Grey Roses. Harland Henry
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and shadows on the houses, the doorways, the people. Oh, the air! Oh, the smells! Que c'est bon—que je suis contente! Et dire que j'ai passé cinq mois, mais cinq grands mois, en Angleterre. Ah, veinard, you—you don't know how you're blessed.' Presently we found ourselves labouring knee-deep in a wave of black pinafores, and Nina had plucked her bunch of violets from her breast, and was dropping them amongst eager fingers and rosy cherubic smiles. And it was constantly, 'Tiens, there's Madame Chose in her kiosque. Bonjour, madame. Vous allez toujours bien?' and 'Oh, look! old Perronet standing before his shop in his shirt-sleeves, exactly as he has stood at this hour every day, winter or summer, these ten years. Bonjour, M'sieu Perronet.' And you may be sure that the kindly French Choses and Perronets returned her greetings with beaming faces. 'Ah, mademoiselle, que c'est bon de vous revoir ainsi. Que vous avez bonne mine!' 'It is so strange,' she said, 'to find nothing changed. To think that everything has gone on quietly in the usual way. As if I hadn't spent an eternity in exile!' And at the corner of one street, before a vast flaunting 'bazaar,' with a prodigality of tawdry Oriental wares exhibited on the pavement, and little black shopmen trailing like beetles in and out amongst them, 'Oh,' she cried, 'the "Mecque du Quartier"! To think that I could weep for joy at seeing the "Mecque du Quartier"!'
By and by we plunged into a dark hallway, climbed a long, unsavoury, corkscrew staircase, and knocked at a door. A gruff voice having answered, ''Trez!' we entered Chalks's bare, bleak, paint-smelling studio. He was working (from a lay-figure) with his back towards us; and he went on working for a minute or two after our arrival, without speaking. Then he demanded, in a sort of grunt, 'Eh bien, qu'est ce que c'est?' always without pausing in his work or looking round. Nina gave two little ahems, tense with suppressed mirth; and slowly, indifferently, Chalks turned an absent-minded face in our direction. But, next instant, there was a shout—a rush—a confusion of forms in the middle of the floor—and I realised that I was not the only one to be honoured by a kiss and an embrace. 'Oh, you're covering me with paint,' Nina protested suddenly; and indeed he had forgotten to drop his brush and palette, and great dabs of colour were clinging to her cloak. While he was doing penance, scrubbing the garment with rags soaked in turpentine, he kept shaking his head, and murmuring, from time to time, as he glanced up at her, 'Well, I'll be dumned.'
'It's very nice and polite of you, Chalks,' she said, by and by, 'a very graceful concession to my sex. But, if you think it would relieve you once for all, you have my full permission to pronounce it—amned.'
Chalks did no more work that afternoon; and that evening quite twenty of us dined at Madame Chanve's; and it was almost like old times.
VIII.
'Oh, yes,' she explained to me afterwards, 'my uncle is a good man. My aunt and cousins are very good women. But for me, to live with them—pas possible, mon cher. Their thoughts were not my thoughts, we could not speak the same language. They disapproved of me unutterably. They suffered agonies, poor things. Oh, they were very kind, very patient. But—! My gods were their devils. My father—my great, grand, splendid father—was "poor Alfred," "poor uncle Alfred." Que voulez-vous? And then—the life, the society! The parishioners—the people who came to tea—the houses where we sometimes dined! Are you interested in crops? In the preservation of game? In the diseases of cattle? Olàlà! (C'est bien le cas de s'en servir, de cette expression-là.) Olàlà, làlà! And then—have you ever been homesick? Oh, I longed, I pined, for Paris, as one suffocating would long, would die, for air. Enfin, I could not stand it any longer. They thought it wicked to smoke cigarettes. My poor aunt—when she smelt cigarette-smoke in my bed-room! Oh, her face! I had to sneak away, behind the shrubbery at the end of the garden, for stealthy whiffs. And it was impossible to get French tobacco. At last I took the bull by the horns, and fled. It will have been a terrible shock for them. But better one good blow than endless little ones; better a lump-sum than instalments with interest.'
