Читать книгу: «The Belovéd Vagabond», страница 13

"Besides," he added, "Blanquette has a place in my heart which the concierge hasn't. I also want those I love to share the happiness that has fallen to my lot. You will write to her my son and ask whether she wants to come home."

"She will take the first train," said I.

"Blanquette is a curious type of the absolute feminine," he remarked. "She is never happier than when she can regard us as a couple of babies. Her greatest delight would be to wash us and feed us with a spoon."

"Master," said I, somewhat timidly, "I think Blanquette is sometimes just a little bit miserable because you don't seem to care for her."

He regarded me in astonishment.

"I not care for Blanquette? But you ridiculous little lump of idiocy! will you never understand? She, like you, is part of myself." He thumped his chest as usual. "In the name of petticoats, what does she want? In Russia I met an honest German artisan who had married a peasant girl. After a month's unclouded existence she broke down beneath the load of misery. Her husband didn't love her. Why? Because they had been married a whole month and he hadn't beaten her yet! Does the child want me to beat her? I believe lots of women do. And you, mindless little donkey, what do you want me to make of her? Your head is full of the imbecilities of the studio. Because I keep her here like my daughter, and have not made her my mistress, you take it upon yourself to conclude that I have no affection for her. Bah! You know nothing. You have lived with me all these years, and you know nothing whatever about me. You don't even know Blanquette. Beneath an unprepossessing exterior she has a heart of gold. She has every large-souled quality that a woman can stuff into her nature. She would live on cheese-rind and egg shells, if she thought it would benefit either of us. I not care for Blanquette? You shall see."

So the following afternoon when we met Blanquette's train at the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paragot had taken her into his arms and planted a kiss on each of her broad cheeks before she realised who the magnificent, clean-shaven welcomer in the silk hat really was.

When he released her, she stared at him even as I had done.

"Mais – qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?" she cried, and I am sure that the comfort of his kisses was lost in her entire bewilderment.

"It is the Master, Blanquette," said I.

"I know, but you are no longer the same. I shouldn't have recognised you."

"Do you prefer me as I used to be?"

"Oui, Monsieur," said Blanquette.

I burst out laughing.

"She is saying 'Monsieur' to the silk hat."

"Méchant!" she scolded. "But it is true." She turned to the master and asked him how he had enjoyed his holiday.

"I never went, my little Blanquette."

"You have been in Paris all the time?"

"Yes."

"And you only send for me now? But mon Dieu!– how have you been living?"

Visions of hideous upheaval in the Rue des Saladiers floated before her mind, and she hurried forward as if there was no time to be lost in getting there. When we arrived she held up horror-stricken hands. The dust! The dirt! The state of the kitchen! The Master's bedroom! Oh no, decidedly she would not leave him again! She would only go to the country after she had seen him well started in the train with a ticket for a long way beyond Paris. There was a week's work in front of her.

"Anyway, my little Blanquette," said Paragot, "you are glad to be with me?"

"It is never of my own free will that I would leave you," she replied.

CHAPTER XVIII

"You perceive," said Paragot, waving a complacent hand, as soon as Blanquette had retired to make the necessary purchases for the evening meal, "you perceive that she is perfectly happy. You were entirely wrong. All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."

When my master adopted the Panglossian view of the universe I used no arguments that might cloud his serenity. I acquiesced with mental reservations. We talked for a time, Paragot sitting primly on a straight-backed chair. He had abandoned his sprawling attitudes, for fear, I suspect, of spoiling his new clothes. The position, however, not making for ease of conversation, he presently took up a book and began to read, while I amused myself idly by making a furtive sketch of him. Since his metamorphosis he was by no means the entertaining companion of his unregenerate days. He himself was oppressed, I fancy, by his own correctitude. The eternal reading which filled so much of his life did not afford him the same wholehearted enjoyment now, as it did when he lolled dishevelled, pipe in mouth and glass within reach, on bed or sofa. This afternoon, I noticed, he yawned and fidgeted in his chair, and paid to his book the distracted attention of a person reading a back number of a magazine in a dentist's waiting room. My sketch, which I happen to have preserved, shows a singularly bored Paragot. At last he laid the book aside, and gathering together hat, gloves, and umbrella, the precious appanages of his new estate, he announced his intention of taking the air before dinner. I remained indoors to gossip with Blanquette during its preparation. I had considerable doubts as to her optimistic view of things, and these were confirmed as soon as the outer door closed behind my master, and the salon door opened to admit Blanquette.

