text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/304

 and mother, and I hate to see you let yourself grow bitter."

"Oh—you think I'm mad, I suppose," Paul said, as though the possibility of the other man's objecting to his scheme had just occurred to him.

"Well, since you mention it, I do."

"Then, don't waste your advice. Madmen must do mad things."

"Madmen" Mr. Kingsley stopped short.

"You were going to retort that madmen are usually locked up." With a gleam of amusement he watched the elder man's countenance which suggested embarrassment, anxiety and frustrated affection. "But you see," Paul went on relentlessly, "that it doesn't do us a particle of good. We only grow madder. It's much wiser of you all to let us go unmolestedly to the dogs."

"Why 'us all?' You don't suppose I had anything to do with bringing about the wretched trial! On the contrary I did my best to defend you."

"I'm not ungrateful for your aid—even though you did maintain that my statements misrepresented my real sentiments. You didn't realize, perhaps, that you were making me out a liar."

"Oh, look here now, Minas"

"Well, it doesn't in the least matter. It's over. Get on with the sale. If my property isn't disposed of within a month I'll give it to the poor, like the young man in the Bible." And Paul went out and slammed the door.

A few hours later he drove into Hale's Turning in a hired car. Without useless preliminaries he set to work on the task he had allotted himself. With the aid of the chauffeur, he brought down his trunks and bags from the attic, then went from room to room making a rapid selection of objects to be packed, setting aside others for destruction, and taking an inventory of the remainder for the convenience of his solicitor.

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/304


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/305

 Most of Aunt Verona's possessions he burnt. They were not for the profane. He preserved only her music. Into his bags also went trifling objects which should remind him of boyish faiths and illusions—among them the lacquer box with its dead flowers. Phœbe, after all, had not come to see the bouquet. She must remain in ignorance of that episode, as Leila had remained in ignorance of the "secrets" he had planned to reveal to her. His life was a succession of fanciful projects which never got beyond a dress-rehearsal.

The inventory was completed before dawn, and Paul lay down for the last time in the little room from whose walls Queen Victoria and Sir John Macdonald looked so forbiddingly forth. His life in Hale's Turning, where he had come to anchor, was ended—but what of the friends who remained? He would have preferred not to see them again. Whatever friendliness he had enjoyed had been offered to the image his friends had made of him, an image in their own likeness. His real self they had involuntarily shunned, or sought to edit. True, some, including Phœbe, had overcome the first shock and made timid advances. But he could never forget their shrinking. He could forgive—Lord yes, had forgiven freely, just as he hoped to be forgiven for having at times, in the groping past, been a sheep among sheep. The long hours of reflection had at least purged his soul of rancour. But after all he was a new man, and as such must be free of confusing associations. On his new pilgrimage, towards the very heart of life, his spirit's meat, as the poet said, must be freedom, his staff must be wrought of strength—carefully conserved strength—and his cloak woven of thought. If there were to be friends—and he felt he was getting beyond the age for making intimate friendships—they could only be people who would accept him for what he was, not for what circumstances had made him appear. Now

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/305


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/306

 that all veils had been discarded and his essential nature stood revealed, he would never again hide it from the world. Let the world react as it saw fit. Enemies and revilers there might be a-plenty, but he had plumbed the depths of any suffering they could inflict. They had sought to make him like themselves by locking him up, but had merely succeeded in confirming his incompatibility with themselves.

For decency's sake, and in order to reassure those who had been kind to him, he planned, in the morning, to make a round of farewell calls. Phœbe he would leave till the last, for she would be the most difficult—especially if she adopted an absolving attitude now that he had settled his account with society. That would be an intolerable weakness on her part, against which he must guard by an impersonal approach. He could find it in his heart to envy Wilfrid his insipidity. As a child Wilfrid had Gritty Kestrell to protect him. In his maturity, he would have Phœbe. And Wilfrid was of a mental and moral stature that Phœbe could manage, with energy to spare for the "improvement of her mind." One couldn't help feeling a little sarcastic toward Phœbe—in strict privacy. Gritty had said, "At least she's the only girl in that God-forsaken hole with a nickel's worth of brains." That wasn't the final word to be said for Phœbe, but it was wickedly near the mark.

Sleep came at last, while his soul, like a kite, tugged pleasantly at his leaden body. His mind had gone beyond the farewells and he drowsily pictured himself in a train, speeding, speeding, towards infinity. Night drawing in, wheels grinding, the carriage swaying, the world rushing by: the globe, the stars, trees, men. Something infinitely precious, but dead, left behind. Life, a series of partial deaths, or of new creations; merely two ways of stating it. And at the heart of it all was a blessed stability; harmony, forgetfulness, peace.

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/306


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/307

Three days later Paul arrived in New York and put up at the old Brevoort Hotel on the edge of "Greenwich Village." Its suggested bohemianism and the mellow beauty of lower Fifth Avenue and Washington Square, red, blue, white, and gold in the glittering sunshine of autumn, soothed nerves fatigued by the insistent exhibits of a city which struck him as a permanent "world's fair."

He engaged a passage on a ship sailing for Havre the following week, then booked a seat for a performance of Take itIt [sic] or Leave It, the revue in which Gritty Kestrell was appearing. Gritty's name stretched across hoardings in red letters and winked at Times Square in electric lights. Her face, with its odd grimaces, its snub nose, blue eyes and hair of counterfeit gold, graced the cover of a smart periodical. She endorsed new beauty creams and published her advice to stage-struck girls. She was proprietress of a dancing establishment frequented by the fashionably fast. Joe Krauss had died and left her a fortune and there were hints that she was on excellent terms with the partner who had stepped into Joe's shoes.

Paul eagerly awaited Gritty's first entrance. There were echoes of a vulgar brawl between father and daughter on a landing, then Gritty appeared, made up as a "slavey," her hair screwed into a knot, her sleeves rolled up, her long, twisted boots toeing in, her apron splashed, her skirt down at the back, bucket and mop in hand, staring aggressively off-stage. She set down the bucket, heaved a sigh, and ran out her tongue at the invisible enemy. Paul chuckled. It was so like the tomboy of twenty years ago.

Then she put her foot in the bucket and came tumbling down the stairs, head over heels, fetching up with a skilfully faked thump and an air of chagrin.

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/307


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/308

 The secret of Gritty's success was patent. On the stage she projected endearingly human qualities, adding a touch of the pert and the incongruous, her whole instinctive object being to make people like her. He had noticed that other women in the cast, more beautiful but less successful, walked on assuming that the audience must be overcome by their charm. Gritty took nothing for granted. She "worked" every minute, as he could see from the gestures and tone-shadings with which she drove home her first song. This ditty descanted upon the woes and hardships of an "honest hired girl":

It was followed by a dolorous dance in which Gritty made capital of her big boots and the long wet mop. She galumphed about the stage with an infectious sense of rhythm, while the gallery softly whistled the tune, then at the approach of the last bars she neared the wings, always neatly cavorting, and repeated the catch line. The "a' ache"—the elision of the consonant—was the real Gritty, and the audience seemed to know it.

In the interval he sent around his card and received a prompt reply:

"You dear old darling. Talk about bolts from the blue. Come back after the show. Ask for Louis who'll bring you to my dressing-room. You're to have supper with me. Oh Paul three cheers."

For a week Gritty gave him all her available time, which in view of matinées, fittings, and visits to the

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/308


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/309

 cinema studios, was limited. He found himself playing with her as a heavy-hearted man might play with a kitten. They were brother and sister again and took tranquil drives into the country in Gritty's limousine, lunching at remote road-houses in Long Island or beside the Hudson.

The five intervening years had brought rich experience to both, Although Gritty had gone far up the ladder, her success had been purchased at the price of hard work, nervous strain, and fierce intrigue. A new maturity underlay her playfulness, Paul found it strangely easy to talk to her. For all her prattling she was transparently sincere, and protectively affectionate. She knew men intuitively and through long observation. And he was more grateful for her approval of him than he would have been for the approval of a less expert woman, however chaste. Gritty was the only human being with whom he had been able to talk without reserve. She combined two qualities rare in women: frankness and discretion. She said exactly what she meant when her hearer was reliable; and was careful to say nothing that an unreliable hearer might repeat with damaging effect.

The only reproach he made to Gritty was her promiscuity. "Nobody expects you to go straight, Gritty," he said, on the day before he was to sail. They were having tea at her flat in Central Park West. "But do be an artist in your affairs. I hated your association with Krauss, and I don't think much of his successor."

"You're mixing up my affairs with my business, honey. There's a sharp difference."

"Well, don't lose sight of the distinction, then, at any rate."

Gritty was suddenly cast down. "You're so clear-headed," she sighed. "I wisht I could have you handy to scold me often. But you're going away to God knows where. Oh, Paul, there is one little streak in me

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/309


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/310

 that's worth all the rest, and you make me remember it. There's something in me that could almost be a nun, if it got the chanst. But you can't give up being a successful artiste to be a bum nun! If I could only be like you and have a thing called a destiny instead of a Broadway career—Gee!"

"You can have a destiny, Gritty. The highest aim anyone can have is to share the destiny of the race. If you go on being generous and playing fair you will be keeping your candle burning and adding to the piteously inadequate enlightenment of this naughty world. The tragedy of it is, there are gigantic waterfalls of intelligence which might be used to generate enlightenment, but the world prefers its dark corners. . . . Oh, Gritty, life is so boundlessly potential. We could be gods and goddesses, if we knew what to do with our energies. Instead of which we snarl and haggle and lie and cheat and show off. We go round in circles instead of going straight forward, and then have the ignorance and cheek to claim intelligence! As an old carpenter on my first ship used to say, 'men are more stoopid as animals.

Gritty's eyes dwelt on him trustingly, compassionately. He read some sort of vague inquiry in her glance, and it made him doubt himself.

"One feels lost at times," he said, with bowed shoulders, "and futile—like some dotty grandsire mumbling in a corner."

"Why don't you be a writer?" Gritty asked.

