Nights Part 9

To the noise of a strident chorus in choice _argot_, which I was told I should be thankful I did not understand, Bruant showed us into his _cafe_. It was more like an amateur museum, with its big Fifteenth Century fireplace, and its bra.s.ses and tapestries on the walls, and if the huge _Mirliton_ hanging from the ceiling was not remarkable as a work of art, it should now, as historic symbol of the Nineties, have a place at the _Carnavalet_ by the side of the sign of the _Chat Noir_. When we had time to look round, we saw that the severe ordeal through which we had pa.s.sed had admitted us into the company of a few youths in the high stocks and long hair of the _Quartier Latin_, a _pet.i.t piou-piou_ or so, two or three stray workmen, women whom perhaps it would be more discreet not to attempt to cla.s.sify, all seated at little tables and harmlessly occupied in drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The place was free from tourists, we were the only foreigners, the handsome Aristide evidently sang his songs for the pleasure of himself and the people.

It was after we had sat down at our little table and given the order required of us that the incidents of the evening began to play so neatly and effectively into Harland's plot. A scowl was on Bruant's handsome face as he strode up and down his _cafe_-museum, for the striding, it seemed, was only part of the regular performance. He should at the same time have been singing the songs we had come to hear, and he could not without the pianist who accompanied him, and the pianist had chosen this night of all others to be late. The scowl deepened, I felt something like a stir of uneasiness through the room, and I did not wonder, for Bruant looked as if he had a temper it might be dangerous to trifle with. And then the strange thing happened and, to our surprise and his, our party whom he had met with such disdain saved the situation. How we did it may be read, with the variations necessary to fit his tale, in Harland's book. We had our own musician--her name was not Mademoiselle Miss--and when she discovered what was the matter, and why Bruant was scowling so abominably, she was moved by the sympathy of one artist for another and offered her services. Bruant led her to the piano, she accompanied him as best she could, the music being new to her, he sang us his _St. Lazare_ and _La Soularde_, all the while striding up and down with magnificent swagger, and was about to begin a third of his most famous songs when the pianist arrived, his unmistakable fright quickly lost in his bewilderment at being received with an amiability he had not any right to expect, and allowed to slip into his place at the piano unrebuked. Bruant, with the manners, the courteous dignity, of a prince, led our Mademoiselle Miss back to us, ordered bocks for her, for me--the only other woman at our table--and for himself, touched his with his lips, bowed, was gone and singing again before we could show that we had not yet learned to drain our gla.s.ses in the fas.h.i.+on approved of at the _Mirliton_.

So far Harland used this little episode much as it happened and made the most of it--I hope the curious who consult his story will be able to distinguish between his realism and his romance. But being mere man he missed the sequel which to the original of his Mademoiselle Miss and to me was the most dramatic and disturbing event of the evening. Gradually, as we sat at our table, watching Bruant and the company, it dawned upon us that Bruant did not exhaust the formalities of his entertainment upon the coming guest but reserved one for the parting guest which in our judgment was scarcely so amusing. For to every woman who left his _cafe_, Bruant's goodbye was a hearty kiss on both cheeks. We had the sense to know that, as we had come to the _Mirliton_ of our own free will, we had no more right to quarrel with its rules than to refuse to show our press ticket at the _Salon_ turnstile, or to give up our umbrellas at the door of the _Louvre_, or to question the regulations of any other place in Paris we chose to go to. If we insisted upon being made the exceptions to the farewell ceremony, and if Bruant would not let us off, could we resent it? And if the men of our party resented it for us, and if Bruant resented their resentment, how would that improve matters?

It was about as unpleasant a predicament as I have ever found myself in.

We talked it over, but could see no way out of it, and in our discomfort kept urging the men to stay for just one more song and then just one more, greatly to their amazement, for they were accustomed to not wanting to go and having to beg us to stay. The evil moment, however, could not be put off indefinitely, and, with our hearts in our boots, we at last got up from the table. We might have spared ourselves our agony.