She came to me with an agitated expression on her face which did not accord with perfect happiness of spirit.

"Dis donc, Asticot," she cried. "What does it mean? Why did the master not go on his holiday? Why did he not send for me? Why has he cut off his hair and beard and dressed himself like a Monsieur? I know very well the master is a gentleman, but why has he changed from what he used to be?"

I temporised. "My dear," said I, "when you first knew me I wore a blue blouse and boots with wooden soles. Almost the last time you had the happiness of beholding me, I was clad in the purple and fine linen of a dress-suit. You weren't alarmed at my putting on civilised garments, why should you be excited at the master doing the same?"

"If you talk like the master, I shall detest you," exclaimed Blanquette. "You do it because you are hiding something. Ah, mon petit frère," she said with a change of tone and putting her arm round my neck, "tell me what is happening. He is going to be married to the beautiful lady, eh?"

She looked into my eyes. Hers were deep and brown and a world of pain lay behind them. I am a bad liar. She freed me roughly.

"I see. It is true. He is going to be married. He does not want me any longer. It is all finished. O mon Dieu, mon Dieu! What is to become of me?"

She wept, rubbing away the tears with her knuckles. I tried to comfort her and lent her my pocket-handkerchief. She need have no fear, I said. As long as the master lived her comfort was assured. She turned on me.

"Do you think I would let him keep me in idleness while he was married to another woman? But no. It would be malhonnête. I would never do such a thing."

She looked at me almost fiercely. There was something noble in her pride. It would be dishonourable to accept without giving. She would never do that, never.

"But what will become of you, my dear Blanquette?" I asked.

"Look, Asticot. I would give him all that he would ask. I am his, all, all, to do what he likes with. I have told you. I would sleep on the ground outside his door every night, if that were his good pleasure. It is not much that I demand. But he must be alone in the room, entends-tu? Another woman comes to cherish him, and I no longer have any place near him. I must be far away. And what would be the good of being far away from him? What shall I do? Tiens, as soon as he marries, je vais me fich' à l'eau."

"You are going to do what?" I cried incredulously.

She repeated that she would "chuck" herself into the river – "Se fich à l'eau" is not the French of Racine. I remonstrated. She retorted that if she could not keep the master's house in order there was nothing left to live for. Much better be dead than eat your heart out in misery.

"You are talking like a wicked girl," said I severely, "and it will be my duty to tell the master."

She gave her eyes a final dab with my handkerchief which she restored to me with an air of scornful resentment.

"If you do, you will be infamous, and I will never speak to you again as long as I live."

I descended from my Rhadamanthine seat and reflected that the betrayal of Blanquette's confidence would not be a gallant action. I maintained my dignity, however.

"Then I must hear nothing more about you drowning yourself."

"We will not talk of it any longer," said Blanquette, frigidly. "I am going to cook the dinner."

As the prim salon provided little interest for an idle youth, I followed her into the slip of a kitchen, where I lounged in great contentment and discomfort. Blanquette relapsed into her fatalistic attitude towards life and seemed to dismiss the disastrous subject from her mind. While she prepared the simple meal she entertained me with an account of the farm near Chartres. There were so many cows, so many ducks and hens and so many pigs. She rose at five every morning and milked the cows. Oh, she had milked cows as a child and had not forgotten the art. It was difficult for those who did not know. Tiens! She demonstrated with finger and thumb and a lettuce how it was done.

"I shall not forget it," said I.

"It is good to know things," she remarked seriously.

"One never can tell," said I, "when a cow will come to you weeping to be milked: especially in the Rue des Saladiers."

"That is true," replied Blanquette. "The oddest things happen sometimes."

Light satire was lost on Blanquette.

After dinner she continued the recital of her adventures for the Master's delectation. The old couple no longer able to look after the farm were desirous of selling it, so that they could retire to Evreux where their only son who had married a rich wife kept a prosperous hotel.

"Do you know what they said, Master. 'Why does not Monsieur Paragot, who must be very rich, buy it from us and come to live in the country instead of that dirty Paris?' C'est drôle, hein?"