The question startled him. He thought for a moment, then shook his head. "No, I can't do it that way."

"Do what?"

"I mean I can't deliver my message by writing. I shouldn't know how to drive it home with a pen. I've got to do it by impressing people with whom I come in contact."

"Oh, but that's so vague—and inglorious."

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/310


text:
Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/465

 his calling, to him who calls him, and to those to whom he is sent, he is bound not only to serve his God, his Church, and his country, but also to train up others to do so after him. Socrates has been praised because he employed his time in educating the young instead of holding some public office. “It is of more use,” said he, “to train men who can govern, than to govern oneself.”

15. O learned scholars, I beseech you not to despise these suggestions because they originate with one less learned than yourselves. Remember the saying of Chrysippus: “Many a market-gardener has spoken to the point. Perchance an ass may know what you do not.” And of Christ: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and ye hear its voice, but know not whence it comes or whither it goes.” In the sight of God I protest that it is not by any overweening confidence in myself, or by a desire for fame or for personal advantage, that I am impelled to advertise these ideas of mine. It is the love of God and the wish to improve the condition of humanity that goad me on, and will not suffer me to keep silence when my instinct tells me what should be done. Therefore, if any oppose my efforts, and hinder the realisation of my ideas instead of aiding it, let him be assured that he is waging war, not against me, but against God, against his own conscience, and against nature, whose will it is that what is for the common good be given over for the use of all men.

16. To you also I appeal, Theologians, since it is in your power to be the greatest assistance or the greatest obstacle to my designs. If you choose the latter course, the saying of Bernhard will be fulfilled: “That Christ has no bitterer enemies than His followers, and especially those who hold the first place among them.” But let us hope that your actions will be worthier, and more suited to your calling. Remember that our Lord charged Peter to feed not only His sheep but also His lambs, enjoining him to take especial care of the latter (John xxi. 15). This is a reasonable injunction, since shepherds find it easier to feed sheep than to feed lambs, which have still to be moulded


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/311

 "Who's talking about glory, you poor little footlight moth! . . . Besides it's not as vague as you think. The greatest messages the world has ever received have been spread by word of mouth."

Paul's vision suddenly cleared. "One thing is sure, and that is that I'll never be good for anything but spreading the ideas that have come to possess me. Like the Ancient Mariner I'm doomed to go wandering forth, stopping 'one of three' . . . Do you remember the days, Gritty, when we had to spout that poem?"

"Do I! I was a rotten reciter—and here I am now, reciting every night of my life! Oh, Paul, darling, doesn't it make you feel chokey to think of those days and that odious little with its smell of wet slate-pencils that squeaked, squeaked, squeaked, and geraniums at the window and coloured water and Miss Hornby's bottle of cod liver oil?"

"And your pigtails!"

"And gingham pinnies that I always came home torn in. And the spit-balls we used to shoot at each other with a elastic."

"And Wilfrid Fraser who always put his head under the desk when he blew his nose."

"And the time John Ashmill held it under when Miss Hornby asked Wilfie a question. . . . And now—whoever would a dreamt all that's happened! Oh. Paul, it is a dream—no kidding. But I do wisht I could have a aim like you, honest I do!"

"Saves disappointment not to, dear."

Gritty stroked his hand. "You so often look sad, honey—why?"

"I feel sad—diffusely, almost paternally. I'm sad for the world, rather. As far as I'm concerned nothing matters. I'm too old."

Gritty gave a ringing laugh. "Baby boy! Why, you're younger'n me, and I'm only thirty!"

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/311


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/312

 "But I've lived harder—mentally. As a boy I was a sort of prodigy. And prodigies have a way of petering out."

Gritty snuggled closer to him on the settee.

"There are people," he went on, "whose lives are concentrated in the span of a single generation. Sometimes I think I'm one of them."

She placed soft white fingers over his mouth. "Hush! Why, in a year or two when you've got used to your new ideas you'll be all over your blues. Won't you? Say yes."

A maid entered the room carrying a big pasteboard box.

"Hats! Hats!" squealed Gritty, undoing the cord with eager fingers.

She tried them on and forgot everything but the bright portraits she was making of herself before a mirror. Paul found them pretty, but his mind travelled back to a summer morning when he had seen Gritty trying on a leghorn hat trimmed with heliotrope ribbon, whilst Phœbe Meddar stooped to pick up a bouquet of tea-roses.

He departed with a nameless sense of desolation. Gritty was the only friend left—the last on his list of farewells. And for all her amiability she was scarcely more than a makeshift: a misguided, vicious, pleasant, warm-hearted, promiscuous, vain, tender little makeshift.

"Poor kitten," he sighed, as he stepped into the street.

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/312


text:
Page:The Crowne of all Homers Workes - Chapman (1624).djvu/85

74


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/313

 Rh

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/313


text: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/314

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/314


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/315

thirty years the world for Paul had been a bazaar stocked with covetable objects. But by the time he reached Paris the counters had lost their fascination. The youthful Minas had been wont to acquire recklessly, then discard, one by one, articles which proved worthless; the mature Minas took only what he was tolerably sure he needed.

He had reached the point where a man rests on his oars, partly because his youthful vigour has subsided, partly because he finds the elusive reflections in the water more arresting than continual change of solid landscape, partly because he is curious to observe how other oarsmen will pull through stretches that have tested him. In Paris he found no lack of contemporaries at grips with issues which he had already settled for himself. Everywhere he met youth who reminded him of himself a few years back, youths who were peering into odd corners in a restless search for their souls. Many were on false scents; nearly all were doomed to find a soul of smaller dimensions than they had taken for granted; some, soul-searching because it seemed to be the clever thing to do, were doomed to find nothing.

Paul watched this game with a sort of tutelary interest. When he offered corroboration and encouragement, the searcher redounded in tributes to his insight; when he adversely criticized, the searcher cried, "But you don't understand!" In either case, when the egoistic possibil- Rh

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/315


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/316

 ities of the discussion had waned, the searcher turned back to his quest, regardless of the interlude, for, as Paul reflected, it is in the nature of youth that it must make mysteries for itself to solve, no matter how lucid a solution you lay before it.

The situation was tinged with paradox. He, who had held his teachers in low esteem, had arrived at the age of thirty to find himself a teacher. His own long process of self-searching had brought him to the pitiable conclusion that the purpose of his existence was to point out to other men the purpose of theirs! He could artistically think—which was to say philosophize—but he could not do. Whilst others performed doughty deeds, he must be content doughtily to theorize. Was that the splendid goal toward which one had so painfully striven? He wondered whether some such let-down were reserved for every man of thirty, or whether the let-down was evidence of his own futility. He classified himself as a creature—like countless other nondescript aliens in Paris—whose body was too heavy for its wings; or rather, a creature all wings and no body, consequently impotent against strong worldly winds.

In any case a failure—except in a limited sense. High time, then, to acknowledge the limitations, and act within one's rôle. He thought of Aunt Verona, his own mentor—Aunt Verona who, like himself, endowed with unusual gifts, had somehow lost heart and sought recourse in teaching, in preparing a prodigy for the destiny she had missed—a destiny which he, in turn, was to miss.

The whole of his property had been realized, and when the final draft had been forwarded he withdrew the money from his bank and deposited it elsewhere, thus removing the last link between himself and the life he had forsworn. He had taken rooms at the top of a bare old house in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and passed for a student—a classification to which his habit of

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/316


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/317

 bringing home second-hand books lent a colour of veracity.

The first definite indication of his tutelary vocation came to him after a casual encounter with a young poetaster on the terrasse of the Café du Panthéon. It was an afternoon of late spring, in the year 1920. Paul had just heard in the Sorbonne a lecture on Will and its Role in the Universe, and stopped at the café to sip an apéritif. The professor's theory had been incontrovertible. The world was what its inhabitants chose to make it. A world peopled by the pure in heart would revolve morally on its axis: the same world would revolve frivolously at the behest of knaves. Paul fatalistically accepted his status as that of a believer in l'univers moral, despite appalling evidence to the contrary. And the only honourable course was to live up to the belief—to go on, in the face of unromantic fact, performing romantic deeds. Such a course was impractical, foolhardy, catastrophant—to use a word of his own coining—but it might serve to redeem his failures. If only enough men turned angelic, earth would become heaven; and somebody had to make a start.

As he mused, he observed a gaunt young man scribbling at the neighbouring table, in a corner that might once have been occupied by the needy Verlaine. His face was drawn and his grey eyes seemed to envisage defeat. His clothes were threadbare, but he was clean, whereas he obviously belonged in a category of visionaries who, like Verlaine, their prototype, were usually dirty. Paul saw in the youth a promise which was in danger of belying itself, a brittle spirit which life might easily snap. Another example of the wretched species—the creature all wings.

At length the youth set down his pencil and looked away from his bescribbled sheets and empty glass. Paul leaned toward him, addressing him in English.

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/317


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/318

 "Do you mind if I see what you've written?"

The young man shrank. "Not at all," he finally replied, shoving the sheets to the edge of his table.

Paul's curiosity had been aroused by a blend of intensity and fastidiousness that reminded him of himself in days gone by. As he read, this impression was confirmed, for the poem evoked one of his most familiar moods:

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/318


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/319

The poet's thoughts proceeded far afield, lured by a romantic gleam. Paul read to the end and handed back the sheets.

"You've always expected a good deal from life, haven't you?" he finally commented.

The youth reflected. "I dare say. But life led me on to expect a good deal. If you're born with an imagination, life puts notions into your head."

"But sooner or later people with imaginations must learn to prepare themselves for the meagreness of what life can give. They can't, of course, cease expecting, but they can, while greatly expecting, reconcile themselves to the inevitable little."

The poet shrugged impatiently. "I despise compromise. For me it's everything or nothing."

"What will you do if it's nothing?"

There was no reply.

Paul smoked in silence. Gradually the youth's eyes came round to him again, filled with a new-born doubt. The impatience was gone. "Would you say," he began, "after reading these silly verses, that with me it's likely to end in—nothing? Was that what you meant?"

