The Quest of the Golden Girl: A Romance

  I really felt very dejected at this not of course entirely unexpectedrejection,--if one might use the word for a situation on which had justbeen set the seal of so unmistakable a kiss; but the vision in my heartseemed to smile at me in high and happy triumph. To have won Sylviawould have been to have lost her. My ideal had, as it were, held herbreath till Sylvia answered; now she breathed again.

  "At all events, we can go on being chums, can't we?" I said.

  For answer Sylvia hummed the first verse of that famous song writ byKit Marlowe.

  "Yes!" she said presently. "I will sing for you, dance for you,and--perhaps--flirt with you; but marry you--no! it's best not, forboth of us."

  "Well, then," I said, "dance for me! You owe me some amends for anaching heart." As I said this, the path suddenly broadened into alittle circular glade into which the moonlight poured in a silverflood. In the centre of the space was a boulder some three or fourfeet high, and with a flat slab-like surface of some six feet or so.

  "I declare I will," said Sylvia, giving me an impulsive kiss, andspringing on to the stone; "why, here is a ready-made stage."

  "And there," I said, "are the nightingale and the nightjar fororchestra."

  "And there is the moon," said she, "for lime-light man."

  "Yes," I said; "and here is a handful of glow-worms for the footlights."

  Then lifting up her heavy silk skirt about her, and revealing aparadise of chiffons, Sylvia swayed for a moment with her face full inthe moon, and then slowly glided into the movements of a mystical dance.

  It was thus the fountains were dancing to the moon in Arabia; it wasthus the Nixies shook their white limbs on the haunted banks of theRhine; it was thus the fairy women flashed their alabaster feet on thefairy hills of Connemara; it was thus the Houris were dancing forMahomet on the palace floors of Paradise.

  "It was over such dancing," I said, "that John the Baptist lost hishead."

  "Give me a kiss," she said, nestling exhausted in my arms. "I alwayswant some one to kiss when I have danced with my soul as well as mybody."

  "I think we always do," I said, "when we've done anything that seemswonderful, that gives us the thrill of really doing--"

  "And a poor excuse is better than none, isn't it, dear?" said Sylvia,her face full in the cataract of the moonlight.

  As a conclusion for this chapter I will copy out a little song which Iextemporised for Sylvia on our way home to Yellowsands--too artlesslyhappy, it will be observed, to rhyme correctly:--

  Sylvia's dancing 'neath the moon, Like a star in water; Sylvia's dancing to a tune Fairy folk have taught her.

  Glow-worms light her little feet In her fairy theatre; Oh, but Sylvia is sweet! Tell me who is sweeter!

  CHAPTER XII

  AT THE CAFE DE LA PAIX

  As love-making in which we have no share is apt to be eithertantalising or monotonous, I propose to skip the next fortnight andintroduce myself to the reader at a moment when I am once more alone.It is about six o'clock on a summer afternoon, I am in Paris, andseated at one of the little marble tables of the Cafe de la Paix,dreamily watching the glittering tide of gay folk passing by,--

  "All happy people on their way To make a golden end of day."

  Meditatively I smoke a cigarette and sip a pale greenish liquorsmelling strongly of aniseed, which isn't half so interesting as acommonplace whiskey and soda, but which, I am told, has therecommendation of being ten times as wicked. I sip it with a deliciousthrill of degeneration, as though I were Eve tasting the apple for thefirst time,--for "such a power hath white simplicity." Sin is for theinnocent,--a truth which sinners will be the first to regret. It wasso, I said to myself, Alfred de Musset used to sit and sip his absinthebefore a fascinated world. It is a privilege for the world to look ongreatness at any moment, even when it is drinking. So I sat, andprivileged the world.

  It will readily be surmised from this exordium that--incredible as itmay seem in a man of thirty--this was my first visit to Paris. You mayremember that I had bought Orlando's tickets, and it had occurred toSylvia and me to use them. Sylvia was due in London to fulfil adancing engagement within a fortnight after our arrival; so after atender good-bye, which there was no earthly necessity to make final, Ihad remained behind for the purposes of study. Though, logically, mypilgrimage had ended with the unexpected discovery of Sylvia Joy, yetthere were two famous feminine types of which, seeing that I was inParis, I thought I might as well make brief studies, before I returnedto London and finally resumed the bachelorhood from which I hadstarted. These were the grisette of fiction and the American girl offact. Pending these investigations, I meditated on the great city inthe midst of which I sat.

