“Elle est morte et n’a point vécu.”
Who does not know the sensation that besets an ordinary man on entering a familiar room, where, during his absence, some change has been made?—a piece of furniture moved, an old hanging taken down, a new picture put up?—that teasing sense of strangeness, which, if subordinate to the business of the moment, yet persists, uncomfortably formless, till, for instance, the presiding genius of the place inquires, “How do you like the way we have moved the piano?” or something else happens to crystallise the sufferer’s mere vague feeling into a perception; after which his spirit may be at rest again?
When I woke this morning, here in my own dingy furnished room, in this most dingy lodging-house, I had an experience very like that I mean to suggest: something seemed wrong and unusual, something had been changed overnight. This was the more perplexing, because my door had remained locked and bolted ever since I had tucked myself into bed; and within the room, after all, there isn’t much to change; only the bed itself, and the armoire, and my writing-table, and my wash-hand-stand, and my two dilapidated chairs; and these were still where they belonged. So were the shabby green window-curtains, the bilious green paper on the walls, the dismal green baldaquin above my head. Nevertheless, a tantalising sense of something changed, of something taken away, of an unwonted vacancy, haunted me through the brewing and the drinking of my coffee, and through the first few whiffs of my cigarette. Then I put on my hat, and “went to school,” and forgot about it.
But when I came back, in the afternoon, I found that whatever the cause might be of my curious psychical disturbance, it had not ceased to act. No sooner had I got seated at my table, and begun to arrange my notes, than down upon me settled, stronger if possible than ever, that inexplicable feeling of emptiness in the room, of strangeness, of an accustomed something gone. What could it mean? It was disquieting, exasperating; it interfered with my work. I must investigate it, and put an end to it, if I could.
But just at that moment the current of my ideas was temporarily turned by somebody rapping on my door. I called out, “Entrez!” and there entered a young lady: a young lady in black, with soiled yellow ribbons, and on her cheeks a little artificial bloom. The effect of this, however, was mitigated by a series of flesh-colored ridges running through it; and as the young person’s eyes, moreover, were red and humid, I concluded that she had been shedding tears. I looked at her for two or three seconds without being able to think who she was; but before she had pronounced her “B’jour, monsieur,” I remembered: Madame Germaine, the friend of poor little Zizi, my next-door neighbour. And then, in a flash, the reason appeared to me for my queer dim feeling of something not as usual in my surroundings, I had not heard Zizi cough! That was it! Zizi, the poor little girl in the adjoining room,—behind that door against which my armoire stands,—who for three months past has scarcely left the house, but has coughed, coughed, coughed perpetually: so that every night I have fallen asleep, and every morning wakened, and every day pursued my indoor occupations, to that distressing sound. Oh, our life is not all cakes and ale, here in the Quarter; we have our ennuis, as well as the rest of mankind; and when we are too poor to change our lodgings, we must be content to abide in patience—whatever sounds our neighbours choose to make.
At all events, so it came to pass that the sight of Madame Germaine, in her soiled finery, cleared up my problem for me: Zizi had not coughed. And I said to myself, “Ah, the poor little thing is better, and is spending the day out of doors.” (It has been a lovely day, soft as April, though in midwinter; and my inference, therefore, was not overdrawn.) “And Madame Germaine,” I proceeded rapidly, “has come to see her; and finding her away, has looked in on me.”
Meanwhile my visitor stood still, just within the threshold, and gazed solemnly, almost reproachfully, at me with her big protruding eyes: eyes that, protruding always far more than enough, seemed now, swollen by recent weeping, fairly ready to leave their sockets. What had she been crying for, I wondered. Then I began our conversation with a cheery “Zizi isn’t there?”
“Ah, m’sieu! Ah, la pauv’ Zizi!”! was her response, in a sort of hysterical gasp; and two fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, making further havoc of her rouge. She took a few steps forward, and sank into my arm-chair. “La pauv’ petite!” she sobbed, I was puzzled, of course, and a little troubled. “What is it? What is the matter?” I asked. “Zizi isn’t worse, surely? I haven’t heard her cough all day.”
“Oh, no, m’sieu, she isn’t worse. Oh, no, she—she is dead.”
I don’t need to recount any more of my interview with Madame Germaine, though it lasted a good half-hour longer, and was sufficiently vivacious. I can’t describe to you the shock her announcement caused me, nor the chill and despondency that have been growing on me ever since. Zizi—dead? Zizi and Death!—the notions are too awfully incongruous. I look at the door that separates our rooms,—the door athwart which, in former times, I have heard so many bursts of laughter, snatches of song, when Zizi would be entertaining her——she called them “friends;” and, latterly, that hacking, unyielding cough of hers,—I look at the door, and a sort of cold and blackness seems to creep in from its edges; and then I fancy the darkened chamber beyond it, with the open window, and Zizi’s little form stretched on the bed, stark and dead,—poor little chirping, chattering, ribald Zizi! Oh, it is ghastly. And all her trumpery, twopenny fripperies round about her, their occupation gone: her sham jewels, and her flounces, and her tawdry furs and laces, and her powder-puffs and rouge-pots—though it was only towards the end that Zizi took to rouge. It is as if they were to tell you that a doll is dead: can such things die? They are not wholly inhuman, then?
They have viscera? are made of real flesh and blood? can experience real pains? and—and die? Here are you and I, serious folk, not without some sense of the solemnity and mystery of God’s creation, here are we still working the first degree of our arcana,—Life; and yonder lies that tinselled little gewgaw, admitted to the second! She has passed the dread portals, she has accomplished the miracle of Death! She was vain and shallow and hard: she was malicious: she was shameless in her speech as in her conduct: she was lively, it is true, and merry-mannered, and pretty: but she had no affections, no illusions, no remorse; and lies dropped like toads from her mouth whenever she opened it: yet she is dead! And to-morrow women (who would have shrunk from her in her lifetime, as from something pestilential) will reverently cross themselves, and men (who would have.... ah, well, it is best not to remember what the men would have done) will decently bare their heads, as her poor coffin is borne through the streets on its way to the graveyard. Isn’t it ghastly? Isn’t it quite enough to depress a fellow, to sober him up, when there is only a thin partition, broken by a door, to separate him from such a death-chamber?—Wait; I must tell you something about Zizi, as I have known her.