Paul weighed it. "No. I merely wished to startle you into the thought that some sort of compromise may be inevitable. 'All or nothing' is a brave banner to rally one's forces under—but few men can keep it aloft."

"Life's damnably hard," said the poet, and the remark was obviously more than a platitude.

"Of course it is. That's why I suggested the wisdom of considering its niggardly terms. In that way one to a certain extent disarms life. By yielding on the score

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/319


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/320

 of sordid fact, one conserves energy for the promulgation of one's private version of the truth."

"But that's cheating!"

"If you leave all the cheating to fate, what ghost of a chance have you to survive!"

"There are destinies more glorious than mere survival!"

Paul smiled sympathetically. "I used to think so—passionately. Now I honestly wonder."

"Oh well, just because you've lost faith is no reason for expecting me to!"

"Certainly not." This was sincere. "If you can win the battle I've lost, so much the better. As it is, I'm cheering for you—albeit half sceptically."

The youth for the first time was lifted from his egoistic morass. "I say!" he exclaimed. "I believe your sceptical warnings are worth more than some men's headlong partisanship. You really have been through the mill, I dare say."

"I have, and it grinds, exceeding small. That's why I wish to help you."

The poet had a twinge of conscience. "Oh, let's forget me. I was spoiled as a child."

"Then, no wonder you expect so much!"

"I do expect a lot, God help me!"

"Even from God!" Paul laughed.

"Rather only from God. Mortals can't do much for you, except in the way of food and clothing."

"That's something."

"You mean it's more than I'm disposed to acknowledge?"

"Yes."

Paul watched the sensitive mouth harden in scorn for a poverty which was imminent and abject.

"What are your plans?" he asked after some desultory talk.

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/320


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/321

 "I don't know. Paris has lost its glamour. One can't help feeling that somewhere one will find one's level. I've thought of Austria. The Philistines at home have said so much against our former enemies that one feels they must harbour rare virtues, as does everything the Philistines decry! Do you know Vienna?"

"I spent two years there—before the war."

"Tell me about it."

"I daren't, for I was young. Consequently I look back at my sojourn through a treacherously romantic haze. You might do worse than go there, if only for the sake of storing up impressions upon which you, too, can look back sentimentally in days to come. For half the joy of life consists in passionate recollection."

Paul paused a moment, then said:

"Do let me send you to Vienna. I can supply you with enough to keep you going for a year or two."

Instinctively the youth drew back. "It's very kind of you, but of course it's out of the question."

Paul was impatient. "I gave you credit for more consistency," he said.

"What do you mean??"

"My offer in no way reaches your pride—or, if it does, then your pride is an impertinent intruder upon your idealism, You profess to be an 'all or nothing' idealist, yet you hold back because of a scruple bred in a sphere of society where ideals are ignored, like the drains."

The young man was impressed, and visibly tempted. "But I can make no return," he temporized.

"I'm not offering gifts to you, you fool," retorted Paul. "I'm subventioning your soul. Your soul is only a facet of my own, of the universal soul. If you starve, the cause of enlightenment is retarded by so much—that is my misfortune as well as yoursyours. [sic]"

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/321


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/322

 "It sounds cogent—but I should feel that I had taken a selfish advantage of your generosity."

"Isn't that my lookout? If I have faith in you, you can't have less. Besides, are you so sure I'm not at heart an 'all or nothing' man? What if my idealism can only be expressed in such ways as the material furtherance of other men's idealistic efforts—will you obstruct it?"

There was a pregnant pause. "Do you realize what a thankless mission you're setting yourself?" asked the poet.

"Perhaps some day you'll ask yourself the same question."

The youth sighed. "I've even done so already."

"Eh bien, trève d'explications! If you'll be here at this hour to-morrow I'll have the money for you."

Two days later Paul made the following entry in a fitful diary he had begun to keep:

"Saw George Paddon, the poet, off to Vienna. His haggardness gone, his eyes lit up with a prodigious expectancy, poor devil! But at least he won't expect to find gold there, as I did. Strange that, of all the questions he might with profit have asked, he asked none; and strange that he, like most others, should choose the one question I will never answer: 'What is your nationality?

For the next three years the diary continued at irregular intervals to reflect Paul's life. No mention was made of his routines, his readings and his return to a half intensive, half dilettantish preoccupation with music, nor of his donations to the needy students, painters, musicians, and writers who kept crossing his path. The entries mirrored picturesque elements in his surround-

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/322


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/323

 ings which stung him into a philosophic reaction. The charities, for the most part quixotic, went on as long as his small fortune lasted.

Following are extracts from significant entries:

"Drawing-room in Passy, Nov. 5, 1920. Luigi Pessaro says he lives for and by virtue of music, yet his rose-festooned piano, under my fingers, is out of tune, and neither he nor his mother nor the Principessa seems aware of it. Moreover, he has just sung a Scarlatti ditty and sentimentalized it out of all conscience. Then how account for that opera score there, inscribed by the composer himself, a 'cordial souvenir to a magnificent artist?' Was Massenet sub-consciously thinking of the artist's eyes! And are all composers as fallible as Massenet? Did a certain 'vieux musicien' sub-consciously think of Aunt Verona's eyes when he waxed eloquent about her performances? As one grows older one grows into the habit of believing by contraries. In a way that's novel and refreshing; gives one a sense of living one's past backwards."

"Night café, rue St. Marc, 4 a.m., December 3, 1920.

"Last night Suzy showed me two snapshots of her little boy in the country. She swore her only reason for being in such company in such a place at such an hour was the necessity of providing an education and prospects for her baby. She wept and leaned her blond head on the beer-stained table and finally tucked the photographs into her powder-dusted bag among notes from a legion of lovers. I half believed her, 'lent' her fifty francs again, for luck, and helped her on with her satin cloak when the American lieutenant invited himself to her apartment. She danced her way out, wreathed in smiles.

"To-night, or rather this morning, a chauffeur and a market porter went home with Suzy, and the patronne

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/323


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/324

 says Suzy will give them somewhat more than the proceeds of the American's liberality, despite her overdue rent. In the light of that fact, what becomes of Suzy's emotion apropos of the snapshots? More to the point, what becomes of the education and prospects of the little boy in the country? Still more to the point, when shall I learn to distribute my fifty-franc notes to good purpose?"

"Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, May 20, 1921.

"Last night, wandering far afield, I found myself in a deserted street on Montmartre. Abruptly, out of the buried past, came the palpable forms of Lord Henry Shroton and his lady. With them a sister of Freddy, Elsie Shroton, exceedingly pretty. If Gritty had only known, that last night, that Freddy would be shot down before the year was out!

"We proceeded to an expensive restaurant for dinner. Through mazes of comfortable talk, I heard scraps of fact concerning motor routes in sundry corners of Europe, gossip about old acquaintances. How lucky, observed Lady H., tentatively, that I hadn't been killed in the war! Ominous silence. Then we went to a haunt where the niece's desire to be shocked could be decently gratified. She sipped a liqueur on my recommendation, with sidelong violet glances from under a stretched-silk hat brim, and poor Cora watched me, her drooping, cynical lips seeming to say, 'Is that then, your type? '

"On leaving them I strolled away to a dingy studio in an alley on the side of the Butte and sought out Karl Zurschmiede, the little Swiss who paints. With him was an anarchistic Italian-American who has roamed the world on 'freight cars' and cattle boats and who has visions of becoming a second Jack London. At present he shines shoes on a boulevard and secretly hopes somebody will write a story about it for the supplement of a

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/324


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/325

 New York Sunday newspaper! So much for the quality of his soul. He made vindictive accusations against the bourgeoisie which grated on my nerves. Middleclass people grate on my nerves equally when they make vindictive remarks about Labour. He gives me the impression of having deliberately chosen to pass his life shining shoes, riding under railway waggons, sleeping in the open, and snarling at the bourgeoisie for keeping him starved and consumptive. I helped him, but felt that his object in life was to arouse sympathy simply that he might have a theatrical occasion to say, 'Damn you and your pity!' And when he departed, tucking his complaints into his cud, the little painter sidled out of his constraint and showed me a series of sketches which proclaimed a painful struggle towards an individuality of expression, which he is scarcely likely to achieve.

"We chatted in a dim candlelight, surrounded by rags and tags, dusty windows, a dilapidated bed and wet canvases, including an agonizing Christ flanked by a Barrabas who suggested a boozing taxicab driver.

"Flavouring it all was Karl's thickish, German-Swiss French, his shiny, round, plain features, his gentle eyes, his simple, warm, considerate sincerity. Not once did he complain of his penury, his chagrins, his amorous betrayals, nor boast of his gift—he merely stated them all, laying his emotions one by one on the table in a hope that I, practised in speech, would build them into an edifice for him; and I did, like a house of blocks for a child. Then he guided me down the steps, through the alley, and I particularly remember the warm, dry, compact stubbiness of his hand, as we parted, the determination in the line of his jaw. The greenish light from a street lamp over his shoulder made a circle around his dimple, and he anxiously told me what to do for my cough. There was a daub of chrome yellow on his nose and he wore no collar.

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/325


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/326

 "I walked home, diametrically across Paris, still keyed up as an effect of the brightness and friendliness of the Shrotons, but mellowed by having acted as Father Confessor in a dingy studio; and I pondered many things.

"Earlier in the evening I had stopped at the Rotonde to drink coffee, and repelled the overtures of a Swedish cinema actress trying to ape the make-up and manner of French tarts—why, God knows! And on my long journey home I had stopped in the Rue St. Marc to have an omelet and a cup of coffee beside a mixed group of thieves, gaming crooks, journalists, public ladies including Suzy, and other noctambules, where the patronne gives me credit and relates the peripéties with which patronnes of blackguardly resorts have to contend.