"Why do they think I am very rich?"

"That is what I asked them. They said if a man did not work he must be either rich or a rogue; and they know you are not a rogue, mon Maître."

"They flatter me," said Paragot. "Would you like to live in the country, Blanquette?"

"Oh yes!" she cried with conviction. "Il y a des bêtes. J'adore ça. And then it smells so good."

"It does," he sighed. "I haven't smelt it for over three years. Ah! to have the scent of the good wet earth in one's nostrils and the sound of bees in one's ears. For two pins I would go gipsying again. If I were a rich man, my little Blanquette, I would buy the farm, and give it you as your dowry, and sometimes you would let me come and stay with you."

"But as I shall never marry, mon Maître, there will be no need of a dowry."

She said it smilingly, as if she welcomed her lot as a predestined old maid. There was not a sign on her plain pleasant face of the torment raging in her bosom. In my youthful ignorance I did not know whether to deplore woman's deceit or to admire her stout-heartedness.

"My child," said Paragot, "no human being can, without arrogance, say what he will or what he will not do. Least of all a woman."

Having uttered this profound piece of wisdom my master went to bed.

During the next few weeks Paragot suffered the boredom of a provisional condition of existence. He went to bed early, for lack of evening entertainment, and rose late in the morning for lack of daily occupation. With what he termed "the crapulous years," he had divested himself of his former associates and habits. Friends that would harmonise with his gloves and umbrella he had none as yet. If he ordered an apéritif before the midday meal, it was on the terrace of a café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where he sat devouring newspapers in awful solitude. Sometimes he took Blanquette for a sedate walk; but no longer Blanquette en cheveux. He bought her a mystical headgear composed as far as I could see of three plums and a couple of feathers, which the girl wore with an air of happy martyrdom. He discoursed to her on the weather and the political situation. At this period he began to develop republican sympathies. Formerly he had swung, according to the caprice of the moment, from an irreconcilable nationalism to a fantastic anarchism. Now he was proud to identify himself with the once despised bourgeoisie. He would have taken to his bosom the draper papa of Hedwige of Cassel.

Most of his time he spent in the studio at Menilmontant; there at any rate he was at ease. We were not too disreputable for the umbrella, and though he deprecated the loose speech of Bringard and Bonnet who had returned to Paris, and the queer personal habits of Cazalet, he appeared to find solace in our society. At any rate the visits gave him occupation. He also posed for the body of M. Thiers in an historical picture which Bringard proposed to exhibit at the Salon the following spring.

"L'homme propose et Dieu expose," said Paragot.

"If he is anything of a judge this ought to be hung on the line," said Bonnet.

I regret to say the picture was rejected.

At last the time came for the Melford visit. Paragot consulted Ewing and myself earnestly as to his outfit, and though he clung to his frock-coat suit as a garb of ceremony, we succeeded in sending him away with a semblance of English country-house attire. He took with him my portrait of Joanna, packed in a wooden case and bearing, to my great pride, the legend, "Precious. Work of Art. With great care," in French and English.

When he had gone I moved my belongings from my attic to the Rue des Saladiers, and gave myself up to the ministrations of Blanquette.

A little while later I received from my dear lady an invitation to visit Melford and paint the portrait of her mother, who regarded my portrait of Joanna as a work of genius. If you are a young artist it makes your head spin very pleasantly to hear yourself alluded to as a genius. Later in life you do not quite like it, for you have bitter knowledge of your limitations and are mortally afraid your kind flatterers will find you out. But at twenty you really do not know whether you are a genius or not. Mrs. Rushworth, however, backed her opinion with a hundred guineas. A hundred guineas! When I read the words I uttered a wild shriek which brought Blanquette in a fright from the bedroom. It was a commission, Joanna explained, and I was to accept it just like any other artist, and I was to stay with them, again like any other artist, during the sittings.

"I am to go to England to paint another portrait, Blanquette. How much do you think I shall be paid for it?"

"Much?" queried Blanquette, in her deliberate way.

I indicated with swinging arms a balloon of gold. Blanquette reflected.

"Fifty francs?"

"Two thousand six hundred and twenty five francs," I cried.

Blanquette sat down in order to realise the sum. It was difficult for her to conceive thousands of francs.

"That will make you rich for the rest of your life."

