Grey Roses. Harland Henry

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      By this time the inevitable had happened, and we were all in love with her—hopelessly, resignedly so, and without internecine rancour, for she treated us, indiscriminately, with a serene, impartial, tolerant, derision; but we were savagely, luridly, jealous and suspicious of all new-comers and of all outsiders. If we could not win her, no one else should; and we formed ourselves round her in a ring of fire. Oh, the maddening, mock-sentimental, mock-sympathetic face she would pull, when one of us ventured to sigh to her of his passion! The way she would lift her eyebrows, and gaze at you with a travesty of pity, shaking her head pensively, and murmuring, 'Mon pauvre ami! Only fancy!' And then how the imp, lurking in the corners of her eyes, with only the barest pretence of trying to conceal himself, would suddenly leap forth in a peal of laughter! She had lately read Mr. Howells's 'Undiscovered Country,' and had adopted the Shakers' paraphrase for love: 'Feeling foolish.'—'Feeling pretty foolish to-day, air ye, gentlemen?' she inquired, mimicking the dialect of Chalks. 'Well, I guess you just ain't feeling any more foolish than you look.'—If she would but have taken us seriously! And the worst of it was that we knew she was anything but temperamentally cold. Chalks formulated the potentialities we divined in her, when he remarked, regretfully, wistfully, as he often did, 'She could love like Hell.' Once, in a reckless moment, he even went so far as to tell her this pointblank. 'Oh, naughty Chalks!' she remonstrated, shaking her finger at him. 'Do you think that's a pretty word? But—I dare say I could.'

      'All the same, Lord help the man you marry,' Chalks continued gloomily.

      'Oh, I shall never marry,' Nina cried. 'Because, first, I don't approve of matrimony as an institution. And then—as you say—Lord help my husband. I should be such an uncomfortable wife. So capricious, and flighty, and tantalising, and unsettling, and disobedient, and exacting, and everything. Oh, but a horrid wife! No, I shall never marry. Marriage is quite too out-of-date. I shan't marry; but, if I ever meet a man and love him—ah!' She placed two fingers upon her lips, and kissed them, and waved the kiss to the skies.

      This fragment of conversation passed in the Luxembourg Garden; and the three or four of us by whom she was accompanied glared threateningly at our mental image of that not-impossible upstart whom she might some day meet and love. We were sure, of course, that he would be a beast; we hated him not merely because he would have cut us out with her, but because he would be so distinctly our inferior, so hopelessly unworthy of her, so helplessly incapable of appreciating her. I think we conceived of him as tall, with drooping fair moustaches, and contemptibly meticulous in his dress. He would probably not be of the Quarter; he would sneer at us.

      'He'll not understand her, he'll not respect her. Take her peculiar views. We know where she gets them. But he—he'll despise her for them, at the very time he's profiting by 'em,' some one said.

      Her peculiar views of the institution of matrimony, the speaker meant. She had got them from her father. 'The relations of the sexes should be as free as friendship,' he had taught. 'If a man and a woman love each other, it is nobody's business but their own. Neither the Law nor Society can, with any show of justice, interfere. That they do interfere, is a survival of feudalism, a survival of the system under which the individual, the subject, had no liberty, no rights. If a man and a woman love each other, they should be as free to determine for themselves the character, extent, and duration of their intercourse, as two friends should be. If they wish to live together under the same roof, let them. If they wish to retain their separate domiciles, let them. If they wish to cleave to each other till death severs them—if they wish to part on the morrow of their union—let them, by heaven. But the couple who go before a priest or a magistrate, and bind themselves in ceremonial marriage, are serving to perpetuate tyranny, are insulting the dignity of human nature.' Such was the gospel which Nina had absorbed (don't, for goodness' sake, imagine that I approve of it because I cite it), and which she professed in entire good faith. We felt that the coming man would misapprehend both it and her—though he would not hesitate to make a convenience of it. Ugh, the cynic!

      We formed ourselves round her in a ring of fire, hoping to frighten the beast away. But we were miserably, fiercely, anxious, suspicious, jealous. We were jealous of everything in the shape of a man that came into any sort of contact with her: of the men who passed her in the street or rode with her in the omnibus; of the little employés de commerce to whom she gave English lessons; of everybody. I fancy we were always more or less uneasy in our minds when she was out of our sight. Who could tell what might be happening? With those lips of hers, those eyes of hers—oh, we knew how she could love: Chalks had said it. Who could tell what might already have happened? Who could tell that the coming man had not already come? She was entirely capable of concealing him from us. Sometimes, in the evening, she would seem absent, preoccupied. How could we be sure that she wasn't thinking of him? Savouring anew the hours she had passed with him that very day? Or dreaming of those she had promised him for to-morrow? If she took leave of us—might he not be waiting to join her round the corner? If she spent an evening away from us. …

      And she—she only laughed; laughed at our jealousy, our fears, our precautions, as she laughed at our hankering flame. Not a laugh that reassured us, though; an inscrutable, enigmatic laugh, that might have covered a multitude of sins. She had taken to calling us collectively Loulou. 'Ah, le pauv' Loulou—so now he has the pretension to be jealous.' Then she would be interrupted by a paroxysm of laughter; after which, 'Oh, qu'il est drôle,' she would gasp. 'Pourvu qu'il ne devienne pas gênant!'

      It was all very well to laugh; but some of us, our personal equation quite apart, could not help feeling that the joke was of a precarious quality, that the situation held tragic possibilities. A young and attractive girl, by no means constitutionally insusceptible, and imbued with heterodox ideas of marriage—alone in the Latin Quarter.

X.

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