Long before our personal acquaintance began I used to see her here and there in the Quarter: at the Bullier balls, or the Café Vachette, or in the Luxembourg or the Boule-Miche when the weather was fine: and to admire her as a singularly inoffensive specimen of her class. Those were her palmy days. Her “friend” was a student of law, from the Quartier Marbouf, with a pocketful of money and a pointed beard. She was the smallest of possible little women, no higher than her law-student’s heart, if he had one; and he was only a medium-sized Frenchman. She was very daintily formed, with fine hands and feet; she had a great quantity of black hair, and a pair of bright black eyes. Her face was pale, and decidedly an interesting face: pert, if you please, and tremendously mischievous, but suggestive of wit, of intelligence, even of humour and passion: a most uncommon face, with character in it,—I believe I may even say with distinction. It was a face you would have noticed anywhere, to wonder who and what its owner might be. And then she used to dress very well, very quietly: in refined grays or blacks: there was absolutely nothing in her dress to betray her place in the world’s economy: passing her in the street, you would have taken her for an entirely irreproachable little housewife, with an unusually interesting face. I used to see her in all the pleasure-resorts of the Quarter, ami to admire her, and speculate about her in a languid, melancholy way. Then I left town for the summer; and when I came back last September I established myself here in the Hôtel du Saint Esprit.
The first morning after my arrival I was awakened by queer but unambiguous noises coming through that door, there behind my armoire; a strident laugh, and a few hardy exclamations, that could leave me in no doubt as to the sex and quality of my fellow-lodger. An hour or two later I encountered Zizi on the landing; and the concierge informed me that she was the tenant of the next room to my own. Such a neighbourship would horrify you in London or New York: but we think nothing of accidents much worse than that, here in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Afterwards, night and morning, and more especially in those small hours that are properly both or neither, I would hear Zizi’s laughter beyond our dividing door; her laughter, or her thin little voice raised in a stupid song, or the murmur of light talk, that would sometimes leap to the pitch of anger, for I suspect that Zizi’s temper was uncertain; and then, rare at first, but recurring more and more frequently, till it became quite the dominant note, her hard, dry, racking little cough.
Elinor was in Paris about this time. To my great joy, she had come to pass the autumn, and perhaps the winter too; and she was very anxious that I should show her something of the seamy side of life here. She had taken lodgings on the other—the right and wrong—bank of the river; and every afternoon, my day’s work done, I would join her there, and we would go off together for little excursions into Bohemia. I happened to be extraordinarily flush for the moment; I had nearly two hundred pounds of ready money; and this was a help. Of course I took her to the Moulin Rouge, which disgusted her, as I had warned her that it would; and to the Chat Noir, which amused her; and I was fortunate enough to get two seats for a performance at the Théâtre Libre, which both amused and disgusted her at once; and I introduced her to the jerry-built splendours of Bullier; and we took long delightful walks together in the Luxembourg, where she would feed the sparrows with crumbs of unnutritious bread; and we lunched, dined, and supped together in an infinite number of droll restaurants; and now and then we went slumming in the far north, or east, or south; and Pousset’s knew us, and Vachette’s; and sometimes,’ for the fun or the convenience of the thing, we would drop in among the demi-gomme of the Café de la Paix: and she would have been altogether happy and contented save for a single unfulfilled desire. She wanted to make acquaintance with some member of the sisterhood of Sainte Grisette; she wanted, as a literary woman, to see what such an one would be like; to convince herself whether or not they were as black as I had painted them, for I had painted them very black indeed.
“Well,” I said at last, “you’ll be sorry for it, but since you won’t take no for an answer, I’ll see what can be done.”
Then one afternoon I was waiting for her by appointment, in that very Café de la Paix, when whom should I see enter, and ensconce themselves in a back room, but my neighbour Zizi, and her friend of the ribbons, Madame Germaine. “When Elinor arrives,” I thought, “and if her heart is still set on that sort of thing, I will introduce Zizi to her: for Zizi is as nearly innocuous as a microbe of her variety very well can be.” Elinor arrived a moment later: beautiful, strong, gracious, and pure as a May morning: and I proposed the measure to her; and her instant decision was, “Oh, yes, by all means.” So she and I penetrated into the backroom, and took the table next to Zizi’s; and presently Zizi gave me a sly little covert glance and smile; and therewith I invited her and her companion to come and sit with us.
“Madame permits?” demanded Zizi, raising her eyebrows, astonished at such magnanimity on the part of a fellow-woman. Elinor smiled assent; and the two étudiantes rose and placed themselves before our own slab of marble. I asked them what they would take; of course they commanded each a menthe à l’eau. But though I tried to suit the conversation to their taste and level, they were not perfectly at ease. The presence of Elinor, whom, for all that she was alone with a man in the Café de la Paix, they could perceive with half an eye to be a bird of a totally different feather to their own, embarrassed them a good deal. Their desire to appear well before her, their determined best behaviour, tied their tongues, and made them surpassingly dull; for when they are not flavoured lavishly with Gallic salt, they are unimaginably insipid, these little soubrettes in the comedy of evil. However, before we broke up, I had engaged them to breakfast with us on the Sunday to follow. We were all to meet at Fousset’s in the Boulevard at noon, and thence we would proceed to the Abbaye de Thélème, where I would bespeak a cabinet particulier.
The Abbaye de Thélème is the riskiest of restaurants in a most risky quarter: but Elinor wanted to see the seamy side of Parisian life, and I was resolved to satisfy her once for all with a drastic measure of it.
“Voyez-vous,” I heard Zizi boasting to her, in a whisper, “it is forbidden for women to come alone to this café. But I am an honest girl. The gérant knows me. They make no objection to me or to my friends. Adieu, madame. Au revoir, proche,”—this last to me. Proche, indeed! But in the Latin Quarter the word is often used as a substitute for voisin. Then Zizi took her small self off, followed by Germaine.