"It is only the beginning," I exclaimed hopefully.

Blanquette shook a reproachful head.

"There are some folks who are never satisfied," she said.

CHAPTER XIX

When I arrived at Melford my head was full of painting and self-importance; and for the first week or so, Mrs. Rushworth, my subject, occupied the centre of my stage. She was a placid lady of sixty, whose hair, once golden, had turned a flossy white, and whose apple cheeks, though still retaining their plumpness, had grown waxen and were criss-crossed by innumerable tiny lines. The light blue of her eyes had faded, and the rich redness of her lips had turned to faint coral. One could trace how Time had day by day touched her with light but unfaltering fingers, now abstracting a fleck of brightness, now lowering by an imperceptible shade a tone of colour, until she had become what I saw her, still the pink and white beauty, but with rose all deadened into white, like a sick pink pearl. Her pink and white character had also suffered the effacement of the years. She was as dainty and as negative as a piece of Dresden China. She loved to dress in lilac and old lace: and that is how I painted her, regarding her as a bit of exquisite decoration to be treated flat like a panel of Puvis de Chavannes.

My young head, I say, was full of the masterpiece I was about to execute, and though I found much joy in renewed intercourse with my beloved lady and my master, I took no particular note of their relations. We met at meals, sometimes in the afternoons, and always of evenings, when I played dutiful piquet with Mrs. Rushworth, while Joanna made music on the piano, and Paragot read Jane Austen in an arm-chair by the fire. To me the quietude of the secluded English home had an undefinable charm like the smell of lavender, for which I have always had a cat-like affection. Not having the Bohemian temperament – I am now the most smugly comfortable painter in Europe – I was perfectly happy. I took no thought of Paragot, whose temperament was essentially Bohemian; and how he enjoyed the gentle monotony of the days it did not occur to me to consider. Outwardly he shewed no sign of impatience. A dean might have taken him as a model of decorum, and when he drove of afternoons with Joanna in the dog-cart, no dyspeptic bishop could have assumed his air of grim urbanity. But after a while I realised that the old Paragot still smouldered within him; and now and then it burst into unregenerate flame.

Mrs. Rushworth had inherited from her father an old Georgian Bath-stone house at the end of the High Street of Melford. He had been the Duke of Wiltshire's agent and a person of note in the town. Mrs. Rushworth also was a person of note, and her beautiful daughter, the Countess, a lady of fortune, became a person of greater note still. Now on Tuesday afternoons Mrs. Rushworth was "at home." We saw a vast deal of Society, ladies of county families, parsons' wives, doctors' wives and the female belongings of the gentlemen farmers round about. There were also a stray hunting man, a curate or two and Major Walters. The callers sat about the drawing room in little groups drinking tea and discoursing on unimportant and unintelligible matters, and seemed oddly shy of Paragot and myself, whom Joanna always introduced most graciously. They preferred to talk among themselves. I considered them impolite, which no doubt they were; but I have since reflected that Paragot was an unusual guest at an English country tea-party, and if there is one thing more than another that an English country tea-party resents, it is the unusual. I am sure that a square muffin would be considered an indelicacy. On the second of these Tuesday gatherings which I was privileged to attend, Joanna presented me to two well-favoured young women, the daughters, I gathered, of people who had country places near by.

"Mr. Pradel is the artist from Paris who is painting mamma's portrait," she explained.

I bowed and remarked that I was enchanted to make their acquaintance. They stared. I know now that this Gallic mode of address is not usual in Melford. One young woman, recovering from the shock, said she would like to be an artist. The other asked me whether I had been to the Academy. I said, no. I lived in Paris. Then had I been to the Salon?

"At Janot's," said I, with the idiot egregiousness of youth, "we don't go to the Salon."

"Why?" asked the first, looking across the room, apparently at a curate.

"On principle," I answered. "In the first place it costs a franc which might be spent in food and raiment, and in the second we desire to preserve our ideals from the contaminating spectacle of commercial art."

"Do you play much tennis?" asked Number Two, with no desire to snub me (as I deserved) for fatuity, but through sheer lack of interest in my observation.

"No," said I.

"Shoot?"

"No; there is not much shooting to be got in the Boulevard Saint-Michel."

"Oh," she remarked. "Where's that?"