"The point, is, I don't know to which category I, by nature, belong: to the facetious, aristocratic and opulent, or the starkly, grimly, obstacle-ridden idealistic. I like good cheer at a scintillating table surrounded by the socially and sartorially impeccable, the playfully-minded leisure class—I shouldn't, but I do. Their point of view is unaccountably familiar and natural to me. I disapprove of the Bolshevist fellow's shallowness. I disapprove even of Karl Zurschmiede's griminess, of his cluttered floor, of his uncomplaining acceptance of squalor. Yet I instantly respond, for, as he would modestly say of a well-drawn sketch,  ' Il y a du caractère dedans, '  and I know I would forego many a good dinner, many a reunion with old acquaintances who show me off at my most amiable, in the interest of the principle that makes the young Swiss, for instance, struggle on in the hope of being able one day to paint a Christ that won't look like half-melted putty."

"Night café, rue St. Marc, 4 a.m., July 8, 1922."

You remember that woman who was sitting in your

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/326


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/327

 corner here yesterday morning?' asks the patronne, and I have to think back to the dawn before.

She was short, thick, black, with wildly disordered hair, rouge-daubed cheeks, a dirty blouse, stubby fingers, magnificent teeth. She was drinking little glasses of rum, and reminded one of a gay, hearty murderess. She was thirty-seven and had just been beaten by a boy of eighteen whom she seduced five years ago. She showed me the bruises and told me how brutal he was—and laughed, a wickedly infectious laugh. She said life was a long series of deceptions. Her young lover forced her to give him money, and spent it on others, and yet she couldn't do without him; and she laughed, and I laughed. She said at that rate her lover would end by stabbing her, or she would stab him, and we laughed and laughed, until the tears came.'

Yes,' I replied, 'I remember her.'

Ben, mon petit, she's desperately in love with you. She came back here last night with diamonds in her ears, to find you. She says she can't do without you. She showed me a roll of hundred-franc notes with which she proposes to tempt you. She was in a terrible state.'

Did she laugh when she confessed herself?'

Laugh! She was filled with nine thousand green devils, and each one was shrieking with laughter.

"Night café, rue St. Marc, February 1, 1923.

"After an absence of months I stopped in to listen to the patronne's latest peripéties. On my last visit Suzy, in the name of sweet respectability, 'borrowed' twenty francs. She told me she was going to Rouen to attend the marriage of her young sister and was 'making economies' in order to put up a good front before the family.

"Heavens knows what Suzy has done in the meantime, but the patronne assures me that the agents broke

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/327


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/328

 into her flat and caught her red-handed. As a result Suzy's curls are drooping in the prison of Saint-Lazare, and the family at Rouen will have one more mysterious silence to add to the long list of gaps in their general information about Suzy.

"Her little dog has been taken in charge by her friend Berthe, who once pulled out half Suzy's back hair in this very room. He seems disconsolate, as though he knew Suzy were languishing. It reminds me of a ditty which Luigi Pessaro used to sing:

"Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, September 5, 1923.

"Across the court there lives a girl whose hair is the colour of new copper wire. Sometimes she hangs her gloves at the window to dry in the sun. Sometimes she sits there polishing her nails. Every day she sketches at a life class in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière around the corner. When we meet in the court, or on the terrasse of the Rotonde, she nods without smiling. I bore her. Her name is Germaine. Her ami is a medical student who wears loose collars and baggy trousers. Late at night, when the concierge's gate clicks open in response to Germaine's knock, her friend crawls through beside her on all fours, so the concierge won't see him through the window. Germaine is more careful of her reputation than most girls who 'go in for' art.

"Her sketches are rather less than mediocre, and she

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/328


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/329

 must know it. Why will women waste time in search of a soul they don't possess, when all they need do, to become incandescent, is to hold themselves before the light of a man's soul—the right man! At her best a woman is a vacuum tube reflecting in rays of dazzling violet, the spiritual current passed through her; at her worst: she's a chameleon; when she tries to be the spiritual currents, herself, or the dye-stuffs, she's either a mannish woman, or just a fraud. Good women there are—the world abounds in them—but they smother you. Conscienceless women are fascinating, and if you're not wary you become addicted to them. The others simply pass by in indifferent clothes, indifferently made up.

"The Germaine who has imbibed enough feministic theories to be useless to herself and the world goes daily to the sketch class. The girl who sits polishing her nails in the sun is the real Germaine. I can't be bothered with the former, but I catch myself peeking through my window rather too often for a glimpse of the latter."

"Rue N. D. des C., November 28, 1923.

"It has been a day of little running waves of imaginative pleasure checked and drawn back into the ocean of fact by an undertow of fear. Illness has something to do with the palpitation—but not everything.

"I'm on a threshold and dare not cross it, lest the abode prove dark, cold and bare in contradiction to its alluring exterior. I'm grateful to be able to forestall desolation by stating it in this way. Many people haven't the anæsthetic of words for their aches. While reason points out the circumstances conspiring against an enduring friendship with the woman who obsesses my vision, my emotions are flowing towards it in a cascade, and one might as well try to cure a drunkard as try to cure me of emotional excess. It's useless to offer me the substitute tisane of studio gregariousness and hail

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/329


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/330

 fellowship for the potent distillation of passionate companionship, flavoured with loyalty. That intensifies life, brings oblivion of minor cares, creates an illusion of energy and health. Yet it belongs to a category of things I've forsworn. The old Adam dies hard. And Eve, this time, ascended my rickety stairs, not with an apple, but with a packet of thermogene!

"What deft fingers, what a way of tucking in blankets that always slide off in the middle watches, what a voice to let oneself sink into—a voice which laves feverish thoughts like a cool river. Hair of glowing copper silhouetted against my brown walls! Some suggestion of jade—the eyes. Translucent jade—a risky amulet.

"Like the drunkard I'm sorry for myself in a maudlin way, but don't wish to be cured. I want earthly love once more, only once. I want it neat. Yet with the glass before me, inviting, I'm afraid. Courage, I know only too well, will come with the first sip, the treacherous courage that bears you on the crest of warm waves, mounting, roaring, rolling with an irresistible momentum, the courage that abandons you at the impact, leaving you numb and weak for the arduous recovery."

"Rue N. D. des C., January 19, 1924.

"A convalescent torpor, grey clouds and wet pavements, an unheated hovel and a cough, growing penury—my own fault, but no matter—and the thought of having to commence some routine of daily-breadwinning. I feel as though my soul, as well as my body, had had an attack of double pneumonia.

"I can fight any number of odds and win, if the odds will do me the favour of being above-board and aggressive. But if they are insidious and passive, if they are merely sandbags, mines, and entanglements, I have no resource but to lay down my firearms and ardently envisage the state of affairs I would substitute.

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/330


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/331

 "Germaine desires to see Italy and Greece. She has saved my worthless life. The return is small enough. We may manage it on my balance at the bank. If we can't—well, one might as well try conclusions with the gods in Athens as in Paris."

"Lake Leman, February 2, 1924.

"A few months ago I was telling the patronne of the blackguardly café in the Rue St. Marc that I longed to escape the blights of a northern winter. When I coughed she recommended her most expensive liqueur! A few weeks ago I was tossing and turning in delirium in the ugliest and coldest little room in Paris. To-day I am sitting on the deck of a white steamer on a blue lake, gazing at sun-gilded, snowy mountaintops, breathing air which stings like rum. Germaine is throwing cakes to the birds and watching them swoop into the icy water.

"A few miles away is Clarens, the enchanted bosquet of Rousseau's Julie and St. Preux. Byron and Shelley once came to visit it. Poor silly pilgrims."

"Hotel Porta Rossa, Florence, February 18, 1924.

"For her the picturesque, the romantic, the idealistic are elements with which life is garnished. For me they are the dish, and the garnishing is what is commonly known as fact. 'I'm so glad it's you who are taking me on this trip,' she says. Which merely means that the excitement of travel is for her the present dish, and my society the garnishing. Somehow I was unable to tell her that her society is the present dish for me, that Italy and Greece and a whole geography-full of lands to be traversed are merely the garnishing, and even overseasoned for my present strength; for she should know it.

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/331


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/332

 "This morning, while Germaine stayed in to polish her nails, I rode in a dusty tram-car to the summit of Fiesole. There I saw pointed hills ringed with gardens and stroked with cypresses, and a Roman theatre whose ruined walls were bescribbled with communist slogans. Roses and oranges tranquilly flourished near, as they flourished when the walls were built.

"I also saw a cab-horse whose tail had grown threadbare through long service in swishing off flies, while bracing himself for the ascents of Vallombrosa. His master had tied on a new tail with red ribbon, but it hung motionless from a weary stump. For Dobbin had come to the dispirited conclusion that fine tails do not make fine horses. I have a presentiment that he will lie down on a steep hill and die before the summer flies arrive. Then that luxuriant false tail will be untied and combed and reutilized, and Dobbin will be cast into a pit and covered with earth.  ' Vanitas vanitatum serait bien le fond de tout! '

"We've been looking at lovely, long, bent-necked Botticelli virgins, and to-morrow we pack our bags again. Whither is it leading? I've gone far enough on the path of self-realization to know that the life of a man bent on that supreme adventure is like a cake, with highly-flavoured little accidents for raisins, and soft, leavened loneliness for dough. It's baked in an oven of intense meditation, and some one, presumably, will eat of it. Will anyone smack his lips in the eating of my cake? I fear it will be done to a cinder."

"Hotel Helvétia, Rome, February 27, 1924.

"Cold airs are creeping in under the doors of the abode. And just what can be the status of this man who has turned up again—the man with whom she danced in the Kursaal at Geneva? Is he garnishing or dish? A little 'high' I should imagine, whichever."

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/332


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/333

 "Pensione Grimaldi, Capri, April 18, 1924. Five weeks in bed, By this time Germaine and her captivating (literally enough) dancing man must be well on the way to India. After all, she wished to see strange lands! One can almost be thankful she ran away when she did, for if she had seen the present collapse she might have remained out of pity—which would have been intolerable. As it is, she has even a sense of moral advantage—at a stretch of imagination which she is equal to. The fact that I failed to keep pace with her up that beastly hill—the mountain of Tiberius—will remain for her an evidence of sulkiness on my part. For all her former care of me, she had forgotten the doctor's warnings. If one were cynical one would wonder whether she ever listened to them.