  A city! How much more it was than that! Was it not the most portentoussymbol of modern history? Think what the word "Paris" means to theemancipated intellect, to the political government, to the humanisedmorals, of the world; not to speak of the romance of its literature,the tradition of its manners, and the immortal fame of its women.France is the brain of the world, as England is its heart, and Russiaits fist. Strange is the power, strange are the freaks and revenges,of association, particularly perhaps of literary association. Herepompous official representatives may demur; but who can doubt that itis on its literature that a country must rely for its permanentrepresentation? The countries that are forgotten, or are of noimportance in the councils of the world, are countries withoutliterature. Greece and Rome are more real in print than ever they werein marble. Though, as we know, prophets are not without honour save intheir own countries and among their own kindred, the time comes whentheir countries and kindred are entirely without honour save by reasonof those very prophets they once despised, rejected, stoned, andcrucified. Subtract its great men from a nation, and where is itsgreatness?

  Similarly, everything, however trifling, that has been written about,so long as it has been written about sufficiently well, becomesrelatively enduring and representative of the country in which it isfound. To an American, for example, the significance of a skylark isthat Shelley sang it to skies where even it could never have mounted;and any one who has heard the nightingale must, if he be open-minded,confess its tremendous debt to Keats: a tenth part genuine song, therest moon, stars, silence, and John Keats,--such is the nightingale.The real truth about a country will never be known till everyrepresentative type and condition in it have found their inspiredliterary mouthpiece. Meanwhile one country takes its opinion of anotherfrom the apercus of a few brilliant but often irresponsible orprejudiced writers,--and really it is rather in what those writersleave out than in what they put in that one must seek the more reliabledata of national character.

  A quaint example of association occurs to me from the experience of afriend of mine, "rich enough to lend to the poor." Having met anAmerican friend newly landed at Liverpool, and a hurried quarter of anhour being all that was available for lunch, "Come let us have apork-pie and a bottle of Bass" he had suggested.

  "Pork-pies!" said the American, with a delighted sense of discoveringthe country,--"why, you read about them in Dickens!" Who shall say butthat this instinctive association was an involuntary severe, but notinapplicable, criticism? A nightingale suggests Keats; a pork-pie,Dickens.

  Similarly with absinthe, grisettes, the Latin Quarter, and so on.

  Why, you read about them in Murger, in Musset, in Balzac, and inFlaubert; and the fact of your having read about them is, I may add,their chief importance.

  So rambled my after-dinner reflections as I sat that evening smokingand sipping, sipping and smoking, at the Cafe de la Paix.

  Presently in my dream I became aware of English voices near me, one ofwhich seemed familiar, and which I couldn't help overhearing. Thevoice of the husband said,--you can never mistake the voice of thehusband,--

  'T was the voice of the husband, I heard him complain,--

  the voice of the husband said: "Dora, I forbid you! I will NOT allowmy wife to be seen again in the
Latin Quarter. I permitted you to goonce, as a concession, to the Cafe d'Harcourt; but once is enough. Youwill please respect my wishes!"

  "But," pleaded the dear little woman, whom I had an immediate impulse,Perseus-like, to snatch from the jaws of her monster, and turning tothe other lady of the party of four,--"but Mrs. ---- has never been,and she cannot well go without a chaperone. Surely it cannot matter foronce. It isn't as if I were there constantly."

  "No!" said the husband, with the absurd pomposity of his tribe.

  "I'm very sorry. Mrs. ---- will, of course, act as she pleases; but Icannot allow you to do it, Dora."

  At last the little wife showed some spirit.

  "Don't talk to me like that, Will," she said. "I shall go if I please.Surely I am my own property."

  "Not at all!" at once flashed out the husband, wounded in that mostvital part of him, his sense of property. "There you mistake. You aremy property, MY chattel; you promised obedience to me; I bought you,and you do my bidding!"

  "Great heavens!" I ejaculated, and, springing up, found myself face toface with a well-known painter whom you would have thought the mostBohemian fellow in London. And Bohemian he is; but Bohemians are seldomBohemians for any one save themselves. They are terrible sticklers forconvention and even etiquette in other people.

  We recognised each other with a laugh, and presently were at it, hammerand tongs. I may say that we were all fairly intimate friends, and thushad the advantage of entire liberty of speech. I looked daggers at thehusband; he looked daggers at me, and occasionally looking at his wife,gave her a glance which was like the opening of Bluebeard's closet.You could see the poor murdered bodies dangling within the shadowycupboard of his eye. Of course we got no further. Additionalopposition but further enraged him. He recapitulated what he would nodoubt call his arguments,--they sounded more like threats,--and as hespoke I saw dragons fighting for their dams in the primeval ooze, andheard savage trumpetings of masculine monsters without a name.

  I told him so.

