Of Human Bondage
he could truthfully answer that he had not a single picture to show. In
Brittany he had come across a painter whom nobody else had heard of, a
queer fellow who had been a stockbroker and taken up painting at
middle-age, and he was greatly influenced by his work. He was turning
his back on the impressionists and working out for himself painfully an
individual way not only of painting but of seeing. Philip felt in him
something strangely original.
At Gravier’s where they ate, and in the evening at the Versailles or at
the Closerie des Lilas Clutton was inclined to taciturnity. He sat
quietly, with a sardonic expression on his gaunt face, and spoke only
when the opportunity occurred to throw in a witticism. He liked a butt
and was most cheerful when someone was there on whom he could exercise
his sarcasm. He seldom talked of anything but painting, and then only
with the one or two persons whom he thought worth while. Philip
wondered whether there was in him really anything: his reticence, the
haggard look of him, the pungent humour, seemed to suggest personality,
but might be no more than an effective mask which covered nothing.
With Lawson on the other hand Philip soon grew intimate. He had a
variety of interests which made him an agreeable companion. He read
more than most of the students and though his income was small, loved
to buy books. He lent them willingly; and Philip became acquainted with
Flaubert and Balzac, with Verlaine, Heredia, and Villiers de l’Isle
Adam. They went to plays together and sometimes to the gallery of the
Opera Comique. There was the Odeon quite near them, and Philip soon
shared his friend’s passion for the tragedians of Louis XIV and the
sonorous Alexandrine. In the Rue Taitbout were the Concerts Rouge,
where for seventy-five centimes they could hear excellent music and get
into the bargain something which it was quite possible to drink: the
seats were uncomfortable, the place was crowded, the air thick with
caporal horrible to breathe, but in their young enthusiasm they were
indifferent. Sometimes they went to the Bal Bullier. On these occasions
Flanagan accompanied them. His excitability and his roisterous
enthusiasm made them laugh. He was an excellent dancer, and before they
had been ten minutes in the room he was prancing round with some little
shop-girl whose acquaintance he had just made.
The desire of all of them was to have a mistress. It was part of the
paraphernalia of the art-student in Paris. It gave consideration in the
eyes of one’s fellows. It was something to boast about. But the
difficulty was that they had scarcely enough money to keep themselves,
and though they argued that French-women were so clever it cost no more
to keep two then one, they found it difficult to meet young women who
were willing to take that view of the circumstances. They had to
content themselves for the most part with envying and abusing the
ladies who received protection from painters of more settled
respectability than their own. It was extraordinary how difficult these
things were in Paris. Lawson would become acquainted with some young
thing and make an appointment; for twenty-four hours he would be all in
a flutter and describe the charmer at length to everyone he met; but
she never by any chance turned up at the time fixed. He would come to
Gravier’s very late, ill-tempered, and exclaim:
“Confound it, another rabbit! I don’t know why it is they don’t like
me. I suppose it’s because I don’t speak French well, or my red hair.
It’s too sickening to have spent over a year in Paris without getting
hold of anyone.”
“You don’t go the right way to work,” said Flanagan.
He had a long and enviable list of triumphs to narrate, and though they
took leave not to believe all he said, evidence forced them to
acknowledge that he did not altogether lie. But he sought no permanent
arrangement. He only had two years in Paris: he had persuaded his
people to let him come and study art instead of going to college; but
at the end of that period he was to return to Seattle and go into his
father’s business. He had made up his mind to get as much fun as
possible into the time, and demanded variety rather than duration in
his love affairs.
“I don’t know how you get hold of them,” said Lawson furiously.
“There’s no difficulty about that, sonny,” answered Flanagan. “You just
go right in. The difficulty is to get rid of them. That’s where you
want tact.”
Philip was too much occupied with his work, the books he was reading,
the plays he saw, the conversation he listened to, to trouble himself
with the desire for female society. He thought there would be plenty of
time for that when he could speak French more glibly.
It was more than a year now since he had seen Miss Wilkinson, and
during his first weeks in Paris he had been too busy to answer a letter
she had written to him just before he left Blackstable. When another
came, knowing it would be full of reproaches and not being just then in
the mood for them, he put it aside, intending to open it later; but he
forgot and did not run across it till a month afterwards, when he was
turning out a drawer to find some socks that had no holes in them. He
looked at the unopened letter with dismay. He was afraid that Miss
Wilkinson had suffered a good deal, and it made him feel a brute; but
she had probably got over the suffering by now, at all events the worst
of it. It suggested itself to him that women were often very emphatic
in their expressions. These did not mean so much as when men used them.
He had quite made up his mind that nothing would induce him ever to see
her again. He had not written for so long that it seemed hardly worth
while to write now. He made up his mind not to read the letter.
“I daresay she won’t write again,” he said to himself. “She can’t help
seeing the thing’s over. After all, she was old enough to be my mother;
she ought to have known better.”