"My only quarrel with Germaine is that she didn't pay me the compliment of being honest—I think that's the only quarrel I have with anybody. But the boat was ready to leave for Naples and, even if she had had a vision of me prostrate on a deserted mountain path, there was no denying the fact that our funds were running low. The other man had to catch his steamer to Port SaidSaïd [sic]. Opportunity knocks only once. Germaine answered. Grand bien lui fasse! At least she's not spoiling perfectly good canvas!

"I've been less clever than Germaine. I've sent word out to Opportunity, in the phrase that Aunt Verona taught me: 'He's not at home.' That, she said, was one of the few fibs in the world that might be told, a mere façon de parler. A grim façon, on the whole—sinister and symbolic. Opportunity doesn't call nowadays; knows it's useless; and I've only to crawl back to Paris. It's just possible that one day even Germaine, if she makes a good thing out of life, will look back and say, 'He wasn't a bad sort; he once gave me a leg-up.' But, if

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/333


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/334

 she plays her cards wrong, she'll say, 'It all started with him; if I'd only stuck at my sketching!'

"One's life is at best a melody soaring above the dissonances of life, but even the worst solo has some coherence, a beginning and a logical end. It doesn't just trail off—surely."

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/334


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/335

easy stages Paul made his way northward through Italy, putting up at the cheapest pensions, resting in villages innocent of tourists, following in the wake of spring, overtaken by summer. The illness which had struck him down proved stubborn, and there were intervals when he was too weak to pursue his wanderings, when he could do little more than lie exposed to the sun, frightening away with a stick the lizards that scrambled up gorse-covered banks and darted between the hot flat rocks.

His objective was Paris. The thought of its neurotic atmosphere daunted him. Yet he was drawn back. He could only explain the urge on the ground that he had failed to fulfil there some mission which he had been predestined to fulfil, though in his present state the idea of hoping to fulfil any mission seemed the wildest mockery.

His past was a series of abdications, As a child he had been impelled forward by the vision of fulfilling a musical destiny he had, as it were, inherited from Aunt Verona; but his inability to do this had become patent in Vienna, the scene of her moral defeat. As a yourig man he had been lured on by the wonder and splendour of spiritual initiation; but the hard kernel of his ego had remained opaque when subjected to the rays, except for a few blessed moments. In the manner of a resigned Rh

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/335


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/336

 loser, he had indulged a last hope, the hope of squandering his unproductive experience on others, and thus sow, as Aunt Verona had done in his case, seeds of truth in soil which seemed propitious; but even in this rôle he could credit himself with only the most dubious success. And, with such aims, to have blundered into the bog of passion for a woman with eyes like risky amulets! Verily he was a prophet à la manque.

Despite which the old injunction still haunted him: Have faith in yourself, and nothing on earth can prevail against you. Only now, after many years of obedience to it, did he realize the sinister corollary: "If you have faith to the nth degree in yourself, the universe will virtually consist of yourself, consequently, however badly fate may serve you, you'll be able to say that nothing is prevailing against you, since, naturally, you can't prevail against yourself." Therefore, in a sense the undeniably true formula was a snare and a delusion, but even if he had been duped by it, he was past caring. In rebellious moments he could almost find it in his heart to wish that Aunt Verona had never existed. She was the only idol that had remained intact. Were she to fail him, life would indeed have been a wilderness.

Of all his misadventures, the one for which he found it least easy to excuse himself was his addiction to Germaine. He had had several months in which to review the affair, and marvelled that he could so completely have hoodwinked himself. By some freak of womanliness she had taken it upon herself to nurse him, and under a spell he had lavished on her the pent-up emotions of a lifetime devoid until then of overmastering passion. His amours had been confined to the comparatively large class of women who make the mistake of assuming that they are indispensable to the men they covet. Germaine, if vastly inferior to these women in worth, was more crafty than they. "Any woman could do as much as I have

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/336


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/337

 done, and more," expressed her attitude, and as it was the plain, hard truth, men, as they must, misinterpreted it as the rare flower of womanly modesty.

"It's a waste of time for you to fall in love with me; besides Raoul, although he is a pig, needs me, and you don't; for you're clever and I'm not."

That is what she said to him, and had doubtless re-echoed to the third man. In consequence she had inflamed him, whose nature it was to crave and magnify what seemed beyond his reach. He had not stopped to ask why she had devoted herself to him. It had been sufficient that she had done so. Now, as he looked back, he gave a new importance to the fact that she had regarded him—whatever other feelings she may have entertained for him—as a man who could feed and clothe her for the time being. Then, as he had made his slow recovery she had talked of her frustrated longings for an education, her desire to see the world—and he had taken her troubles au grand tragique. What a situation for a man who had presumed to lead youth in the way it should go, who had so confidently pointed out pitfalls to others! Ah yes, but in their cases he was not blinded by his own febrile passion. The most wise and sober of men were not proof against madness where their own affairs were concerned.

It was over now, and he would never feel again—in that particular way. It was a relief to know it. Germaine now stood merely for the memory of a bad investment—the worst of many doubtful ones. Some might yet show a dividend. The young poet, George Paddon, for example, might end by upholding the torch toward which he, Paul Minas, a sort of philanthropic foolish virgin, had contributed a little oil. Paddon, according to a letter now several months old, seemed to have found his level among a group of budding philosophers and poets—neo-somethingists.

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/337


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/338

 By the time Paul had made his way as far north as Siena, his funds were at a point which made imperative the most rigid economy. Having no head for figures he could not account for the fact that he had, in less than five years, disposed of a sum that should, under wise manipulation, have provided him with an income for life. For life! He smiled at the phrase. What with incessant coughing, perspiring through the night, waking with shiny eyes, and funking every steep hill—the handful of francs still in one's possession might last a "lifetime."

He thought of the young sailor who had hoarded his savings, year in and year out, for the sake of a holiday in Germany. Paradoxically, in those days he had not known the value of money. Now he knew. Money existed for the purchasing of one's ideals—whether the ideals consisted in fine raiment or the subsidizing of needy visionaries. Paul had had money to spend, and spent it. Not a sou had he begrudged. Not a purchase did he regret. Not even Germaine, for she had taught him something, if only the extent of his own fatuity.

He arrived in Paris on a rainy day of September, 1924. He had spent a sleepless night on the wooden bench of a third-class compartment, and caught a fresh chill from the bad air and the draughts. By the time he had collected his scanty possessions from the entrepôt and moved into a fifth-floor lodging in a dingy street behind the Gare Montparnasse, he was in the grip of an illness which he knew to be dangerous. Of all his former acquaintances there was no one he cared to send for, no one he could trust to do the right things, without asking questions or offering advice. He craved companionship, yet he was relieved to think that no one could find him in this retreat. For two weeks he lay in bed obliged to submit to the attention of a fumbling old physician whom

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/338


text:
Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/466

 by the discipline of the flock and the staff of the herdsman. Surely a man betrays his ignorance if he prefer unlettered hearers! What goldsmith does not try to procure the very purest gold? What shoemaker does not try to obtain the finest leather? Let us likewise be children of light and wise in our generation, and let us pray that schools may supply us with as many educated hearers as possible.

17. And suffer not envy to enter into your hearts, O servants of the living God, but rather lead others to that charity that envies not, seeks not its own advantage, and thinks no evil. Let envious thoughts arise if others originate schemes that have never entered into your minds, but be content to learn from others; in order that (as Gregory says) all, being full of faith, may praise God, and may be instrumental in spreading the truth.

18. But to you, in particular, do I direct my prayers, ye rulers and magistrates, who, in God’s name, preside over human affairs. To you, as to Noah, it has been entrusted from on high to build an ark for the preservation of the Word of God in this terrible deluge of disasters (Gen. vi.) It is your duty, as it was that of the princes of old, to aid in the building of the sanctuary, and to see that no obstacle be placed in the way of the artificers whom the Lord has filled with His Spirit and has taught to devise ingenious plans (Exod. xxxvi.) You, like David and Solomon, should summon architects to build the temple of the Lord, and should supply them with the necessary materials (1 Kings vi.; 1 Chron. xxix.) You are those centurions whom Christ will love if you have loved His little ones, and erected schools for them (Luke vii. 5).

19. For Christ’s sake, for the sake of our children’s salvation, I beseech you to listen to me. This is a weighty question, and concerns the glory of God and the salvation of mankind. Well do I know how much you love your country. If a man came to you and promised to tell you how all your towns might be fortified at a slight cost, how all your youths might be instructed in the art of warfare, how your rivers might be made navigable and be filled


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/339

 the concierge had sent up, and retarding his recovery by worrying as to how he was going to pay the bills.

His first venture out of doors was an excursion to the stalls along the quays, where he sold an armful of his best books for a tenth of their value.

Once he thought of looking up friends to whom he had made advances in the past, on the off-chance that their fortunes, unlike his own, had taken a turn for the better. But the suggestion was vetoed by the very pride for which he had righteously scolded so many others, when they had shown a reluctance to accept aid at his hands. After all, he had invested in their talent, and he had no talents of his own deserving subvention. Besides, the men he had helped—at least in the best cases—had not actually asked; they had simply accepted what he had guessed—they needed. Would anyone guess he needed help? Perhaps, but he was under no illusion as to the amount of help likely to be voluntarily offered. Tant pis. He had known that a day of reckoning must come.

At the night café in the Rue St. Marc he found a disconcerting welcome. The patronne, who had always regarded him as her most distinguished client, received him with open arms, but only after she had stepped back with an expression of consternation on her face and a fervently uttered, "Grand Dieu du Ciel." For a moment Paul was unnerved. He had not realized that his appearance had altered to such an extent.