"Paris," said I.

"Oh yes. You live in Paris." And she regarded me with the expression of bored curiosity exhibited by a superior child before the Yak's enclosure at the Zoological Gardens. An English country-bred maiden's cosmic horizon was sadly limited in those days. Now I believe she has extended it to include the more depressing forms of drama when she pays her annual visit to London. There was a silence after which she enquired whether I fished. As my ideas of fishing were restricted to the patient hosts – pale shades of Acheron – who have angled off the quays of the Seine for centuries and have till now caught nothing, I smiled and shook my head.

"The Browns have taken a fishing in Scotland," observed Number One taking her eyes from the curate, "and I'm to join them next month."

"Myra Brown is going to be married, I hear."

"At Christmas."

"What is he like?"

The hitherto unspeculative eyes of the young woman lit up; an answering gleam awoke in the other's. Myra Brown and her engagement absorbed their attention, and I slunk back in my chair, forgotten. I suffered agonies of shyness. I disliked these foolish virgins and longed to flee from them; but how to rise and make my escape, without rudeness, passed my powers of invention. I looked around me. At the tea-table on the farther side of the room stood Joanna and Major Walters. He was a tall soldierly man with a blond moustache and fair hair thinning on the crown. There are about two thousand like him at the present moment on the active and retired list of the British Army. He seemed to be talking earnestly to her, for her eyes were fixed on the point of her shoe, which she moved slightly, from side to side. Presently she flashed a glance at him somewhat angrily and her lips moved as though she said: —

"What right have you to speak like that?"

He made the Englishman's awkward paraphrase of the shrug, looked swiftly over at Paragot, and turned to her with a remark. Then for the first time since the Comte de Verneuil's death, the glacier blue came into her eyes. She said something. He executed a little stiff bow and walked away. Joanna, bearing herself very haughtily, crossed the room with a cup of tea for a new arrival.

Paragot, gaunt and tight-buttoned in his famous frock coat – he had donned it for the ceremonious afternoon, but Joanna (I think) had suppressed the purple cravat with the yellow spots – was talking to an elderly and bony female owning a great beak of a nose. I wondered how so unprepossessing a person could be admitted into a refined assembly, but I learned later that she was Lady Molyneux, one of the Great Personages of the county. The lady seemed to be emphatic; so did Paragot. She regarded him stonily out of flint-blue eyes. He waved his hands; she raised her eyebrows. She was one of those women whose eyebrows in the normal state are about three inches from the eyelids. I understood then what superciliousness meant. Paragot raised his voice. At that moment one of those strange coincidences occurred in which the ends of all casual conversations fell together, and a shaft of silence sped through the room, killing all sound save that of Paragot's utterance.

"But Great Heavens, Madam, babies don't grow in the cabbage patch, and you are all well aware they don't, and it's criminal of your English writers to mislead the young as to the facts of existence. Charlotte Yonge is infinitely more immoral than Guy de Maupassant."

Then Paragot realized the dead stillness. He rose from his chair, looked around at the shocked faces of the women and curates, and laughing turned to Mrs. Rushworth.

"I was stating Zola to be a great ethical teacher, and Lady Molyneux seemed disinclined to believe me."

"He is an author very little read in Melford," said the placid lady from her sofa cushions, while the two or three women with whom she was in converse gazed disapprovingly at my master.

"It would do the town good if it were steeped in his writings," said he.

As this was at a period when like hell you could not mention the name of Zola to ears polite, no one ventured to argue the matter. Mrs. Rushworth's plump faded lips quivered helplessly, and it was with a gush of gratitude that she seized the hand of one of the ladies who rose to take her leave, and save the situation. The little spell of shock was broken. Groups resumed their mysterious conversations, and Paragot swung to the hearth-rug and stood there in solitary defiance. I seized the opportunity to escape from my two damsels. As I passed Lady Molyneux, she turned to her neighbour.

"What a dreadful man!" she said. "I entirely disapprove of Mrs. Rushworth having such persons in her house."

I could have wept with rage. Here was this turtle-brained, ugly woman (so, in my presumption, I called her) daring to speak slightingly of my beloved master who had condescended to speak out of his Olympian wisdom, and no fire from Zeus shrivelled her up! She signified her disapproval with the air of a law-giver, and the other woman acquiesced. I longed to flame into defence of Paragot; but remembering how ill I fared on a similar occasion when a member of the Lotus Club accused him of having led a bear in Warsaw, I wisely held my peace. But I was very angry.