“Well,” I queried, as soon as Elinor and I were alone, “is your thirst for experience satisfied? Are you happy at last?”
“I am overcome with bewilderment. Who would have known that they weren’t simply two ordinary bourgeoises? There wasn’t anything rowdy or shocking about them.”
“What! The rouge? The ribbons? The bulging eyes?”
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of that one. I didn’t care much for her. Still, even she looked no worse than—well, a shop-girl. But the other, the little one. I shouldn’t have been surprised to meet her anywhere,—at Madame X———’s, at Madame de Z———-’.. She was dressed so quietly, in such good taste. Her manners were so subdued, almost English. And her face,—it’s a face that would strike you anywhere. So delicate, refined, so quaint and interesting. She doesn’t rouge. And such lovely hair! Oh, I am sure she is full of good qualities. What a shame and horror it is that... that... It makes one feel inclined to loathe your whole sex.”
Elinor’s commentary at this point became a lamentation, which it would be irrelevant to repeat. “I must get her to tell me her story,” was its conclusion.
“Oh, she’ll tell you her story fast enough, only, I warn you, it will be a pack of lies. The truth isn’t in them, those little puppets. Don’t cherish any illusions about her. The most one can say for her is that she’s a fairly harmless example of a desperately bad class. The grisette of Musset, of Henry Murger, exists no longer, even if she ever did exist. To-day Zizi was on her good behaviour. Sunday, I hope for the sake of science, she’ll get off it, and be her wicked little self. Yes, her face is remarkable, but it’s an absurd accident, a slip of nature: not one of the qualities it would seem to indicate is anywhere in her—neither wit nor humour nor emotion. She’s just a little undersized cat; not a kitten: she has none of the innocent gentleness of a kitten: an undergrown, hard, sprightly little cat. However, she can be amusing enough when she’s roused; and on Sunday we are likely to have a merry breakfast.” But herein I proved myself a false prophet. We were still at the hors d’ouvres when Zizi began to cry. She had coughed; and Elinor had asked her if she had a cold; and that question precipitated a flood of tears. This was dispiriting. It is always dispiriting to see one of these creatures anything but gay and flippant: serious feeling is so crudely, so garishly, at variance with your preconception of them, with the mood in which you approach them. And yet they cry a good deal,—mostly, however, tears of mere spite or vexed vanity; or, it may be, of hysteria, for they are frightfully subject to what they call crises de nerfs. But Zizi’s tears now were of a different water. Had she a cold? Oh, no, it was worse than that. The doctor said her lungs were affected; and if she didn’t speedily change her mode of life, she must go into a decline. And this, if you please, was the dish laid on our table, there in the vulgar cabinet particulier of that shady restaurant, under the crystal gasalier, and between the four diamond-scratched looking-glasses that covered the walls,—this was the dish served to us even before the oysters; and you may imagine, therefore, with what appetite we attacked the good things that came after. The doctor had told her that she must absolutely suspend her dissipations for at least a six-month, and rest, and soigner herself, and “feed up,” or she would surely become poitrinaire. “And do nothing? How can I? Faut vivre, parbleu!” Her present friend-in-chief, she explained, was at the School of Mines; his pension from his family only amounted to two hundred and fifty francs a month; he was all that is good, he would do his utmost for her; but she couldn’t live on what he could spare her out of two hundred and fifty francs a month.
With this she went off in a regular fit of hysterics; and Elinor had her hands full, trying to bring her round. Hysterics are infectious; and Madame Germaine sat in her place, and sobbed helplessly,—not in sympathy, but by infection,—whilst her tears fell into her plate.
I saw that Elinor was tremendously distressed, and I cursed the misinspired moment when I had arranged this feast. “Terrible, terrible!” she murmured, shaking her head and looking at me with pained eyes. When at length Zizi was calm again, Elinor asked, “You won’t mind if I speak with Monsieur in English?” and then said to me, “This is quite too dreadful. We must do something for her. We must save her from consumption; and perhaps at the same time we can redeem her, make a good woman of her. She has it in her.”
I respected Elinor’s sincerity too much to laugh at the utopian quality of her optimism: so I waived the latter of her remarks, and replied only to the former. “I should be glad to do anything possible for her, but I don’t exactly see what is possible. Besides, I don’t believe she’s threatened with consumption, any more than I am. This is a pose, to make herself interestingly pathetic in your eyes, and get some money. You’ll see—she’s going to strike me for fifty francs. It’s the sum they usually ask for. And she wants to win your sanction to the gift beforehand.”
Surely enough, Zizi lifted up her tearful face, its features all puffed out and empurpled, and said at this very moment, in a whimper that ought to have hardened the softest heart, “If Monsieur could give me a little money—a couple of louis—a fifty-franc note? I could buy medicines and things.”
“Nonsense,” said I, brutally; “you’d buy chiffons and things.”
She laughed without offence, and gave me a knowing glance, but protested, “Non, sérieusement, je veux me soigner.” Then she turned to Elinor, and pleaded coaxingly, “Madame, tell him to give me fifty francs—pour me soigner.”
“No,” Elinor replied; “he won’t give you fifty francs, but this is what he will do, what we will do. If you will obey the doctor’s orders, send your friends about their business, and lead a perfectly regular life for the time being, we will undertake to see that you want for nothing during the next six months. After that, nous verrons! For the present, that is what we offer you: six months in which to give yourself every chance for a cure. Only, during those six months—faut etre sage.”
Of course, Zizi began to cry again; and, of course, she could do nothing less than accept Madame’s proposition with some show of effusion: though I mistrusted the whole-heartedness of her acceptance; she would much rather have pocketed the fifty francs, and had done with us.
Elinor and she fell to discussing sundry practical details. Good and abundant food, warm clothing, healthful lodgings: these were the three desiderata that Elinor prescribed. As for the last, Zizi assured us that she already had them—“since I live in the same house as Monsieur,” she explained, convincingly.
But Elinor was not convinced. “Do your rooms face south?” was the question she insisted on.