For the next fifteen minutes he was engaged in answering Madame's questions. Then she went to the kitchen herself to prepare food for him. The night was not far advanced, and the regular gathering of compositors, van-drivers, thieves and fly-by-nights had not arrived. Paul had hoped to see Suzy, whose favours he had declined, but who was indebted to him for many a loan. Suzy, for all her depravity, would heartily welcome an opportunity to do him a good turn, if she

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/339


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/340

 was in luck. When he had finished his meal he mentioned her name to the patronne, who treated her own sex with uniform contempt.

"Oh, Suzy never comes here now. She's living up in Montmartre somewhere. She owes me thirty francs—sale gribiche qu'elle est! They're all alike, ces filles. . . . But your great amoureuse still comes."

"Who is that?"

Madame reminded him of the murderous, mirthful hag who had been prepared to bid for him with rolls of hundred-franc notes.

"She always asks about you."

Paul shuddered. To-night the thought of his admirer was not even funny. He turned up his collar, and rose from the bench.

"Ça ne fait rien, Madame, st je vous paie la prochaine fois?"

"Mais quand vous voudrez, mon petit, quand vous voudrez. Ici vous êtes toujours chez vous. Vous le savez bien!"

He thanked her and shook hands, in accordance with the etiquette of the establishment. The dirty floor and the stale smells of tobacco and beer nauseated him. Madame had just served to an unsuspecting customer a steak of horse-flesh. In the fat surrounding his own potatoes, Paul had been obliged to remove the corpse of a fly. He hurried away.

"Here, you can always consider yourself at home," she had said. Home!

There was only one direction in which Paul could turn for an immediate livelihood. Through the centre of all the shifting emotions of life, music had run as a dull gold thread. He would have preferred not to degrade it to the status of mere breadwinner, but there was

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/340


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/341

 no alternative. He thought of becoming a professional accompanist, as he had done in Vienna, and with this idea in mind sought out an acquaintance of four years back, Luigi Pessaro, a man of ample means who had taken up singing as a hobby and whose art was reserved for salons.

Pessaro received him with the dismayed countenance that Paul had grown to expect. For once, however, his altered appearance stood him in good stead. The singer, shocked into action, took him to Monsieur Sariac, a teacher at the Conservatoire.

Monsieur Sariac heard Paul play with evident interest. "With your temperament," he finally commented, "you strike me as a virtuoso run to seed. You've missed your calling. You have more to say than the average soloist for whom it will be your duty to efface yourself."

Paul shrugged his shoulders, "There comes a time," he replied, "when one has no desire so strong as to efface oneself. I am seeking a livelihood, not a career."

Monsieur Sariac was unable to offer him employment, but promised to recommend him in various quarters. Then, as Paul was on the point of leaving, an idea struck the elder man.

"Do you by any chance play the organ?"

"Yes."

"Then I may possibly be able to help you. It's a very unusual post."

Paul sat down again. It was a question of going three or four times a week to play for a harmlessly deranged old gentleman—an aristocrat and an exile—who lived, closely guarded, in a house off the Boulevard St. Germain. When Paul had assured M. Sariac that he was not deterred by the singularity of the situation, the teacher gave further details, binding his listener to respect the confidence.

"The old man lives under the delusion that a woman

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/341


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/342

 long dead is at his side—a girl with whom he was violently in love, but who vanished on the day he killed his wife."

M. Sariac paused to watch the effect of his words, then reassured, went on. "The crime was committed in an access of insanity brought on by the hopelessness of the love affair. M. de Reisenach, as he is called, fled to Paris, but was overtaken by couriers, who found him raving. To avoid a scandal it was given out that he was dead and, with the connivance of the authorities here, it was arranged that he should be installed in a private house. The house is, of course, nothing more than a private asylum, and for many years its inmate has persuaded himself that he is living in clandestine happiness with the woman he loved. Naturally he sees almost nobody from the outside world, and whoever penetrates into the house is obliged to humour him in a dozen subtle ways. . . . You see the difficulties of the post?"

Paul was fascinated by them. "What makes you think I might qualify?"

"Ah ça! How does one know such things? There's a quiet intensity in your manner that makes me feel you might appeal to the old man—if you care to undertake the task. Of course he may turn you down at sight. There's no accounting for his judgment."

"Has he nobody to play for him?"

M. Sariac's face became grave. "For the last twenty years my wife went regularly to play for him—my wife died only last week."

Paul filled the hiatus with an expression of sympathy, and M. Sariac descanted upon the qualities of the unfortunate lady.

"If you are interested," he finally said, "I'll take you to M. de Reisenach's secretary."

Paul felt that the offer lay peculiarly in his province.

"There is a further warning," concluded the teacher.

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/342


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/343

 "Like most deranged men, M. de Reisenach has periods when he believes himself watched by spies. You will have to exercise great tact."

"And the remuneration?"

"It is modest, but if you succeed in pleasing the old gentleman they will be liberal. When my wife died I received a charming letter and a cheque for twenty-five thousand francs."

Two days later, on a crisp afternoon of November, Paul was ushered into an enormous salon. A tall, white-haired man of seventy, dressed in correct morning clothes, turned at his approach. Paul found a pair of large blue eyes searching him. Lips half defiant, half appealing, pronounced a courteous greeting in French which betrayed a trace of accent.

Then, turning to an empty arm-chair which was drawn close to the fire, M. de Reisenach said in tones at once ceremonious and affectionate:

"My dear, let me present to you Monsieur Minas, a friend of our good Sariac. He has come to play." Then with a quick motion, M. de Reisenach turned and pierced Paul with a suspicious glance.

But Paul had been rehearsed, and was bowing gravely to the imaginary occupant of the chair.

The old man's face relaxed in a smile. "My wife adores music," he explained. "Though I, too, am fond of it, in my ignorant way. It was very good of you to come to us. We are dull old fogies."

"On the contrary, Monsieur, it is a pleasure to be invited to play for appreciative hearers—and in such a room."

For half an hour the old man exhibited his treasures, explaining their history and artistic worth. At the end of the room in a large alcove stood an organ built of dark carved oak, its pipes rendered as inconspicuous as possible by a decorator who must have deplored their in-

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/343


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/344

 trusion into the scheme. Near the alcove stood the most beautiful piano Paul had ever seen—of glowing black, inlaid with metal in a pattern that corresponded with other pieces of furniture in the room. M. de Reisenach himself lifted the lid, and motioned Paul to the keyboard, then retraced his steps toward the fireplace. A footman advanced silently and wheeled the vacant arm-chair round so that the back of the imaginary woman would not be turned to the guest. For the first time since he had entered the room Paul thrilled to the uncanniness of his surroundings. He had experienced no difficulty in bowing to the chair, or in casting polite glances in its direction, but the footman's matter-of-fact attention to a non-existent mistress sent a shudder through him, and he had to make an effort to steady his nerve.

For an hour he played, gaining confidence as he went on. The old man dozed through it all. The piano responded graciously, and Paul rose to his best heights. It was as though he were desperately trying to disprove M. Sariac's frank comment: a virtuoso run to seed. And the old man dozed on till a clock warned Paul that his time was up.

He left the piano, and his host, roused by the cessation of sound, got up to meet him.

"Ah, Monsieur, I cannot tell you how much we have enjoyed your music, You will come again, will you not—often?"

Paul breathed a sigh of relief. "You are very kind, Monsieur." He turned to the arm-chair and said, with a bow, "Bonsoir, Madame." Then he shook hands with M. de Reisenach and left the room.

As the winter wore on, Paul settled patiently into his new mode of existence. With lessened vitality had come

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/344


text:
Page:The Crowne of all Homers Workes - Chapman (1624).djvu/86

Rh


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/345

 a simplification of interests. From a daily routine which would once have dejected him by its lack of variety he now derived as much stimulation as his chastened organism could endure. He had no grievances, no wayward hopes nor goading ambitions to disturb the tenor of his mind. In the mornings—often after nights of pain and insomnia—he awoke with a sense of security. Outside his window, in the streets, beyond them, in outlying villages and fields, stretching in circles which infinitely widened, life hummed and purred its course in myriad activities each of which contributed to a compact protective total. For life was protective; it afforded sustenance and comfort in subtle ways, meting itself out in portions nicely adjusted to one's capacity.

Paul had progressed beyond the stage of exacting boons from life, consequently could at last appreciate boons which came gratuitously, could revel in diluted rays of sunlight which more sturdy souls cursingly accused of meagreness, could feel deep thankfulness for food and drink which to others seemed frugal, could find solid worth in creatures whom the world voted dull. Without picturesquely striving—as the devotees of a hundred cults strove—he had unexpectedly achieved, as they expressed it, peace. He made no boast of it, took no false credit for it. Simply his soul was in equipoise.

For this long coveted state he had paid heavily—but he was able to face the bill without a tremor.

The lonely ache which had always shadowed him was gone, yet in spirit he now stood farther aloof from the world than ever. Friendship and companionship were as far beyond his reach as if he were an invisible figure on the earth, though he moved among men who passed for friends and companions. Love in a personal sense he would never experience again; its place had been pre-empted by an emotion which reached out in all directions, knitting the universe together in a warm garment

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/345


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/346

 which he wore as a mantle over his soul. For thirty-five years he had been a slave to his egos, then, as in the case of the Ancient Mariner, his stubborn heart had yielded without warning, and the weight of his mistakes and failures had dropped into the sea at his feet.

One of the first signs of his spiritual freedom was the magnetism he unconsciously exerted. In the old days the rare homage of his fellows fed his vanity. Now it increased his humility. Night after night in a modest restaurant on the Boulevard Raspail, he found himself the centre of a heterogeneous group of students and artists. Former acquaintances sought him out and, having found him, came back again and again to lay their problems before him. Karl Zurschmiede, the painter, the American-Italian tramp of literary and anarchistic leanings, Paddon, the English poet fresh from circles of radical opinion in Vienna, were among the list. And a prominent figure in the growing confraternity was a young French Jew, Philippe Bloch, whose essays on the theory of relativity, concerning which speculation was rife and comprehension uncertain, were winning attention for him in serious reviews.

