CHAPTER VII
THE FATE OF FAME
Madame Séraphine had spoiled my plan of a triple marriage, but there was nothing to prevent a double one. It took place one midsummer morning in the Mairie, rue Grenelle. On the strength of my thousand dollars from the Uplift people, I offered to pay all expenses.
In the great gloomy chamber of the Mairie we occupied one of a series of benches. Frosine and Rougette were looking radiant, and Helstern and Lorrimer comported themselves as if getting married was part of their daily routine. I was the only person at all excited.
On the other benches were other bridal parties, a bridal party to a bench. On a platform facing us sat a tall man with an Assyrian beard. He wore evening dress traversed by a tricoloured sash. He took each couple in turn, looking down on them with no more interest than if they had been earwigs. Then he mumbled into his beard for about two minutes; finally he cleared his throat and for the first time we heard him distinctly: “The ceremony is terminated.”
After he had spoken this phrase about a dozen times our turn came. Joyfully I pushed forward my candidates and in a few minutes they were admitted into the matrimonial fold according to the law of France.
Then I whirled them off to Marguery’s where we had a lunch of uproarious jollity, punctuated with kisses, compliments and toasts. They would fain have lingered, but I whisked them off once more to the Place Denfort Rochereau where on every Saturday afternoon assembles the crowd of tourists that descends into the darkness of the Catacombs. I bought candles for all, showed my permit to the door-keeper, and we joined the long procession of candle-bearing cosmopolitans. The three women were delighted. It seemed so original for a Parisian to visit the Catacombs of Paris.
So for miles we followed these weird galleries hewn from the living rock and lined with the bones of their million dead. As we walked in single file the flickering candles gruesomely lit up the brown walls where the shank bones were piled with such meticulous neatness, knob dove-tailing into hollow, and the whole face of them decorated with fantastic frescoes of thousands of skulls. And behind these cordwood-like piles were vast heaps of indistinguishable débris, the bones of that mediæval myriad gutted from the graveyards when the great city had to have more room.
We were all emerging from a side-gallery when I pulled Anastasia back; for there, at the head of a party of Cook’s tourists, whom should I see but her enemy O’Flather. Luckily he did not notice her and she did not recognise him, so I held my tongue. But I thought:
“Ah, now if I were a writer of fantastic fiction, instead of a recorder of feeble fact, what a chance I should have here! Could I not in some way have left us in the darkness, all three together, our candles lost down one of those charnel pits? Then imagine: a battle in the dark between him and me, with the girl insensible between us. There in the black bowels of Paris how we smash at one another with naked femurs in our hands! How the bones and dust of death come toppling down on us! How, finally, I bowl him over with a chance-hurled skull. Then imagine how I wander there in the darkness with the girl in my arms! How we starve and nearly go mad! And how at last, on the following Saturday, the next batch of tourists finds us lying insensible at the foot of the great stairs!” As I thought of these things, by an absent-minded movement, I raised my candle. There was a fierce, frizzling noise. It was the feathers on the hat of the stout dame in front. They shrunk in a moment down to three weedy quills. Poor lady! she did not know, and I—I confess it with shame—had not the moral courage to tell her.
No sooner had we got into the open air again than I whirled my party off again to Montmartre. There was a matinée at the Grand Guignol, and I had taken seats in the low gallery. The pieces were more thrilling than usual and the three women screamed ecstatically.
For example: A father and son are left in charge of a solitary lighthouse. (You see the living-room of the lighthouse; you hear the howling of the storm.)
Then the son confesses to the father that he has been bitten by a rabid dog and that he feels the virus in his veins. He implores the father to kill him, but the old man refuses. The storm increases.
The son begins to go mad. He freezes, he burns, he raves, he weeps. Night is failing. It is time to light the lamps. The old man goes to do so: but the son is trying to kill himself and the father has to wrestle with him. The hoarse horn of a ship is heard in the growing storm.