Bruant, with the instinct and intelligence of the Frenchman, realized our embarra.s.sment and I hope I am right in thinking he had his laugh over us all to himself, so much more than a laugh did we owe him. For what he did when we got to the door was to shake hands with us ceremoniously, each in turn, to repeat his thanks for our visit and his grat.i.tude to the musician for her services, to take off his wide-brimmed hat--the only time that night--and to bow us out into the darkness of the _Boulevard Rochechouart_.

Following the example of Mademoiselle Miss in the story, unless it was she who was following ours, we finished the evening which had begun at the _Mirliton_ by eating supper at the _Rat Mort_. It was an experience I cared less to repeat even than the visits to the _Casino de Paris_ and the _Moulin Rouge_. As light and satisfying a supper could have been eaten in many other places, late as was the hour. Neither wit nor art entered into the entertainment as at the _Chat Noir_ and Bruant's. Vice was at no trouble to disguise itself. On the contrary, it made rather a cynical display, I thought, and cynicism in vice is never agreeable. I give my impressions. I may be wrong. I have not forgotten that the harmless portrait by Degas of Desboutin at the _Nouvelle Athenes_ scandalized all London in the Nineties. Everything depends on the point of view.

Anyway, another adventure I liked better was still to come before that long Paris night was at an end. It was so characteristic of Harland and his joy in the humorous and the absurd that I do not quite see why he did not let his Mademoiselle Miss share it. Outside the _Rat Mort_, in the early hours of the next morning, we picked up an old-fas.h.i.+oned one-horse, closed cab, built to hold two people, and of a type almost as extinct in Paris as the three-horse omnibus. It was the only cab in sight and we packed into and outside of it, not two but eight. As it crawled down one of the steep streets from _Montmartre_ there was a creak, the horse stopped and, as quickly as I tell it, the bottom was out of the cab and we were in the street. Harland, as if prepared all along for just such a disaster, whisked the top hat so conspicuous in everything we did from the astonished Architect's head, handed it round, made a pitiful tale of _le pauvr' cocher_ and his hungry wife and children, and implored us to show, now or never, the charitable stuff we were made of. Considering it was the end of a long evening, he collected a fairly decent number of francs and presented them to the _cocher_ with an eloquent speech, which it was a pity someone could not have taken down in shorthand for him to use in his next story. The _cocher_, the least concerned of the group, thanked us with a broad grin, drew up his broken cab close to the sidewalk, took the horse from the shaft, clambered on its back, rode as fast as he could go down the street, and disappeared into the night. A _sergent-de-ville_, who had been looking on, shrugged his shoulders; in his opinion, _cet animal la_ was in luck and probably would like nothing better than the same accident every night, provided at the time he was driving ladies and gentlemen of such generosity. _Allez!_ Didn't we know the cab was heavily insured, all Paris cabs were, we had made him a handsome present--_Voila tout!_

And so wonderful is it to be young and in Paris that we laughed our way back as we trudged on foot through the now dark and empty and silent streets between _Montmartre_ and our rooms. I doubt if I could laugh now at the fatigue of it. Of all the many ghosts that walk with me along the old familiar ways, the one keeping most obstinately at my side is that of my own youth, reminding me of the prosaic, elderly woman I am, who, even if the zest for adventure remained, would be ashamed to be caught plunging into follies like those of the old foolish nights in Paris that never can be again, or who, if not ashamed, would be without the energy to see them through to the end.

VII

In Paris, as in London, a further ramble down those crowded, haunted, resounding Corridors of Time would lead me to many other nights of gaiety and friendliness and loud persistent talk.