Each member of the confraternity, with the exception of Paul, was driven by some demon, Each was bent on entering controversial lists to vindicate the honour of some theory on which he might base a scheme of life. Each was obliged to argue at length and with heat in order to find out what he believed. And through the kaleidoscope of colours that would not blend, in the wars that surged round the names of modern personalities and movements, artistic, political, scientific, religious, Paul's impartiality became the refuge of all parties. He seldom supported an applicant with an axe to grind, but he usually restored harmony by his faculty for reducing all problems to a common denominator, his faculty for eliminating inessentials and raising the issue to a plane

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/346


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/347

 beyond the reach of disputation. He was not known to have any special subject, though he was described, vaguely, as a musician. And he seemed to have no panacea for the ailments of the world, unless his views on internationalism and the fundamental unity of all religions could be thought of as such.

On a few occasions Paul had emerged from his impersonality in some sudden onslaught, some appeal for tolerance, some championship of the despitefully used. In such moments he had expressed himself with a fervour that gripped his hearers, and it was on account of them that he had begun to acquire the status of a prophet. But for two reasons he curbed such effusions. In the first place he felt that his most valuable contribution to life lay in his ability to exert a tranquillizing rather than a stimulating influence. In the second place the concentration entailed in propounding a difficult thesis, in preaching and converting, took a heavy toll from his physical resources, bringing on disorders which he could ill afford to encourage.

One evening in March, 1925, intoxicated by the deceptive warmth of a spring-like night which seemed to presage a summer of infinite bounties, a future of glorious opportunity, Paul threw precaution to the winds. He had been absorbing life in small, diluted doses. To-night he craved a more potent draught. The soft strong air from a window opening on a row of evergreens laved and quickened him. The lights, the buzz of familiar faces, the distant murmur of a world awakening from winter sluggishness filled him with a throbbing joy, made him feel twenty-one instead of half the allotted three score and ten. He tingled to the incomparable privilege of living, gave thanks for it, gloated over the treasures that lay within the reach of himself and his kind. He had an impulse to rouse the world to a sharper wonderment, a more electric vitality. To-night he knew

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/347


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/348

 himself for a superior being—superior not in the sense against which he had chafed as a boy, when Mrs. Kestrell placed before him her finest linen, but superior in his comprehension of the infinite insignificance of himself and of all men as individuals, in the puissant totality of life. With flushed cheeks and shining eyes he seized the reins of discourse and drove it furiously, increasing the pace as each man and woman showed signs of catching up.

In the background he saw the proprietor rubbing his hands.

Paul found himself talking of the soul, of its arduous journey through the valley of the shadow, of its imprisonment in the body and its subjection to a mind which sought to argue it out of existence, of its incessant struggle for liberation, encouraged by a presence merely felt, as a brushing of wings, or merely glimpsed in flashes of celestial light, of its ultimate emancipation at death. He deprecated the unnecessary strife within the trinity: soul, mind and body. His plea was for order, co-ordination, poise, harmony. Religion, he said, any sort of religion, even that of maniacal evangelists, was an essential part of life, necessary as a sort of tuning-fork that gave human beings the right "pitch," according to which they might live without flatting.

Then the talk swerved round to the topic on which he was known to have expressed views that savoured of a past bitterness. Never had his conviction that national barriers were a heritage from barbarous days, that the progress of civilization depended on a pooling of human interests, been so succinctly, so vehemently and inspiringly set forth. "La parole est à Orphée," cried Philippe Bloch, who sought to maintain a sort of parliamentary procedure in these discussions. "Orpheus" was a nickname conferred on Paul in jest by his acknowledged disciple, George Paddon, and it had caught.

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/348


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/349

 For an hour Paul talked, foretelling the new heaven and the new earth illuminated by a unified religion, impelled forward by the concerted energies of a unified race. He suggested, in imaginative flights, ways and means of making it feasible, appealed for support, speculating, affirming, convincing. Through it all he was exultingly conscious that this, at last, was the essence of his famous message. A message neither startling nor original, but grand, with a grandeur that could only be measured by the intensity with which it was projected, the zeal with which it inspired those who were destined to carry it into the highways and by-ways. His ego was not delivering the message; the message was being delivered through it, by a power as much greater than himself as winds are greater than the ships they drive across the ocean. He was free from self-consciousness now as he had never been—not even on the far-distant occasion when, as a precocious cabin-boy, he had evoked the spirit of Beethoven and caused it to speak, through him, to a roomful of seamen. The difference between the two occasions was that to-night he was able to bring the force of experience, reason, spiritual exaltation, moral fervour, and impassioned words to bear on his audience—an audience, moreover, of virtual disciples, predisposed to accept the message which was being transmitted through him.

Of all the faces that crowded about him, Paul was conscious of only one steeled against his appeal. The Italian-American vagabond, a man who, born perverse, had let his mind become distorted still more by disease and hard-usage, and then become enamoured of his own distortions, had from the outset of their acquaintance shown a personal antipathy, an antipathy which Paul, loath to argue with an insincere man whom he had aided, had taken no pains to break down. When Paul brought his impromptu speech to an end, the anarchist waited for

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/349


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/350

 a lull in the hubbub, and then, with a cynical laugh, threw out a challenge which he had obviously been saving.

"How do we know you're speaking in good faith? For all anybody knows to the contrary, you might be a spy in the employ of a government that has something to gain by your kind of propaganda, preached outside its own boundaries. Are you afraid to show your papers?"

Although the speaker was not popular, and although in its present mood the confraternity would have taken Paul's side against anyone, an undercurrent of curiosity awaited with interest the fate of the challenge.

Paul had no intention of gratifying this curiosity, nor of evading the challenge.

"I make a secret of my nationality out of sheer consistency," he replied quietly. "To my way of thinking, the fact that nobody here can say for a certainty what country produced me is a vindication, in a small way, of my thesis. If everybody had tried to ignore national prejudices as consistently as I have done, we should find ourselves able to co-operate in ways which are now infeasible. . . . I'm not afraid to show my papers—the suggestion is silly. But I don't mind telling you that I've served a term in prison for the views I've been advocating, if you need any proof of my good faith."

A few short years ago he would have been tempted to give a cynical flourish to this final piece of information. But he had outgrown his cynicism.

There was a stir of renewed interest, and Paul went on to link up his remarks, bringing the audience again under his sway. Gradually his words dwindled. There was a singing in his ears which drowned the sound of his voice. He was suddenly oppressed by the thick smoke that filled the room, and reached towards the window, which someone had closed as the night air grew colder. Paul knew now that he had shot his bolt. The strange buoyancy he had experienced earlier in the evening had

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/350


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/351

 departed, leaving as a sort of echo an inward turbulence. He was too exhausted to decide whether the turbulence was emotional or physical.

He shivered. The draught from the window brought him out of his thoughts. He had a vague premonition of impending trouble, and felt he must find a pretext to go home.

Before he could close the window again, he was coughing. His cough was well enough known by this time, yet many eyes turned to him with quick sympathy and fear.

He had only one thought now—to control himself until he could get out of the room, away from everybody. He rose from his chair, and some one darted forward. Why should Karl look so panicky? Paul tried to deceive himself with the question, then gave it up. Self deception wouldn't work; he had tried it before. He sat down again, racked in a cough that was past controlling. He had once thought of buying a red handkerchief to carry against such emergencies. Had he done so, his acquaintances would merely have laughed at his conversion to Bolshevism. As it was—there would be a scene—and his speech would be forgotten in the light of this more impressive, useless phenomenon. His genius for anticlimax again.

Zurschmiede and Paddon got him to his attic room, and Bloch arrived shortly afterwards with a doctor.

The three young men took their leave. As Paddon opened the door some loose sheets of paper fluttered from a table. Believing them to be a copy of an essay which Paul had forgotten to return to him, he mechanically thrust the sheets into his pocket. Later in the evening, by the light of his own candle he read what seemed to be an entry destined for a diary:

"Rue N.D. des C., March 14, 1925. Since my soul insists, I give it up to a soft breeze which mysteriously

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/351


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/352

 stirs in all this wintry stench of mid-Paris, and bears it to the bourne of my pilgrimage which I shall always vaguely discern but never reach. The sea is there, amethystine; a shore of crisp velvet sand, deserted; sweeping green banks; a sweetly melancholy, faint rustle of leaves; deep-hued flowers discreet in number, for each has its individuality; not one is superfluous.

"Silence composed of infinite soft sounds, as whiteness is composed of infinite colours. A terrace, high windows flung open, a glimpse of spacious rooms which my soul can enter when night falls.

"Music which comes from the flowers or from within me and pervades the afternoon but has no locus. Music and perfume which mingle, which gently thrill, which stir the curtains of the high windows, the foliage of trees, music and perfume which give life to the sea air, which like interweaving recitatives hover above the ocean's rhythm.

"And a presence felt, guessed, but not seen: a radiant figure so perfectly unlike, yet so strangely like me, for it has a beauty I have ever coveted. It comes and goes, brushing me invisibly in its flight. It is young, fresh, eager, iridescent, suddenly languid, suddenly animated, suddenly visible, splashed with the blue-purple-green of the water, the yellow of the sunshine, the green of the trees, the red of the flowers, a red that throws off glints of orange and purple like rubies. The figure is echoed by a rhythmic fragrance, perfume that comes in a pattern. Its movements are determined by, or determine my music. It has the fragility, the grace of a vision, yet it makes me conscious of my body, stirs my veins to new measures. It mocks and challenges, and the music and perfume deepen to riot, and I am running to its urge, leaping, pursuing, nearing, touching draperies of gossamer, catching laughter tossed to me like bubbles, capturing, subduing, at the music's dictate.

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/352


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/353

 "In my arms the vision takes life from me, leaving me but a soul. The enchanted laughter under my lips becomes a healing caress. My eyes, for the fullness of seeing, close. The ethereal figure which was beautiful is now a part of me, a supplement. With it I am become the universe. The music has grown so full-toned, it is beyond hearing, just as my eyes in the fullness of seeing merged into the vision and ceased to see. The music has become as great as the universe; it is the vesture enveloping the universe which I, by uniting with my fleeting vision, have become. With the fullness of feeling we have ceased to feel."