Now Zizi, about the points of the compass, and such abstruse matters generally, had no more idea than I have of Sanskrit; yet, “Oh, yes, my room gives to the noon,” she answered, without turning a hair. “And, anyhow, it is a very nice room.—Come and see,” she added, impulsively. “I should be charmed to show you.”
“I suppose it will be all right?” Elinor asked of me.
“Oh, no worse than the rest,” I acquiesced.
And so we took a cab, and were driven to the Rue St. Jacques. Madame Germaine parted from us at the threshold of the eating-house. “I have an engagement in the Parc Monceau,” she informed us, in the candour of her heart. Zizi jeered at her a good deal as we drove across the town. “Her ribbons—hein? Her goggle-eyes! Not at all comme il faut. But a brave girl. She loves me like a sister. Monsieur smiles. No, word of honour, it is not as you think.” If I had thought as Zizi thought I thought, I shouldn’t have smiled; but she, of course, couldn’t be expected to understand that. “Poor Germaine! Her real name is Gobbeau, Marthe Gobbeau. She is stupid and ugly, but she is good-natured,” which was more, perhaps, than one could say with truth of her little critic. “Her mother is an ouvreuse in the Théâtre de Belleville.”
“And her father?” queried Elinor.
“Her father!” cried Zizi, and she was about to continue, when it occurred to her to respect Elinor’s unsophistication. She gave me a furtive wink, and said, gravely, “Oh, her father lives in the twenty-first arrondissement.” Elinor was not aware that the arrondissements of Paris number only twenty, and so she could not realise either the double meaning or the antiquity of this evasion.
Zizi’s room was precisely like a thousand other rooms in the Latin Quarter, though rather more luxurious than most: much more so than mine, for example. To begin with, she had a carpet, her private property, a sober-hued Brussels carpet, that covered almost the entire floor; then she had four chairs, each practicable and reasonably fresh-looking; her bed was enriched by a counterpane of crimson silk, and crimson too were the hangings over it. The walls were decorated in the prevailing style of her class and epoch, with tambourines, toy trumpets, empty bonbon boxes, and so forth, hung from tin-tacks. But the chief impression that you got of the room was one of cleanliness and order: Zizi, still for all slips of hers, was French.
“How very neat it is, how exquisitely neat,” Elinor murmured, in evident surprise.
Zizi smiled complacently,—with what they call proper pride. “Pas mal, hein? Asses chic, eh?” she questioned, whilst her eyes snapped triumphantly.
“Yes,” Elinor admitted, “it is very nice, but—it looks due north.”
And she proceeded to develop her favourite hygienic thesis, to the effect that no one could keep well who lived in a room that had no sun, the application being that Zizi must change her quarters. To-morrow, Monday, she must find a room that really did “give to the noon;” and at three o’clock we would meet her at the Vachette, and go with her to inspect it. Of course we were to pay the rent.
“My dear Elinor,” I said, when we had taken leave of Zizi, “I am sorry to discourage you, but your benevolent schemes will come to nothing. She won’t change her lodgings, and she won’t change her mode of life. We would much better have given her a little ready cash, and got rid of her. An endeavour to be respectable, if only ad interim as it were, would weary her too much. You rashly promised to see that she wanted for nothing. Can you see that she has plenty of excitement?—which is the breath of her nostrils. To-morrow she will draw back; she will tell you that on the whole she finds she can’t accept your bigger offer, and will renew her request for fifty francs.”
“If I didn’t know you weren’t, I should think you were a perfectly soulless cynic,” was Elinor’s rejoinder.
But, cynic or no cynic, I was right. Elinor, in agreeing to meet Zizi at Vachettes on the morrow, had forgotten a previous engagement, which she remembered afterwards; so I went to the rendezvous alone, charged, however, with full powers to act as I might deem best. Zizi was a quarter-hour late, but she didn’t mind that, apparently; at any rate she vouchsafed no apology for having kept me waiting. She made haste to let me know that she couldn’t possibly change her lodgings; she hadn’t even looked for others: her mother wouldn’t hear of it, for one thing; and then—her friends? They all have mothers, somehow or other, though the notion seems incongruous: yet I suppose it’s only natural. Zizi’s was a purple-faced old sage femme from the purlieus of ‘Montmartre. She had taken counsel with her mother, she said, and her mother wouldn’t hear of her changing her abode. And then—her friends? When they came to see her, and found that she had moved, they would be displeased; they wouldn’t follow her up. Business is business, after all, but in our youth we were taught that friendship isn’t. Anyhow, Zizi foresaw herself quite friendless if she moved. “But my room is very well. If you and Madame want to support me, why not support me there?”
I echoed, rather feebly perhaps, Elinor’s lecture on the advantages of sunlight; and in any case, I told her, desirous as Madame and I were to “support her,” we positively declined to permit ourselves that indulgence, unless she took a sunny room: what we really wished was to help her to get well; we were persuaded that she couldn’t get well in a northern aspect; and we had no sort of eagerness to throw our money from the windows. It was pretty clear to me that she had begun to distrust our motives: such unaccustomed kindness, such reckless extravagance, bore on their face a suspicious look.
“Et cette dame?” she queried. “Cette anglaise? Qu est-ce qu’elle me veut? Elle est ta maîtresse, hein? Femme mariée, eh? Et toi, avec ton petit air Sainte-Nitouche, va! I’ll tell you what: give me some money, fifty francs, to buy medicines, to pay a doctor. Come on! Fifty francs—it isn’t much.”
“Yes, it is, my dear,” I retorted. “It’s a jolly lot, as you know very well. But still, if you prefer the part, when you might have the whole, that is your affair; and so I’m going to give it to you. Only, mind, this will begin and end the whole transaction. We give you fifty francs, but we will never give you another penny.” Then I smuggled a fifty-franc note into her pretty little hand,—smuggled it, so that the waiters and the other consommateurs shouldn’t see.