There is no time to lose. The ship is close at hand, rushing on the rocks. The old man leaves his son and springs to the rope-ladder leading to the lights. He gets up it almost to the top, but the son is after him. With the blood-curdling snarl of a mad animal he seizes his father by the leg and buries his teeth in it. The old man kicks out, and the son, loosing his hold, tumbles crashing to the stage below. The curtain falls on the spectacle of the old man crouching over the dead body of his boy and the doomed ship crashing on the rocks.
This was one of the most cheerful pieces we saw, so that when we issued forth again we were all in excellent frame of mind for an apéritif at the Moulin Rouge. We had dinner at the Abbaye, and finished up by visiting those bizarre cabarets, Hell, Heaven and Annihilation.
“It’s been a lovely day you’ve arranged for us,” said Lorrimer as we broke up; “but one thing you missed to make it complete. Could you not have contrived a visit to the Morgue?”
“I tried,” I admitted mournfully, “but they’re not issuing permits any more.” However, I agreed with him; it had been one of the loveliest days I had ever spent.
So Lorrimer and Rougette went off to Brittany, and Helstern and Frosine to Normandy, and it seemed very lonely without them all. Yet the days passed serenely enough in our little apartment in that quiet by-street. I was becoming more and more absorbed in The Great Quietus which already was beginning to show signs of unruliness. My Pegasus, harnessed to imagination, is hard to keep in hand, and I perceived that, soon it would take the bit in its teeth. Anastasia was deeply interested in some tapestry she was trying to imitate from a design in the Cluny Museum. Sometimes for hours as we both worked you would not hear a sound in the tiny room.
Then when we were tired of toiling we would go out on, to me, the pleasantest of all the boulevards, Montparnasse. We would walk down as far as the Invalides, and, returning, sit in front of the Dome or the Rotando Café and sip Dubonnets while we watched the passing throng. We mixed with the groups of artists and students that thronged the rue de la Grand Chaumiere with its gleaming signs of Croquis schools, where for half a franc one may sketch for three hours some nude damsel with a wrist watch and very dirty feet. Or we spent a tranquil evening in a Cinema, halfway down the Boulevard Raspail, whose cherry-coloured lights saves the people on the apartments across the way a considerable sum yearly in gas bills.
Days of simple joys! What a world of difference a few extra francs make. Economy still, but self-respecting economy, not sordid striving to make ends meet. Anastasia would not waste anything. The remains of the gigot for dinner appeared as a ragoût at lunch. The morning milk left over must serve as the evening soup. Often I groaned in spirit, and suggested a little more recklessness. But no! I must not forget we were poor. We must cut our coat according to our cloth.
It was useless to try and change her. She was of that race of born house-wives who have made France the rich nation it is to-day. Early in the morning see their kimono-clad arms protruded from their windows to shake the energetic duster; a little later see them seated, trim and smiling at the cash-desks in their husband’s shops. Centuries of prudence are in their veins; industry is to them a religion, and the instinct of thrift is almost tyrannical. I know one of them who insisted on her daughter marrying an Englishman because she had sent her to a school in Brighton for a year, and did not want to see the money wasted.
So, recognising the genius of the race, I submitted meekly to Anastasia’s sense of economy. Her greatest delight was to spend the afternoon in the great Magasins that lie behind the Opera. She would spend three hours there, walking them from end to end, turning over enormous quantities of stuff which she would throw aside in the contemptuous way of the born shopper, swooping hawk-like, pressing intrepidly through crowds that appalled me, breathing air that gave me a headache, and in the end returning with six sous of riband, declaring that she had had a glorious day.
Often I wonder how a woman who is tired if she walks a mile in the open air can walk ten in a close, heated department store without fatigue. As I walk in the street Anastasia lags hopelessly in the rear, but the moment we enter the Louvre or the Bon Marché there is a mighty change. The enthusiasm of the bargain stalker gleams in her eyes; she becomes alert, a creature of fierce and predatory activity. It is I who am helpless now, I who try in vain to keep up, as in some marvellous way she threads in and out that packed mob of sister bargain-stalkers. She is still fresh when I am ready to drop with exhaustion, and she knows the Galerie and the Printemps as well as I know my pocket. Her only weakness is for special bargains. How often has she bought fancy boxes of note-paper and envelopes, just because they were too cheap to resist. I have enough rose and cream stationery to last me the balance of my life. I believe she buys them for the sake of the box.