I joined Paragot on the hearth-rug. Presently Joanna came with her silvery laugh.

"You mustn't be so dreadfully emphatic, Gaston," she said.

"Unintelligent women must not lay down the law on matters they don't understand," said Paragot.

"But it was Lady Molyneux."

"Which signifies?"

"The sovereign lady of Melford."

"God help Melford!" ejaculated my master.

When the ladies had left us that evening after dinner, Paragot poured out a glass of port and pushed the decanter across to me.

"My son," said he, "as a philosopher and a citizen of the world you will find Melford repay patient study as much as Chambéry or Buda-Pesth or the Latin Quarter. It is a garden of Lilliput. Here you will see Life in its most cultivated littleness. A great passion bursting out across the way would convulse the town like an earthquake. Observe at the same time how constant a factor is human nature. However variable the manifestation may be, the degree is invariable. In spacious conditions it manifests itself in passions, in narrow ones in prejudices. The females in and out of petticoats who were here this afternoon experience the same thrill in expressing their dislike of me as a person foreign to their convention, as the Sicilian who plunges his dagger into a rival's bosom. When I am married, my son, I shall not live at Melford."

"Where do you propose to live, Master?" I enquired.

He made a great gesture and drew a deep breath.

"On the Continent of Europe," said he, as if even a particular country were too cabined to satisfy his nostalgia for wide spaces. "I must have room, my son, for the development of my genius. I must dream great things, and immortal visions are blasted under the basilisk eye of Lady Molyneux."

"She is a vieille pimbêche!" I cried.

"She is the curse of England," said Paragot.

After this it occurred to me that I might take more note of Melford and its ways than I had done hitherto, and the more I observed it the less did it appear to resemble either Eden or the Boulevard Saint-Michel. At times I felt dull. I would lean over the parapet of the bridge at the other end of the High Street, and watch the tower and decorated spire of the old parish church rise from the gold and russet bosom of the church-yard elms, and wish I were back on the Pont Neuf with the tumultuous life of Paris around me. There was a lack of breeziness in the social air of Melford.

Meanwhile Paragot and Joanna continued the romance of long ago. They walked together in the garden like lovers, his arm around her waist, her delicate head lightly leaning on his shoulder. Once when I made my presence known, he withdrew his arm, but Joanna laughingly replaced it.

"What does it matter? Asticot is in our confidence," she remarked. "Isn't he going to be your best man? You will bring him over for the wedding, Gaston."

"You cling to the idea of being married in Melford?" he asked.

"Of course."

"By that dry, grey-whiskered gentleman who treats me as if I were a youth he would like to prepare for confirmation? And all these dreadful people to look on? My dear, doesn't the thought of it chill you into the corpse of a Melfordian?"

"I should have imagined that so long as we were married the 'how' would not matter to you."

"Quite so," said he. "Why does the 'how' matter so much to you?"

"It is different," said Joanna. "It is right for me to be married here."

"We must do what is right at all costs," assented my master in an ironical note, which she was quick to detect. She swerved from his encircling arm.

"You would not be married under a bush like a beggar?" she quoted.

"I wish to heaven I could!" he exclaimed with sudden spirit. "It is the only way of mating. I would take you to a little village I know of in the Vosges, overhanging a precipice, with God's mountains and sky above us, and not a schedule of regulations for human conduct within thirty miles, and Monsieur le Maire would tie his tricolor scarf around him and marry us, and we would go away arm in arm and the cow-bells overhead would ring the wedding peal, and there would be just you and I and the universe."

"We'll compromise," said Joanna, smiling. "We'll spend our honeymoon in your village in the Vosges after we are well and duly and respectably married in Melford. Don't you think I am reasonable, Asticot?"

"My dear Joanna," said Paragot, "you have infatuated this boy to such an extent that he would agree with you in anything. Of course he will say that the Reverend and respectable Mr. Hawkfield is better than the picturesque Monsieur le Maire, and that a wedding cake from Gunter's is preferable to the curdled cheese of Valdeauvau. He would perjure his little soul to atoms for your sake."