For an hour or two he felt a little uncomfortable. His attitude was
obviously the right one, but he could not help a feeling of
dissatisfaction with the whole business. Miss Wilkinson, however, did
not write again; nor did she, as he absurdly feared, suddenly appear in
Paris to make him ridiculous before his friends. In a little while he
clean forgot her.
Meanwhile he definitely forsook his old gods. The amazement with which
at first he had looked upon the works of the impressionists, changed to
admiration; and presently he found himself talking as emphatically as
the rest on the merits of Manet, Monet, and Degas. He bought a
photograph of a drawing by Ingres of the Odalisque and a photograph of
the Olympia. They were pinned side by side over his washing-stand so
that he could contemplate their beauty while he shaved. He knew now
quite positively that there had been no painting of landscape before
Monet; and he felt a real thrill when he stood in front of Rembrandt’s
Disciples at Emmaus or Velasquez’ Lady with the Flea-bitten Nose. That
was not her real name, but by that she was distinguished at Gravier’s
to emphasise the picture’s beauty notwithstanding the somewhat
revolting peculiarity of the sitter’s appearance. With Ruskin,
Burne-Jones, and Watts, he had put aside his bowler hat and the neat
blue tie with white spots which he had worn on coming to Paris; and now
disported himself in a soft, broad-brimmed hat, a flowing black cravat,
and a cape of romantic cut. He walked along the Boulevard du
Montparnasse as though he had known it all his life, and by virtuous
perseverance he had learnt to drink absinthe without distaste. He was
letting his hair grow, and it was only because Nature is unkind and has
no regard for the immortal longings of youth that he did not attempt a
beard.
XLV
Philip soon realised that the spirit which informed his friends was
Cronshaw’s. It was from him that Lawson got his paradoxes; and even
Clutton, who strained after individuality, expressed himself in the
terms he had insensibly acquired from the older man. It was his ideas
that they bandied about at table, and on his authority they formed
their judgments. They made up for the respect with which unconsciously
they treated him by laughing at his foibles and lamenting his vices.
“Of course, poor old Cronshaw will never do any good,” they said. “He’s
quite hopeless.”
They prided themselves on being alone in appreciating his genius; and
though, with the contempt of youth for the follies of middle-age, they
patronised him among themselves, they did not fail to look upon it as a
feather in their caps if he had chosen a time when only one was there
to be particularly wonderful. Cronshaw never came to Gravier’s. For the
last four years he had lived in squalid conditions with a woman whom
only Lawson had once seen, in a tiny apartment on the sixth floor of
one of the most dilapidated houses on the Quai des Grands Augustins:
Lawson described with gusto the filth, the untidiness, the litter.
“And the stink nearly blew your head off.”
“Not at dinner, Lawson,” expostulated one of the others.
But he would not deny himself the pleasure of giving picturesque
details of the odours which met his nostril. With a fierce delight in
his own realism he described the woman who had opened the door for him.
She was dark, small, and fat, quite young, with black hair that seemed
always on the point of coming down. She wore a slatternly blouse and no
corsets. With her red cheeks, large sensual mouth, and shining, lewd
eyes, she reminded you of the Bohemienne in the Louvre by Franz Hals.
She had a flaunting vulgarity which amused and yet horrified. A
scrubby, unwashed baby was playing on the floor. It was known that the
slut deceived Cronshaw with the most worthless ragamuffins of the
Quarter, and it was a mystery to the ingenuous youths who absorbed his
wisdom over a cafe table that Cronshaw with his keen intellect and his
passion for beauty could ally himself to such a creature. But he seemed
to revel in the coarseness of her language and would often report some
phrase which reeked of the gutter. He referred to her ironically as la
fille de mon concierge. Cronshaw was very poor. He earned a bare
subsistence by writing on the exhibitions of pictures for one or two
English papers, and he did a certain amount of translating. He had been
on the staff of an English paper in Paris, but had been dismissed for
drunkenness; he still however did odd jobs for it, describing sales at
the Hotel Drouot or the revues at music-halls. The life of Paris had
got into his bones, and he would not change it, notwithstanding its
squalor, drudgery, and hardship, for any other in the world. He
remained there all through the year, even in summer when everyone he
knew was away, and felt himself only at ease within a mile of the
Boulevard St. Michel. But the curious thing was that he had never
learnt to speak French passably, and he kept in his shabby clothes
bought at La Belle Jardiniere an ineradicably English appearance.
He was a man who would have made a success of life a century and a half
ago when conversation was a passport to good company and inebriety no
bar.
“I ought to have lived in the eighteen hundreds,” he said himself.
“What I want is a patron. I should have published my poems by
subscription and dedicated them to a nobleman. I long to compose rhymed
couplets upon the poodle of a countess. My soul yearns for the love of
chamber-maids and the conversation of bishops.”
He quoted the romantic Rolla,
“Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux.”
He liked new faces, and he took a fancy to Philip, who seemed to
achieve the difficult feat of talking just enough to suggest
conversation and not too much to prevent monologue. Philip was