Paul was warned by a specialist that he must leave Paris at once and seek some mountain resort.

"But it's a luxury I can't afford these days," said the invalid.

The specialist held open the door of his consulting-room. "Alors, mon pauvre ami, unless you do as I say, life itself is a luxury you can't afford."

The remark took Paul's fancy. "That's what I've been telling myself for many a year," he replied.

He walked into the bright April sunshine and directed his footsteps toward the Luxembourg gardens. Under a canopy of trees on which budding leaves shot forth like green flames from gas jets, lolled students wearing black hats and red neckties, idly addressing themselves to books and sketch-blocks. He pushed on towards the round pound, where children were sailing boats, and paused to watch them, marvelling at their obliviousness of the doom that overshadowed them. They were as exuberantly unconscious of their sad mortality as the hyacinths were unconscious of the rain-cloud encroaching on the blue and golden glories of the afternoon sky.

He left the park to the innocents who infested it, to

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/353


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/354

 the God-blessed and the God-spared, and walked on through the gates past the Odéon, down the hill through narrow streets toward the river. When the shower descended he took refuge inside the doors of a. One volume attracted his attention, for it contained an account of the life and teachings of Orpheus.

Rugged is the road which leads to the realm of the Gods,' said Orpheus, who seemed to be replying to voices from within himself rather than to his disciple. 'A flowery path, a sharp slope, then rocks haunted by thunder-bolts and surrounded by the immensity of space—that is the destiny of the seer and the prophet on earth. Let thy feet dwell in the flowery pathways of this world, my child, and aspire not to go further.'

My thirst but increases the more as thou seekest to quench it,' said the young disciple. Thou hast taught me the secrets of the Gods. But tell me, great master of mysteries, thou who wast inspired by divine Eros, shall I ever be able to see them?'

With the eyes of the soul,' replied the pontiff of Jupiter, 'but not with those of the body. At present thou canst see merely with the eyes of the body. Only by dint of long travail and great pain may the spiritual eyes be opened.

Paul thought of his disciples, of Paddon, who had conferred on him the name of Orpheus. He skimmed through the pages and came to the end of the dialogue:

Thou hast earned the crown of initiation, and thou hast lived my dream,' concluded Orpheus. 'But let us depart from hence; for in order that fulfilment may come to pass, it is necessary that I should die, and thou shouldst live.

On the point of buying the volume with the few remaining coins in his pocket, Paul was deterred by a per-

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/354


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/355

 ception of the irony of the situation. What purpose could be served by his absorption of the contents of one more book? What purpose, for that matter, had been served by the omnivorous reading of thirty years? Books had nourished his mind as bread had nourished his body. But why should either have been nourished? In a few months or weeks or days, the one would be under the ground and the other would have vanished God knew where. An echo of phraseology recurred to him—spurlos versenkt!

Perhaps this volume, after all, could throw a glimmer on the probable destiny of one's spirit. One might read it on the off chance that it would impart a smattering of spiritual etiquette, in case there were some sort of conscious survival after death. He bought the volume, and went out again into the cold sunlight of the rain-splashed street.

He passed cafés where men were sipping pleasant concoctions, passed stalls heaped with fruits, heard scraps of good-humoured talk, caught glimpses of fresh cheeks and keen eyes. What a pity to leave it all behind, what a pity beyond the range of tears and chagrin! What incredible and meaningless extravagance, que la vie! Thirty-five years of seething and frothing like a busy bubble, then, instead of floating off, as a bubble should, towards some Empyrean, one merely relapsed into the illimitable ocean—the river with but a single bank. One's iridescent personal bloom, a mere reflection, vanished with a little plop, and one dispersed as air and water. The arch-anticlimax! It was not that one resented being merged into the reservoir of life; it was simply that one endlessly wondered why a complicated system of bubbles should have been ordained. Did they, perhaps, make it possible for a greater quantity of oxygen to be dissolved into the water for the benefit of fish—and if so, what, in the metaphor, corresponded to fish?

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/355


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/356

 Why seek to purchase a prolongation of life? Would one be warranted in begging for the wherewithal to tarry among stalls heaped with fruits, streets running over with traffic, gardens filled with children, young and grown-up? Besides, could one cheat fate with money? Into his head came the ominous air from Carmen he had hummed one night more than ten years ago: "Si tu dois mourir, recommence vingt fois; la carte impitoyable répètera la mort."

He wandered along the quays, nodding to booksellers of his acquaintance, and at the Gare d'Orsay turned into a street leading to the closely guarded house of M. de Reisenach, where he was due at five o'clock.

The old man greeted him with the customary show of hospitality. Paul bowed as usual to the empty arm-chair, exchanged the usual remarks about the weather, sat at a tiny table laid for three and drank tea poured out by a servant, since "Madame" had "an aversion to presiding over her table." This explanation was invariably repeated.

Paul had forgotten whatever horror he had first experienced on hearing of the crime committed so long ago, and felt strangely in sympathy with the motives that urged M. de Reisenach to persist in his realization of a wildly extravagant ideal. Paul entered into the madman's psychology and played his part in the other's drama with a facility that gave him cause to question his own balance. The measure of his sanity, he concluded, was merely the measure of his failure to realize his chimères. Paul recalled a sentence of a favourite writer: "Cette forme est réelle, puisqu' elle est apparente et qu'il n'y a de réalité au monde que les apparences." M. de Reisenach's visions were real to him. He was to be envied.

Paul's long walk had fatigued him. The strong tea made his cheeks burn. He felt his body frail against

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/356


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/357

 the soft upholstery of the chair. In a mirror he saw a reflection of his face—a flushed ivory setting for two black jewels. That very morning he had seen a paragraph in the Paris edition of an American newspaper stating that Miss Gritty Kestrell had arrived at the Ritz for a visit of some weeks, and he could not go to her, for he was unwilling to subject her to the shock of his emaciation.

Within him, beneath a little singing restlessness of nerves, there was a deep tranquillity.

Monsieur was speaking of music. It was time to drag oneself from the chair. He marvelled that a body so thin could be so heavy. Monsieur was asking him to play the organ for a change. If Monsieur only knew how fatiguing the pedals were, how hard one had to press down the keys!

Once seated on the bench, Paul's energies rallied. He played a Pastorale of César Franck's—a thing of quiet, gentle, austere beauty, reflecting a loftiness of spirit, a sincerity and nobility that refreshed and inspired.

Although he had drawn away from it at intervals, music still expressed some truth he had always sought in books and in life itself yet never quite attained. It was strangely satisfying, yet it stirred a longing for fuller revelation.

From Franck he went back to older masters, and found himself playing Bach fughettas he had not heard since childhood. Once more he was the small boy performing his solo while the pennies fell with a chink into baize-lined mahogany plates. Once more he was playing for Phœbe Meddar—not the ladylike schoolmistress, but a pale blue, pale pink, pale gold and lavender Princess of Alcantara who knew no language but the ethereal language he made for her with his music. Once more he identified his life with the melody—he was the voice which rose yearningly above the complexity of opposing

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/357


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/358

 voices, Again he thought of life as a series of variations on a given theme. His had surely passed through enough. Further variations could only be anticlimactic. Yet it was so difficult to know when to stop.

His strength had come back as if by magic with his absorption in the music. His body was forgotten, he was again the creature all wings. What if he endeavoured to live, after all? There were always ways of making shift. He thought of Gritty. She was a sort of sublimated Suzy—a Suzy with the advantages of talent, brains, and what she had called "one genuine little streak." If Gritty only knew, she would insist on helping him as a right—a right given by sisterly regard. In a sense he even owed Gritty the opportunity to be of service to him. She had once expressed a desire to share his destiny in some way.

Yet

His fatigue was creeping back. The thought of going over old ground, of preparing a fresh campaign against the world of fact—even were it worth the effort, could he undertake the responsibility? Something in him held back, something whispered: "Your solo is finished, and a damn bad job you made of it; get off the platform."

He turned away from the organ.

For once Monsieur had not dozed. A psychical sympathy which had grown up between them made him respond to Paul's mood.

"You're tired, to-day, my young friend. Has something gone wrong?"

"Things always go wrong, if one is foolish enough to brood. They're right enough if one doesn't care."

"Then you've been brooding—it doesn't pay."

"One has weak moments."

The old man eyed him with vague misgiving. Usually he was too deeply immersed in his own unreal world to be conscious of others' anxieties. "Pourtant," he went

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/358


text:
Page:Solo (1924).pdf/359

 on, "you've never played so well as you played to-day. That's curious."

"Malheureusement," supplemented Paul, with a grim smile. "Good art is a product of suffering."

The old man had retired into his shell. "So well," he insisted, "that I was hoping you'd play a little longer—perhaps something on the piano."

"Volontiers," Paul acquiesced, though he would rather have crept back to his garret.

He opened the piano and let his fingers roam. He was still living in the past. His moral life was unfolding itself before him year by year. Instinctively he began the sonata he had performed on the night when he had first become conscious of having a mission to fulfil. As the first movement played itself he relived the tropical nights at sea, recaptured the smell of tar, the sound of crisp, lapping water and flapping sails, the sight of a moonlight track through the indigo gloom, a track down which he sent passionate invocations towards a radiant future which had become a dreary present.

In the last movement his courage failed him. That triumphant, self-sure theme which he had boldly identified with his own ego—what a travesty! Yet he forced himself to play it, if only as a tribute to the heroic dead—for that eager, credulous boy of thirteen was assuredly dead.

His arms dropped at his sides. He could not have played another bar.

M. de Reisenach came towards him with tears in his eyes. He looked old and harrowed. It was the first time Paul had played the sonata in his house.

"Ah, mon cher ami, if you only knew what the sonata means to me—to us. It was one of my wife's favourites. How many times has she played it for me in the old happy days that ceased long ago—before you were even born!"

title: Page:Solo (1924).pdf/359