by. And, at my side, too, I saw it slowly ebbing.

The interior, one of those fine old New York interiors, with high ceilings, bordered with plaster guilloches, white carved marble fire-places, sliding doors, and huge crystal chandeliers, whose pendants jingled when some one walked on the floor above, it had been his happy fancy to decorate in the early Victorian manner. The furniture, to be sure, was mostly Chippendale, Sheraton, and Heppelwhite, but there were also heavy carved walnut chairs, upholstered in lovely figured glazed chintzes. The mirrors were framed in four inches of purple and red engraved glass. The highboys were littered with ornaments, Staffordshire china dogs and shepherdesses, splendid feather and shell flowers, and ormolu clocks stood under glass bells on the mantel-shelves. He had found a couple of rather worn, but still handsome, Aubusson carpets, with garlands of huge roses of a pale blush colour. One of these was in the drawing-room, the other in the library. An old sampler screen framed the fire-place in the latter room. The books were curious. Peter was now interested in byways of literature. I remember such volumes as Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig, Paterne Berrichon's Life of Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, with music by Claude Terrasse, Jean Lorrain's La Maison Philibert, Richard Garnett's The Twilight of the Gods, the Comte de Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror, Leolinus Siluriensis's The Anatomy of Tobacco, Binet-Valmer's Lucien, Haldane MacFall's The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer, James Morier's Hajji Baba of Ispahan, Robert Hugh Benson's The Necromancers, André Gide's L'Immoraliste, and various volumes by Guillaume Apollinaire. The walls of the drawing-room were hung with a French eighteenth century, rose cotton print, the design of which showed, on one side, Cupid rowing lustily, while listless old Time sat in the bow of the boat, with the motto: l'Amour fait passer le Temps; and, on the other side, Time propelling the boat, while a saddened Cupid, his face buried in his hands, was the downcast passenger, with the motto: Le Temps fait passer l'Amour. In the centre, beside a charming Greek temple, a nymph toyed with a spaniel, and the motto read: l'Amitié ne craint pas le Temps! There were, therefore, no pictures on these walls, but, elsewhere, where the walls were white, or where they were hung with rich crimson Roman damask, as in the library, there were a few steel engravings and mezzotints and an early nineteenth century lithograph or two. Over his night-table, at the side of his bed, he had pinned a photograph of a detail of Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes in the Palazzo Riccardi, the detail of the three youths, and there was also a large framed photograph of Cranach's naïve Venus in this room. The piano stood in the drawing-room, near one of the windows, looking over the river. It was always open and the rack was littered with modern music: John Ireland's London Pieces, Béla Bartok's Three Burlesques, Gerald Tyrwhitt's Three Little Funeral Marches, music by Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, and Zoltan Kodaly. I remember one day he asked me to look at Theodor Streiche's Sprüche and Gedichte, with words by Richard Dehmel, the second of which he averred was the shortest song ever composed, consisting of but four bars.

It was a lovely house to lie about in, to talk in, to dream in. It was restful and quaint, offering a pleasing contrast to the eccentric modernity of the other homes I visited at this period. There was no electricity. The chandeliers burned gas but the favourite illumination was afforded by lamps with round glass globes of various colours, through which the soft light filtered.

On an afternoon in December, 1919, we were lounging in the drawing-room. Peter had curled himself into a sort of knot on a broad sofa with three carved walnut curves at the back. He had spread a knitted coverlet over his feet, for it was a little chilly, in spite of the fact that a wood fire was smouldering in the grate. On the table before him there was a highball glass, half-full of the proper ingredients, and sprawling beside him on the sofa, a magnificent blue Persian cat, which he called Chalcedony. George Moore and George Sand had long since perished of old age and Lou Matagot had been a victim of the laboratory explosion. There was a certain melancholy implicit in their absence. Nothing reminds us so irresistibly of the passing of time as the short age allotted on this earth to our dear cats. The pinchbottle and several bottles of soda, a bowl of cracked ice and a bowl of Fatima cigarettes, which both of us had grown to prefer, reposed conveniently on the table between us. I remember the increasing silence as the twilight fell and, how, at last, Peter began to talk.

I wanted to do so much, he began, and for a long time, during these past four years, it seemed to me that I had done so little. I remembered Zola's phrase: Mon œuvre, alors, c'était l'Arche, l'Arche immense! Hélas! ce que l'on rêve, et puis, après, ce que l'on exécute! At the beginning of the war, I was so very miserable, so unhappy, so _alone_. It seemed to me that I had been a complete failure, that I had accomplished nothing....