But Zizi was troubled by no such false shame. She smoothed the note out, and held it up to the light, scrutinising it rigorously. Having satisfied herself that it wasn’t a counterfeit, she crammed it into a small silver purse, closed the purse with a snap, and buried it in an occult female pocket. At last she turned her face towards mine, and said, “T’es bon, toi. That will bring you luck. Kiss me.” I suggested that the café was rather too public a place for kissing. The fifty-franc note radiated its genial warmth throughout her small frame, and she quite “chippered up,” and laughed and chatted with me very pleasantly. “Why do you never come to see me,—since we live in the same house?” she was good enough to ask. And she tried to pump me, in a naughty insinuating way, about Elinor, her benefactress.
But Zizi was launched upon her descent into Avernus. Her cough got worse and worse; her cheeks grew hollow, her whole face dragged-looking; her figure lost its elasticity. She took to rouge and powder, and introduced falsetto notes into her toilet. With her failing health, her friends began to fail her too: coughs and fevers and eyes unnaturally bright are disturbing elements, and put a strain on friendship. She had to seek for new ones, and was to be met with a good deal in the Boulevards. Whenever she spied Elinor and me on her horizon, she bore down upon us, and begged for money: and she was always spying us, always turning up; it seemed as if she must have dogged our footsteps. Thus you cast your bread upon the waters, and it comes back to you in the fulness of time. She was French, as I have remarked before: but she showed no discretion, and no respect for places or occasions. Not infrequently, therefore, her familiar hailings of us were embarrassing. By and by she acquired a light-hearted habit of entering the Vachette, ordering what she would, and leaving it to be scored to my account; and I had to remonstrate. At last she found out Elinor’s address, and called upon her. But Elinor was going to London the next day; so nothing came of that. This was in December; and early in the same month Zizi began to keep her room. She was probably very ill; she coughed perpetually. She coughed a good deal when it wasn’t necessary, and only racked without relieving her poor chest, to say nothing of her neighbours’ nerves. I used to urge her to control her cough, not to cough when she could help it; but self-control of any sort was beyond her tradition; and she would always cough at the slightest impulse. Once in a great while, if she was a little better, and the weather favoured, she would put on her rouge and her finery, and go out,—to “pécher à la ligne,” as she expressed it. Then, on her re-entrance, I would hear forlorn attempts at song and laughter, which would inevitably end in long, pitiful fits of coughing.
And now it is all over; Zizi is dead; and I am as much shocked as if the event were inconsequent and unexpected, as if she hadn’t been coughing her life out steadily these three months past. Ah, well, the difficulty is to reconcile one’s idea of Zizi with anything not vain and hollow and make-believe, with anything natural and sincere; and death is so hideously natural, so horribly sincere. For the first time since her birth, I dare say, she has done a sincere thing, a real thing,—she has died!
His wife had died some five and twenty years before, leaving him with an infant son upon his hands; and she had made him promise that the boy should be brought up as a “good American.”
He, poor man, was a desperately bad one. The very word, for instance, as he pronounced it, forgot to rhyme with hurricane; and, lest anybody should be disposed to look indulgently upon the said offence, I hasten to add that he persistently sounded the e in clerk unlike the i in dirk. Besides (the homeliness of the detail may be forgiven to its significance), he suffered his nose, as an instrument for the communication of ideas, to sink into disuse and atrophy.
And he lived in London, and brazenly acknowledged that he liked it better than New York.
A serious old friend, writing from oversea to remonstrate with him, spoke of duty and patriotism, and got this pert reply:—
“Duty, my dear, is the last weakness of great minds; and patriotism, as manifested at any rate by such travelling fellow-countrymen of ours as I have met on British soil, patriotism corrupts good manners. Of the patriots themselves I may say, as of divers birds, orators, operas, and women, that they should be seen perhaps, but certainly not heard; and if I could not talk, I should not wish to live.”
As a matter of principle all this rather shocked his young American wife (a Massachusetts girl, who had been bred in the straitest sect of the national religion), though in practice she was nearly as shameless as himself. Anyhow, she submitted cheerfully to a residence in England, and forbore to draw comparisons;—indeed, if she had drawn them, it is not inconceivable that they might have redounded less to the disparagement of the elder country than one could have desired.. But then she fell ill, and came to die, and was smitten with home-sickness; and fond memories of the land of her girlhood begot a sort of dim remorse for the small place she had lately let it hold in her affections; and groping blindly for something in the nature of atonement, she made her husband promise that the boy should be educated as a good American, in an American school, and at Harvard College.
Afterwards, he transported the baby and its nurse to Beacon Street in Boston, and deposited them with the dead lady’s parents. And as soon as he decently could be returned to England; and twenty-five years passed during which neither father nor son crossed the Atlantic.
This I am afraid must be confessed, that he was a very, very frivolous young person;—he carried his age as jauntily as his gloves and his walking-stick, and would have been genuinely surprised if anybody had spoken of him as otherwise than young, though he was fifty-seven.
With a beggarly five hundred a year to his patrimony, he lived at the rate of half as many thousand, he who had never earned a sixpence. He had never had time, he said; he had been kept too busy doing nothing; he had found no leisure for productive industry. What with teas and dinners and dances, with visits in country houses and dashes across the channel, with reading and conversation, dreaming and sleeping, his days and nights had been too full; and so he had had to raise the balance of his expenditures by leaving the greater number of his debts unpaid. For pocket-money he resorted to what he called reversed post-obits. His son would some day, by inheritance from his maternal grandparents, be a rich man; and he would surely not refuse, on his father’s death, to buy up such stamped paper as might bear his father’s autograph; and the Jews (a race that always set great hopes upon posterity) were happy, with this prospect in view, to accommodate him at sixty per cent, per annum.
He was tall and lean and loosely built, much given to lounging about in queer twisted postures, as if double-jointed; whereby a friend was led to suggest for his consideration that, when hard-up, he might turn an honest penny by enlisting in some itinerant menagerie as India-rubber man. One of his eyes met the world unarmoured, with a perfectly vacant stare; the other glimmered ambiguously behind a circular shield of glass. He had an odd, musical, rather piping voice, in which he drawled forth absurdities with such a plaintive, weary, spoiled-child intonation as seemed to hint wits tottering and spirits drooping under an almost insupportable burden of fatigue and disappointment; whence, for a stranger, it was not at once easy to determine if his utterances were funny or only inconsequential. When I first made his acquaintance, I remember, I thought for a minute or two that I had stumbled upon a tired imbecile,—then an amusing one,—then an inspired. Some people branded him a snob, others a sort of metaphysical rake, but all agreed that he was an entertaining man.