Again, I would have my Whistler nights, the background now not our chambers, but the memorable apartment in the Rue du Bac _rez-de-chaussee_ opening upon the s.p.a.cious garden where, in the twilight, often we lingered to listen to the Missionary Monks in their s.p.a.cious garden on the other side of the wall, singing the canticles for the Month of Mary so dear to me from my convent days--nights in the dining-room with its beautiful blue-and-white china, the long table and the j.a.panese "something like a birdcage" hanging over it in the centre, many once-friendly faces all about me, Whistler presiding in his place or filling the gla.s.ses of his guests as he pa.s.sed from one to the other, always talking, saying things as n.o.body else could have said them, witty, serious, exasperating, delightful things, laughing the gay laugh or the laugh of malice that said as much as his words;--nights in the blue and white drawing-room, with the painting of Venus over the mantel, and the stately Empire chairs, and the table a litter of papers among which was always the last correspondence to be read, interrupted by his own comments that to those who heard were the best part of it--nights that will never perish as long as even one man, or woman, who shared in them lives to remember;--Whistler nights even after Whistler had left us for the land where there is neither night nor day: nights these with the old friends who had loved him, with the painter Oulevey and the sculptor Drouet who had been his fellow students, with Theodore Duret who had been faithful during his years of greatest trial, friends who rejoiced in talking of Whistler and of all that had gone to make him the great personality and the greater artist; but of the Whistler nights in Paris, as in London, I have already made the record with J. The story of them is told.

And along the same rich Corridors, I would come to nights only less worth preserving in the studios of artists, American and English, who studied and worked and lived in Paris--nights that have bequeathed to me the impression of great s.p.a.ce, and lofty ceilings, and many canvases, and big easels, and bits of tapestry, and the gleam of old bra.s.s and pottery, and excellent dinners, and, of course, vehement talk, and a friendly war of words--nights with men irrevocably in the movement, whose work was conspicuous on the walls of the New _Salon_ and had probably, a few hours earlier, kept us busy arguing in front of it and writing voluminous notes in our note-books--nights not the least stirring and tempestuous of the many I have spent in Paris, but nights of which my safe rule of silence where the living are concerned forbids me to tell the tale.

And one special year stands out when the little hotel in the Rue St.

Roch was deserted for the Grand Hotel, and when all the nights seemed swallowed up in the International Society's business--not the International Society of Anarchists, but the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers in London, which, in those terribly enterprising Nineties, sent its deputation--J. included in it--to collect all that was most individual and distinguished in the _Salons_ for its next Exhibition. It was a year of many wanderings in many directions to many studios of French artists, or foreign artists working in Paris--a year of many meetings of many artists night after night. But this clearly is not a story for me to tell, since the International was J.'s concern, not mine. In the hours away from my work I looked on, an outsider, but an amused outsider, marvelling as I have never ceased to marvel since the faraway nights in Rome, at the inexhaustible wealth of art as a subject of talk wherever artists are gathered together.

And rambling still further into that past, I would stumble into American nights--nights with old friends, established there or pa.s.sing through and run across by chance--nights of joy in being with my own people again, of hearing not English, but my native tongue and having life readjusted to the American point of view. n.o.body knows how good it is to be with one's fellow-countrymen who has not been years away from them. But these also are nights that come within the forbidden zone--the zone where Silence is Golden.

VIII

I have put down these memories of Paris nights and my yearly visit to Paris in the year when, for the first time since I began my work in its galleries, no _Salon_ has opened to take me there in the springtime.

With the coming of May the lilacs and horse-chestnuts bloomed with the old beauty and fragrance along the _Champs-Elysees_ outside the _Grand Palais_, but inside no prints and paintings were on the walls, no statues in the great courts. To those admitted, the only exhibition was of the wounded, the maimed, the dying. Does it mean, I wonder, the end of all old days and nights for me in Paris, as the war that has shut fast the _Salon_ door means the end of the old order of things in the Europe I have known? Shall I never go to Paris again in the season of lilacs and horse-chestnuts? Already I have ceased to meet my old friends by day in front of the picture of the year and to quarrel with them over it by night at a _cafe_ table, or in the peaceful twilight of the suburban town and park and garden. Am I to lose as well the link with the past I had in the _Salon_, am I to lose perhaps Paris? Who can say at the moment of my writing, when the echo of sh.e.l.ls and bullets is thundering in my ears? The pleasure of what has been becomes the dearer possession in the mad upheaval that threatens to sweep all trace of it away, and so I cling to the remembrance of my Paris nights the more tenderly and even with the hope, if far-fetched, that others may understand the tenderness. Youth sees little beyond youth, but as the years go on I begin to believe youth exists for no other end than to supply the incidents that age transforms into memories to warm itself by. If I have reached the time for looking back, I have my compensation in the invigorating glow, for all its sadness, that I get from my new occupation.