As the days went on I found myself becoming more and more in love with the lotus life of Bohemia. I began to dread making an engagement; it weighed on me like a burden. I wanted to be free, free to do what I liked every moment of my time. An engagement was a constraint. The chances were that when the time came I did not feel in a sociable mood. Yet I would have to take part in conversation that did not interest me; I would have to adapt my thoughts to the thoughts of others. So Society became to me a form of spiritual tyranny, a state where I could not be myself, but had to play the complacent ape among people who were often uncongenial.
The fact of the matter was, I was overworking myself, living again that strange intense life of the maker of books, heedless of the outside world, and more and more vividly intent on the glowing world of my dreams. When I felt the force flag within me I would stimulate myself anew with draughts of strong black coffee. More and more was I the martyr to my moods, a prey to strange enthusiasms, strange depressions.
For hours I would sit tense over my typewriter, all nerves and desire; now attacking it in a frenzy of whirling phrases, now wrestling with the god of scribes for a few feeble fumbling words. Words—how I loved them! What a glory it was to twist and torture them, to marshall and command them, to work them like jewels into the gleaming fabric of a story!
As I walked the streets I had moments of wonderful exaltation; moments when my brain would be full of strange gleams and shadows. I would know the joy that is theirs who feel for a moment the inner spirit of things. I would have the reeling sense of intoxication as the Right Word shot into my consciousness. As I walked, the ground beneath my feet would seem billowy, the world around strangely, deliciously unreal, and the people would take on a new and marvellous aspect. So light I felt, that I imagined my feet must have some prehensible quality preventing me flying upward.
Particularly I favoured walking in an evening of soft-falling rain. It turned the boulevards into avenues of delight. The pavements were of beaten gold; down streets that were like plaques of silver shot ruby lights of taxicabs; the vivid leaves on the trees were clustered jewels. Perhaps I would see two people descending from a shining carriage, the lady in exquisite gown, held up to show silk-stockinged ankles, the man in evening dress. “They are going to dinner,” I would say; “to force themselves to be agreeable for three hours; to eat much rich, unnecessary food. Ah! how much better to be one’s own self and to walk and dream in the still, soft rain.”
So on I would go, and the world would become like a shadow beside the glow of my imagination. I would think of my work, thrill at its drama, chuckle over its humour, choke at its pathos. I would talk aloud my dialogues till people stared at me, even in Paris, this city of privileged eccentricity. I was more absent-minded than ever, and my nerves were often on edge. My manner became spasmodic, my temper uncertain. I avoided my friends, took almost no notice of Anastasia; in short, I was agonising in the travail of, alas! best-seller birth.
For my story had once more got out of hand. It was writing itself. I could not check it. I would rattle off page after page till the old typewriter seemed to curse me and my frenzy. Then, if perchance I was sitting mute and miserable before it, a few cups of that hot, black coffee till my heart began to thump, and I would be at it once more. I wanted to get it finished, to rid my mind of it, to send it away so that I would never see it again.
At last with a great spurt of effort I again wrote the sweetest word of all—The End. I leaned back with a vast sigh: “Thank God, I can rest now.”
Then I looked at the manuscript sadly.
“Another of them. I’ve no doubt it will sell in the tens of thousands. It will be a success; yet what a failure! What a chance I had to make art of it! What poetry! What romance! And I have sacrificed them for what?—adventure, exciting narrative, melodrama. I had to invent a villain, an educated super-ape who makes things hum. But I couldn’t help it. It was just the way it came to me and I could do no other.
“Oh, cursed Fate! I am doomed to success. Like a Nemesis it pursues me. If I could only achieve one glorious failure how happy I would be! But no. I am fated to become a writer with a vogue, a bloated bond-clipper.
“Alas! No more the joy of the struggle, the hope, the despair. Farewell, garrets and crusts! Farewell, light-hearted poverty! Farewell, the gay, hard life! Bohemia, Paris, Youth—farewell!”
And as I gazed at the manuscript that was to make for me a barrel of money there never was more miserable scribe than I.