He had translated the hitherto incomprehensible-seeming motto of his house, “Estre que fayre,”—“To be rather than to do.” To be: to be on all sides a highly developed mortal,—a scholar, a connoisseur, a good talker, an amiable companion, a healthy animal,—was his aim in life, so nearly as it could be said of him that he had an aim. And therefore he played golf (it was heartrending, he declared, to see how badly), took an intelligent interest in foot-ball, read everything (save the hyperbole!) and kept abreast of what was being done in music, painting’, sculpture, and keramics: in short, went heavily in for all forms of unremunerative culture. The theatre he avoided, because he deemed acting at its best but a bad reflection of the creative arts, and at its worst, as he maintained we got it nowadays, a mere infectious disease of the nervous system. Neither would he hunt, shoot, fish, nor eat of any flesh, because, he explained, it would be unpleasant to have to consider himself a beast of prey. He had a skillful cook, however, and fared sumptuously every day on such comestibles as plovers’ eggs and truffles, milk, honey, fruits, and flowers (is not the laborious artichoke a flower?), and simple bread and cheese served in half a hundred delectable disguises. He dined out, to be sure, six or seven evenings in the week; but these were Barmecide feasts for him, and on coming home he could sup. When he went to stay in the country he took his cook with him, instead of his man; and people bore with his eccentricities because he could say diverting things.
He was an epicure, though a vegetarian, a cynic in a benignant, trifling way, and a pessimist, though a debonair one.
“A little cheerful pessimism, is a great help here below,” he used to urge. “It takes one over many a rough place. Has it ever struck you to reflect how much worse the world might be, if it weren’t so bad?”
Occasionally, no doubt, his pessimism glowed with a less merry hue: when, for instance, he would be short of funds and hard pressed by duns. “How many noble fellows have fought loyally in the battle to lead a life of sweet idleness, and fallen overpowered by the cruel greed of tradesmen! Am I to be of their number?” he would ask himself sadly at such moments.
He was the most indefatigable of human men when engaged in pursuits that were entirely profitless, like arranging picnics, going to parties, inventing paradoxes, or drinking tea; but when it came to anything remotely approaching the sphere of Ought, he was the most indolent, the most prone to procrastination. Far, far too indolent, for example, to be a possible correspondent,—unless he were addressing a money-lender or a woman,—whence it resulted that he and his son had written to each other but desultorily and briefly, and knew appallingly little of each other’s state of mind. Three or four years ago the boy, having taken his degree at Harvard, had poised for an instant on the brink of a resolution to run over and pay his sire a visit; but then he had decided to wait about doing that till he should have put in “the requisite number of terms at the Law School to secure his admission to the Bar,” as he expressed it.
Now, it appeared, the requisite number had been achieved, for early in May, along with the first whiffs of warm air, shimmers of sunshine, and rumblings of carriage-wheels in the Park, the elder man received a letter that ran like this:—
“My dear Father,
“You will, I am sure, be glad to know that I have passed my final examinations, and shall shortly have the right to sign LL. B. after my name, as well as to practise in the courts.
“I mean to sail for Europe on the 1st of June, by the Teutonic, and shall reach London about the 8th. I should like to spend the summer with you in England, familiarising myself with British institutions, and in the fall go through France and Germany, and down into Italy to pass the winter. But of course I should submit my plans to your revision.
“My grandfather and grandmother are keeping very well, and join me in love to you.
“Your affectionate son,
“Harold Weir.”
“The lad seems to have some humour,” was the senior Weir’s reflection upon this epistle. “‘British institutions’ is rather droll. And if his style seems a trifle stiff in the joints, that only results from youth and a legal education. I trust to Providence, though, that he mayn’t have LL. B. engraved upon his card;—these Americans are capable of anything. However I shall be glad to see him.”
And he began to picture pleasantly to himself the fun that awaited him in having a well set-up young man of five and twenty, whose pockets were full of money (the maternal grandfather saw to that, thank goodness), to knock about with; and he looked forward almost eagerly to the 8th of June. They would finish the season in town together, and afterwards do a round of country houses, and then make for the Continent: and, taking one consideration with another, it would be a tremendous lark. That Harold was well set-up he knew from a photograph. His only fear on the score of appearance concerned his colouring. That might be trying. However, he would hope not; and anyhow, in this world we must take the bitter with the sweet.
He went to Euston (having had due telegraphic warning from Liverpool) to welcome the youth on the platform; and he didn’t quite know whether to be pleased or dismayed when he saw him step from a third-class compartment of the train. It was rather smart than otherwise to travel third-class, of course; but how could a young American, fresh from democracy, be aware of this somewhat recondite canon of aristocratic manners? and might the circumstance not argue, therefore, parsimony or a vulgar taste?
He had no doubt at all, however, about the nature of the emotion that Harold’s hat aroused in him; for not only was it a “topper,” but—as if travelling from Liverpool in a topper weren’t in itself enough—it had to be a topper of an outlandish, un-English model; and he shuddered to speculate for what plebeian provincial thing people might have been mistaking this last fruit of his gentle family tree. He hurried the hat’s wearer out of sight, accordingly, into his brougham, and gave the word to drive.
“But my baggage?” cried the son.
“Oh, my man will stop behind and look after that. Give him your receipt.”
His hat apart, Harold was really a very presentable fellow, tall and broad-shouldered, with a clear eye, a healthy brown skin, and a generous allowance of well-cropped brown hair; and on the whole he wasn’t badly dressed: so that his father’s heart began to warm to him at once. His cheeks and lips were shaven clean, like an actor’s or a priest’s, whereby a certain rigidity was imparted to the lines of his mouth. He held himself rather rigidly too, and bolt upright: but as his father had noticed a somewhat similar effect in the bearing of a good many unexceptionable young Oxford and Cambridge men, he put it down to the fashion of a generation, and didn’t allow it to distress him.