But what was she going to do? How was she going to live? For, after all, much as she loved Paris, she couldn't subsist on its air and sunshine.
'Oh, never fear! I'll manage somehow. I'll not die of hunger,' she said confidently.
IX.
And, sure enough, she managed very well. She gave music lessons to the children of the Quarter, and English lessons to clerks and shop girls; she did a little translating; she would pose now and then for a painter friend—she was the original, for instance, of Norton's 'Woman Dancing,' which you know. She even—thanks to the employment by Chalks of what he called his 'inflooence'—she even contributed a weekly column of Paris gossip to the Palladium, a newspaper published at Battle Creek, Michigan, U.S.A., Chalks's native town. 'Put in lots about me, and talk as if there were only two important centres of civilisation on earth, Battle Crick and Parus, and it'll be a boom,' Chalks said. We used to have great fun, concocting those columns of Paris gossip. Nina, indeed, held the pen and cast a deciding vote; but we all collaborated. And we put in lots about Chalks—perhaps rather more than he had bargained for. With an irony (we trusted) too subtle to be suspected by the good people of Battle Creek, we would introduce their illustrious fellow-citizen, casually, between the Pope and the President of the Republic; we would sketch him as he strolled in the Boulevard arm-in-arm with Monsieur Meissonier, as he dined with the Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy, or drank his bock in the afternoon with the Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour; we would compose solemn descriptive criticisms of his works, which almost made us die of laughing; we would interview him—at length—about any subject; we would give elaborate bulletins of his health, and brilliant pen-pictures of his toilets. Sometimes we would betroth him, marry him, divorce him; sometimes, when our muse impelled us to a particularly daring flight, we would insinuate, darkly, sorrowfully, that perhaps the great man's morals … but no! We were persuaded that rumour accused him falsely. The story that he had been seen dancing at Bullier's with the notorious Duchesse de Z—— was a baseless fabrication. Unprincipled? Oh, we were nothing if not unprincipled. And our pleasure was so exquisite, and it worried our victim so. 'I suppose you think it's funny, don't you?' he used to ask, with a feint of superior scorn which put its fine flower to our hilarity. 'Look out, or you'll bust,' he would warn us, the only unconvulsed member present. 'By gum, you're easily amused.' We always wrote of him respectfully as Mr. Charles K. Smith; we never faintly hinted at his sobriquet. We would have rewarded liberally, at that time, any one who could have told us what the K. stood for. We yearned to unite the cryptic word to his surname by a hyphen; the mere abstract notion of doing so filled us with fearful joy. Chalks was right, I dare say; we were easily amused. And Nina, at these moments of literary frenzy—I can see her now: her head bent over the manuscript, her hair in some disarray, a spiral of cigarette-smoke winding ceilingward from between the fingers of her idle hand, her lips parted, her eyes gleaming with mischievous inspirations, her face pale with the intensity of her glee. I can see her as she would look up, eagerly, to listen to somebody's suggestion, or as she would motion to us to be silent, crying, 'Attendez—I've got an idea.' Then her pen would dash swiftly, noisily, over her paper for a little, whilst we all waited expectantly; and at last she would lean back, drawing a long breath, and tossing the pen aside, to read her paragraph out to us.
In a word, she managed very well, and by no means died of hunger. She could scarcely afford Madame Chanve's three-franc table d'hôte, it is true; but we could dine modestly at Léon's, over the way, and return to the Bleu for coffee—though, it must be added, that establishment no longer enjoyed a monopoly of our custom. We patronised it and the Vachette, the Source, the Ecoles, the Souris, indifferently. Or we would sometimes spend our evenings in Nina's rooms. She lived in a tremendously swagger house in the Avenue de l'Observatoire—on the sixth floor, to be sure, but 'there was a carpet all the way up.' She had a charming little salon, with her own furniture and piano (the same that had formerly embellished our café), and no end of books, pictures, draperies, and pretty things, inherited from her father or presented by her friends.
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