Part 63 (1/2)

'No, I never did. But I am a provincial, and I have seen nothing at all. Perhaps in London--'

'No, you would see nothing like it in London,' said Regnault decidedly. 'Bah! it is not that you are more virtuous than we are.

Who believes such folly? But your vice is grosser, stupider. Lucky for you! You don't sacrifice to it the best young brain of the nation, as we are perpetually doing. Ah, _mon Dieu_!' he broke out in a kind of despair, 'this enigma of art!--of the artist! One flounders and blunders along. I have been floundering and blundering with the rest,--playing tricks--following this man and that--till suddenly--a door opens--and one sees the real world through for the first time!'

He stood still in his excitement, a smile of the most exquisite quality and sweetness dawning on his strong young face.

'And then,' he went on, beginning to walk again, and talking much more to the night than to his companion, 'one learns that the secret of life lies in _feeling_--in the heart, not in the head. And no more limits than before!--all is still open, divinely open.

Range the whole world--see everything, learn everything--till at the end of years and years you may perhaps be found worthy to be called an artist! But let art have her ends, all the while, s.h.i.+ning beyond the means she is toiling through--her ends of beauty or of power. To spend herself on the mere photography of the vile and the hideous! what waste--what sacrilege!'

They had reached the Place de la Concorde, which lay bathed in moonlight, the silver fountains plas.h.i.+ng, the trees in the Champs-Elysees throwing their sharp yet delicate shadows on the intense whiteness of the ground, the buildings far away rising softly into the softest purest blue. Regnault stopped and looked round him with enchantment. As for David, he had no eyes save for his companion. His face was full of a quick responsive emotion.

After an experience which had besmirched every ideal and bemocked every faith, the young Frenchman's talk had carried the lad once more into the full tide of poetry and romance. 'The secret of life lies in _feeling_, in the heart, not the head'--ah, _that_ he understood! He tried to express his a.s.sent, his homage to the speaker; but neither he nor the artist understood very clearly what he was saying. Presently Regnault said in another tone:

'And they are such good fellows, many of them. Starving often--but nothing to propitiate the _bourgeois_, nothing to compromise the ”dignity of art.” A man will paint to please himself all day, paint, on a crust, something that won't and can't sell, that the world in fact would be mad to buy; then in the evening he will put his canvas to the wall, and paint sleeve-links or china to live.

And so generous to each other: they will give each other all they have--food, clothes, money, knowledge. That man who gave that abominable thing about St. Francis--I know him, he has a little apartment near the Quai St.-Michel, and an invalid mother. He is a perfect angel to her. I could take off my hat to him whenever I think of it.'

His voice dropped again. Regnault was pacing along across the Place, his arms behind him, David at his side. When he resumed, it was once more in a tone of despondency.

'There is an ideal; but so twisted, so corrupted! What is wanted is not less intelligence but _more_--more knowledge, more experience--something beyond this fevering, brutalising Paris, which is all these men know. They have got the poison of the Boulevards in their blood, and it dulls their eye and hand. They want scattering to the wilderness; they want the wave of life to come and lift them past the mud they are dabbling in, with its hideous wrecks and _debris_, out and away to the great sea, to the infinite beyond of experience and feeling! you, too, feel with me?--you, too, see it like that? Ah! when one has seen and felt Italy--the East,--the South--lived heart to heart with a wild nature, or with the great embodied thought of the past,--lived at large, among great things, great sights, great emotions, then there comes purification! There is no other way out--no, none!'

So for another hour Regnault led the English boy up and down and along the quays, talking in the frankest openest way to this acquaintance of a night. It was as though he were wrestling his own way through his own life-problem. Very often David could hardly follow. The joys, the pa.s.sions, the temptations of the artist, struggling with the life of thought and aspiration, the craving to know everything, to feel everything, at war with the hunger for a moral unity and a stainless self-respect--there was all this in his troubled, discursive talk, and there was besides the magic touch of genius, youth, and poetry.

'Well, this is strange!' he said at last, stopping at a point between the Louvre on the one hand and the Inst.i.tute on the other, the moonlit river lying between.--' My friends come to me at Rome or at Tangiers, and they complain of me, ”Regnault, you have grown morose, no one can get a word out of you”--and they go away wounded--I have seen it often. And it was always true. For months I have had no words. I have been in the dark, wrestling with my art and with this goading, torturing world, which the artist with his puny forces has somehow to tame and render. Then--the other day--ah! well, no matter!--but the dark broke, and there was light!

and when I saw your face, your stranger's face, in that crowd to-night, listening to those things, it drew me. I wanted to say my say. I don't make excuses. Very likely we shall never meet again--but for this hour we have been friends. Good night!--good night! Look,--the dawn is coming!'

And he pointed to where, behind the towers of Notre-Dame, the first whiteness of the coming day was rising into the starry blue.

They shook hands.

'You go back to England soon?'

'In a--a--week or two.'

'Only believe this--we have things better worth seeing than ”Les Trois Rats”--things that represent us better. That is what the foreigner is always doing; he spends his time in wondering at our monkey tricks; there is no nation can do them so well as we; and the great France--the undying France!--disappears in a splutter of _blague_!'

He leant over the parapet, forgetting his companion, his eyes fixed on the great cathedral, on the slender shaft of the Sainte Chapelle, on the sky filling with light.

Then suddenly he turned round, laid a quick hand on his companion's shoulder.

'If you ever feel inclined to write to me, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts will find me. Adieu.'

And drawing his coat round him in the chilliness of the dawn, he walked off quickly across the bridge.

David also hurried away, speeding along the deserted pavements till again he was in his own dark street. The dawn was growing from its first moment of mysterious beauty into a grey disillusioning light.

But he felt no reaction. He crept up the squalid stairs to his room. It was heavy with the scent of the narcissus.

He took them, and stole along the pa.s.sage to Elise's door. There were three steps outside it. He sat down on the lowest, putting his flowers beside him. There was something awful to him even in this nearness; he dare not have gone higher.