I must have raised a protesting hand, for he interjected, No, don't interrupt me. I am not complaining or asking for sympathy. I am explaining how I felt, not how I feel. I never spoke of it, of course, while I felt that way. I am only talking about it now because I have gone beyond, because, in a sense, at least, I understand. I am happier now, happier, perhaps, than I have ever been before, for in the past four years I have left behind my restlessness and achieved something like peace. I no longer feel that I have failed. Of course, I have failed, but that was because I was attempting to do something that I had no right to attempt. My cats should have taught me that. It is necessary to do only what one must, what one is forced by nature to do. Samuel Butler has said, and how truly, Nothing is worth doing or well done which is not done fairly easily, and some little deficiency of effort is more pardonable than any perceptible excess, for virtue has ever erred rather on the side of self-indulgence than of asceticism.... And so, in the end, and after all I am still young, I have learned that I cannot write. Is a little experience too much to pay for learning to know oneself? I think not, and that is why, now, I feel more like a success than a failure, because, finally, I do know myself, and because I have left no bad work. I can say with Macaulay: There are no lees in my wine. It is all the cream of the bottle....

I have tried to do too much and that is why, perhaps, I have done nothing. I wanted to write a new Comédie Humaine. Instead, I have lived it. And now, I have come to the conclusion that that was all there was for me to do, just to live, as fully as possible. Sympathy and enthusiasm are something, after all. I must have communicated at least a shadow of these to the ideas and objects and people on whom I have bestowed them. Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes--now, don't laugh at what I am going to say, because it is true when you understand it--are just so much more precious because I have loved them. They will give more people pleasure because I have given them my affection. This is something; indeed, next to the creation of the frescoes, perhaps it is everything.

There are two ways of becoming a writer: one, the cheaper, is to discover a formula: that is black magic; the other is to have the urge: that is white magic. I have never been able to discover a new formula; I have worked with the formulæ of other artists, only to see the cryptogram blot and blur under my hands. My manipulation of the mystic figures and the cabalistic secrets has never raised the right demons....

What is there anyway? All expression lifts us further away from simplicity and causes unhappiness.... Material, scientific expression: flying-machines, moving pictures, and telegraphy are simply disturbing. They add nothing valuable to human life. Any novelist who invokes the aid of science dies a swift death. Zola's novels are stuffed with theories of heredity but ideas about heredity change every day. The current craze is for psychoanalytic novels, which are not half so psychoanalytic as the books of Jane Austen, as posterity will find out for itself.... Art in this epoch is too self-conscious. Everybody is striving to do something _new_, instead of writing or painting or composing what is natural.... Even the disturbing irony and pessimism of Anatole France and Thomas Hardy add nothing to life. We shall be happier if we go back to the beginning....

The great secret is the cat's secret, to do what one _has_ to do. Let IT do it, let IT, whatever IT is, flow through you. The writer should say, with Sancho Panza, De mis viñas vengo, no sé nada. Labanne, in Le Chat Maigre, cries: Art declines in the degree that thought develops. In Greece, in the time of Aristotle, there were only sculptors. Artists are inferior beings. They resemble pregnant women; they give birth without knowing why. And again, to quote my beloved Samuel Butler, No one understands how anything is done unless he can do it himself; and even then he probably does not know how he has done it. I might add that very often he does not know what he has done. Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy to ridicule his personal enemies. Dickens began Pickwick to give the artist, Seymour, an opportunity to draw Cockney sportsmen and he concluded it in high moral fervour, with the ambition to wipe out bribery and corruption at elections, unscrupulous attorneys, and Fleet Prison. To Cervantes, Don Quixote was a burlesque of the high-flown romantic literature of his period. To the world, it is one of the great romances of all time....

You see, I am beginning to understand why I haven't written, why I cannot write.... That is why I am unhappy no longer, why I am more peaceful, why I do not suffer. But, and now a strange, quavering note sounded in his voice, if I had found a new formula, who knows what I might have done?

He turned his face away from me towards the back of the sofa. The cat was purring heavily, almost like the croupy breathing of a child. It was quite dark outside, and there was no light in the room save for the flicker that came from the dying embers. There was a long silence. In trying afterwards to reckon its length, I judged it must have been fully half an hour before I spoke. It was a noise that broke the charm of the stillness. The dead end of the log split over the andirons and fell into the grate.

Peter, I began.

He did not move.

Peter.... I rose and bent over him. The clock struck six. The cat stirred uneasily, rose, stretched his enormous length; then gave a faint but alarmingly portentous mew and leaped from the couch.

Peter!

He did not answer me.

_April 29, 1921 New York._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 4: In the Garret.]

THE END