“I had no idea you kept a carriage,” Harold remarked, after an interval.
“Oh, I should ruin myself in cab-fares, you know,” Weir explained.
“I presume London is a pretty dear city?”
“Oh, for that—shocking!”
“I came down on the cars third-class. I want to get near the people while I am over here, and see for myself how their status compares to that of ours. I want to get a thorough idea of the economic condition of England, and see whether what David A. Wells claims for free trade is true.”
“Ah, yes—yes,” his father responded, dashed a little. But the boy’s voice was not unpleasant; his accent, considering whence he came, far better than could have been expected; and as for his locutions, his choice of words, “I must cure you of your Americanisms,” the hopeful parent added.
“Sir?” the son queried, staring.
“There, to begin with, don’t call me sir. Reserve that for Royalty. I said I must try to break you of some of your Americanisms.”
“Oh, I know. The English say railway for railroad, and box for trunk.”
“Ah, if it began and ended there!” sighed Weir.
“But I don’t see why our way isn’t as good as theirs. We’ve got a population of sixty millions to their thirty, and——”
“Oh come, now! Don’t confuse the argument by introducing figures.”
But at this Harold stared so hard that his father’s conscience smote him a little, and he asked sympathetically, “I’m afraid you take life rather seriously, don’t you?”
“Why, certainly,” the young man answered with gravity. “Isn’t that the way to take it?”
“Oh, bless you, no. It’s too grim a business. The proper spirit to take it in is one of unseemly levity.”
“I don’t think I understand you—unless you’re joking.”
“You need limbering up a bit, that’s all,” declared his father. “But I say, we must get you a decent hat. Later in the day I’m going to trot you off to Mrs. Midsomer-Norton’s for tea. Well stop at a hatter’s now.” And he gave the necessary instructions to his coachman.
“What is the matter with the hat I’ve got on?”
“We’re not wearing that shape in London.”
“What will a new one cost?”
“Don’t know. I’m sure. Five-and twenty shillings, I expect.”
“Well, this one cost me eight dollars in Boston just about three weeks ago. Don’t you think it would be extravagant to get a new one so soon?”
“Oh, damn the extravagance. We must ‘gae fine’ whatever we do.”
This time there was a distinct shadow of pain in Harold’s stare; and he preserved a rueful silence till the brougham drew up at Scott’s. He followed his father into the shop, however, and submitted stolidly to the operation of being fitted. When it came to paying, he pulled a very long face indeed, and appeared to have an actual mechanical difficulty in squeezing the essential coin from his purse.
“Now you look like a Christian,” his father averred, as they got back into the carriage.
“I hate to throw away money, though.”
“For goodness’ sake don’t tell me you’re close-fisted.”
“I don’t think it’s right to throw away money.”
“That’s a New England prejudice. You’ll soon get over it here.”
“I don’t know. A man ought never to be wasteful—especially with what he hasn’t earned.”
“Ah, there’s where I can’t agree with you. If a man had earned his money he might naturally have some affection for it, and wish to keep it. But those who like you and me are entirely vicarious in their sacrifice, and spend what other folk have done the grubbing for, can afford to be royally free-handed.”
Harold made no response, but it was evident that he had a load on his mind for the remainder of their drive.
At Mrs. Midsomer-Norton’s the young man’s bewilderment and melancholy seemed to deepen into something not far short of horror, as he formed one of a group about his father, and heard that personage singsong out, with an air of intense fatigue, his flippant inconsequences.
There was a little mite of a man present, with a fat white face and a great shock of red hair, whom the others called the Bard; and he announced that he was writing a poem in which it would be necessary to give a general definition of Woman in a single line; and he called upon the company to help him.
“Woman,” wailed Weir, languidly, as he leaned upon the mantelpiece, “Woman is—such sweet sorrow.”
There was a laugh at this, in which, however, Harold could not join. Then the Bard cried, “That’s too abstract;” and Weir retorted, drawling, “Oh, if you must have her defined in terms of matter, Woman is a mass of pins.” Harold slunk away into a corner, to hide his shame. He felt that his father was playing the fool outrageously.
The Bard curled himself up, cross-legged like the bearded Turk, upon the hearthrug, and repeated some verses. He called them a “villanelle,” and said they were “after the French.”
“I have lost my silk umbrella,
Someone else no doubt has found it:
I would like to catch the fella!
“Or it may be a femella
Cast her fascination round it.
I have lost my silk umbrella.
“Male or female, beau or hella,
Who hath ventured to impound it,
I would like to catch the fella!
“Talk about a tourterella!
I’d rather lose a score, confound it.
I have lost my silk umbrella.
“It was new and it was swella!
If I had his head I’d pound it,
I would like to catch the fella.
“ Hearken to my ritoumella,
From my heart of hearts I sound it,—
I have lost my silk umbrella,
I would like to catch the fella.”
Everybody laughed; but Harold thought the verses silly and uninteresting, and full of vain repetitions; and he wondered that grown-up men and women could waste their time upon such trivialities.
On their way home he took his father to task. “Of course you didn’t mean the things you said in that lady’s house?” he began.
“Why? Did I say anything I hadn’t oughter?”
Harold frowned in wonder at his father’s grammar, and replied severely, “You said a good many things that you couldn’t have meant You said a lie in time saves nine. You said consistency is the last refuge of a scoundrel. You said a lot of things that I can’t remember, but which seemed to me rather queer.”
“Oh, we’re a dreadfully frisky set, you know,” Weir explained. Then he turned aside for an instant, to get rid of an importunate hansom, that had sauntered after them for a hundred yards, the driver raining invitations upon them from his “dicky.”—“No, I won’t be driven. I’ll be led, but I won’t be driven,” he said, resolutely. “You’ll get accustomed to us, though,” he continued, addressing his son.
“Do you mean to say the people of your set are always like that? Why, there wasn’t a single person there that you could converse with seriously about anything.”
“I didn’t want to, I’m sure,” his father protested.
But the son’s commentary was not to be diverted. “I asked that gentleman they called Major what he thought the effect of smokeless powder would be upon future warfare; and he looked perfectly paralysed, and said he didn’t know, he was sure. And that member of Parliament from Sheffingham, I asked him what the population of Sheffingham was, and he didn’t know. And that lady,—Lady Angela something,—-I asked her how she liked ‘Robert Elsmere,’ and she said she didn’t know him.”
“I’m afraid our friends thought you had rather a morbid appetite for information, Harold.”
“Well, I must say, I thought they were very superficial. All froth and glitter. Nothing solid or genuine about them. And that poem that little red-haired man recited! Now in American houses of that sort you’d hear serious conversation.”
“Your taste is austere. But you must be charitable, you must make allowances. Besides, some of us aren’t so superficial as you’d think. All that glitters isn’t pinchbeck. Major Northbrook, for example, is the best polo player in England. And Lady Angela Folbourne is very nearly the most disreputable woman. A reg’lar bad un, you know, and makes no bones of it, either. Perfectly, frankly, cynically wicked. Yet somehow or other she contrives to keep her place in society, and goes to Court. You see, she must have solid qualities, real abilities, somewhere?”
“How do you mean she’s wicked,—in what sense?”
“Oh, I say! You mustn’t expect me to dot my i’s and cross my t’s like that. A sort of société en commandite, you know.”
“You mean——?”
“Yes, quite so.”
“Why, but then, gracious heavens! she’s no better than a—than a professional——”
“Worse, worse, my clear. She’s an amateur.”
“I’m surprised you should know such a woman.”
“Oh, bless you, she’s a Vestal Virgin to ladies I could introduce you to across the Channel.”
“How horrible!” cried the young American.
“For pity’s sake, don’t tell me you’re a Nonconformist,” his father pleaded.
“I’m an Episcopalian,” the son answered. He relapsed into his stare; and then at dinner it turned out that he was a teetotaller and didn’t use tobacco.
In his diary, before he went to bed. Harold made this entry:—
“London cab-fares are sixpence a mile, with a minimum of a shilling. There are upwards of 10,000 cabs in London. The city is better paved than Boston, but not so clean. Many of the wards preserve their original parochial systems of government. The people aren’t so go-ahead as ours, and the whole place lacks modernity. The tone of English society seems to be very low. To-morrow I shall visit Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Hyde Park, the British Museum, and the Victoria Embankment. Qy.: what was the cost of the construction of the latter?”
That will give a notion of the dance he led his father on the following day. Harold stared at most of the “sights,” as he called them, in solemn silence. Of Westminster, however, he remarked that it was in a bad state of repair. “The English people don’t seem to have much enterprise about them,” he said. “Now if this were in America—” But his father did not catch the conclusion. St. Paul’s struck him as surprisingly dirty. “You should see the new Auditorium in Chicago,” he suggested. “I was out there last year. That’s what I call fine architecture.” And then, as they drove along the Embankment, he propounded his query anent its cost; and his father cried, “If you ask me questions like that. I shall faint.” Harold’s diary that night received this pathetic confidence:—
“On the whole London doesn’t come up to any of the large American cities. As for my father, I hoped yesterday that he was only putting it on for a joke, but I’m afraid now that he really is very light-minded. He wears an eyeglass and speaks with a strong English accent. Expenses this day. And so forth.”
The elder Weir, at the same time, was likewise engaged in literary composition:—
“My Dear Mrs. Winchfield.—
“I am in great distress about my son. You don’t believe I’ve got one? Oh, but I give you my word! He’s just reached me from America, where I left him as a hostage a quarter of a century ago. And he’s full of the most awful heathenish ideas. I never met so serious a person. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke; he thinks I’m undignified, if you can imagine that; and he objects to my calling him Hal, though his name is Harold. I feel like a frisky little boy beside him,—like the child that is father to the man. Then his thirst for knowledge is positively disgraceful. He has nearly killed me to-day, doing London, guide-book in hand, and asking such embarrassing questions. Can you tell me, please, how long the Houses of Parliament were a-building?
“And how many dollars there are in the vaults of the Bank of England? And what the salary of a policeman is? And who is ‘about the biggest lawyer over here?’ The way he dragged me up and down the town was most unfilial. We’ve been everywhere, I think, except to my club. But he’s a very good-looking fellow, and I don’t doubt he’s got the right sort of stuff dormant in him somewhere, only it wants bringing out. I can’t help feeling that what he needs is the influence of a fine, sensitive, irresponsible woman, someone altogether wayward and ribald, to lighten and loosen him, and impart a little froth and elasticity.
“I was entirely broken-hearted when I heard that you were going to stop at Sere all summer; but even for adversity there are sweet uses; and I wish you would ask my boy down to stay with you. I’m sure you can do him good, unless too many months of country air have made a sober woman of you. Do try to Christianise him, and a father’s heart will reward you with its blessing.
“Yours always,
“A. Weir.”
Then Harold went down to Sere; and a fortnight later Mrs. Winchfield wrote as follows to his parent:—
“Dear Weir,—
“I’m afraid it’s hopeless. I’ve done my utmost, and I’ve failed grotesquely. Yesterday I chanced to say, in your young one’s presence, to Colonel Buttington, who’s staying here, that if my husband were only away, I should so enjoy a desperate flirtation with him. Harold, dear boy, looked scandalised, and by and by, catching me alone, he asked (in the words of Father William’s interlocutor) whether I thought at my age it was right? He is like the Frenchman who took his wife to the play, and chid her when she laughed, saying, ‘Nous ne sommes pas ici pour nous amuser,’ I am sending him back by the morning train to morrow. Keep him with you, and try to cultivate a few domestic virtues. A vous,
“Margaret Winchfield.”
Harold arrived, looking very grave. But his father looked graver still, and he invited the young man into the library, and gave him a piece of his mind. It produced no sensible effect. At last, “Well, I hope at least you tipped the servants liberally?” the poor man questioned.
“No, sir, I don’t believe in tipping servants. What are they paid their wages for?”
“You’re quite irreclaimable,” the father cried. “May I ask how long you mean to remain in England?”
“I think I shall need about two months to do it thoroughly.”
His father left the room, and gave orders to his man to pack for a long journey.