  "You are," I said,--"and you will forgive my directness ofexpression,--you are the Primeval Male! You are the direct descendantof those Romans who carried off the Sabine women. Nay! you have a muchlonger genealogy. You come of those hairy anthropoid males who huntedtheir mates through the tangle of primeval forests, and who finallyobtained their consent--shall we say?--by clubbing them on the headwith a stone axe. You talk a great deal of nonsense about the NewWoman, but you, Sir, are THE OLD MALE; and," I continued, "I have onlyto obtain your wife's consent to take her under my protection thisinstant."

  Curiously enough, "The Old Male," as he is now affectionately called,became from this moment quite a bosom friend. Nothing would satisfy usbut that we should all lodge at the same pension together, and theremany a day we fought our battles over again. But that poor little wifenever, to my knowledge, went to the Cafe d'Harcourt again.

  CHAPTER XIII

  THE INNOCENCE OF PARIS

  This meeting with William and Dora was fortunate from the point of viewof my studies; for that very night, as I dined with them en pension, Ifound that providence, with his usual foresight, had placed me next toa very charming American girl of the type that I was particularlywishful to study. She seemed equally wishful to be studied, and we goton amazingly from the first moment of our acquaintance. By the middleof dinner we were pressing each other's feet under the table, and whencoffee and cigarettes had come, we were affianced lovers. "Why shouldI blush to own I love?" was evidently my quaint little companion'smotto; and indeed she didn't blush to own it to the whole table, andpublicly to announce that I was the dearest boy, and absolutely themost lovable man she had met. There was nothing she wouldn't do forme. Would she brave the terrors of the Latin Quarter with me, I asked,and introduce me to the terrible Cafe d'Harcourt, about which Williamand Dora had suffered such searchings of heart? "Why, certainly; therewas nothing in that," she said. So we went.

  Nothing is more absurd and unjust than those crude labels of nationalcharacter which label one country virtuous and another vicious, onemusical and another literary. Thus France has an unjust reputation forvice, and England an equally unjust reputation for virtue.

  I had always, I confess, been brought up to think of Paris as a sort ofSodom and Gomorrah in one. Good Americans might go to Paris, accordingto the American theory of a future state; but, certainly I had thought,no good Englishman ever went there--except, maybe, on behalf of theVigilance Society. Well, it may sound an odd thing to say, but whatimpressed me most of all was the absolute innocence of the place.

  I mean this quite seriously. For surely one important condition ofinnocence is unconsciousness of doing wrong. The poor despisedParisian may be a very wicked and depraved person, but certainly hegoes about with an absolute unconsciousness of it upon his gay andkindly countenance.

  "Seeing the world" usually means seeing everything in it that mostdecent people won't look at; but when you come to look at theseterrible things and places, what do you find? Why, absolutedisappointment!

  Have you ever read that most amusing book, "Baedeker on Paris"?

  I know nothing more delightful than the notes to the Montmartre andLatin Quarters. The places to which you, as a smug Briton, may or maynot take a lady! The scale of wickedness allowed to the waxworkBritish lady is most charmingly graduated. I had read that the cafewhere we were sitting was one of the most terrible places inParis,--the Cafe d'Harcourt, where the students of the Latin Quartertake their nice little domestic mistresses to supper. But Baedeker wasdreadfully Pecksniffian about these poor innocent etudiantes, many ofwhom love their lovers much more truly than many a British wife lovesher husband, and are much better loved in return. If you doubt it,dare to pay attention to one of these young ladies, and you willprobably have to fight a duel for it. In fact, these romanticrelations are much more careful of honour than conventional ones; forlove, and not merely law, keeps guard.

  I looked around me. Where were those terrible things I had read of?Where was this hell which I had reasonably expected would gape leaguesof sulphur and blue flame beneath the little marble table? I mentallyresolved to bring an action against Baedeker for false information.For what did I see? Simply pairs and groups of young men and womenchattering amiably in front of their "bocks" or their "Americains."Here and there a student would have his arm round a waist every oneelse envied him. One student was prettily trying a pair of new glovesupon his little woman's hand. Here and there blithe songs would springup, from sheer gladness of heart; and never was such a buzz of happyyoung people, not even at a Sunday-school treat. To me it seemedabsolutely Arcadian, and I thought of Daphnis and Chloe and the earlyworld. Nothing indecorous or gross; all perfectly pretty and seemly.

  On our way home Semiramis was so sweet to me, in her innocent, artlessfrankness, that I went to bed with an intoxicating feeling that I mustbe irresistible indeed, to have so completely conquered so true a heartin so few hours. I was the more flattered because I am not a vain man,and am not, like some, accustomed to take hearts as the Israelites tookJericho with the blast of one's own trumpet.

  But, alas! my dream of universal irresistibility was but short-lived,for next afternoon, as William and I sat out at some cafe together, Ifound myself the object of chaff.

  "Well," said William, "how goes the love-affair?"

  I flushed somewhat indignantly at his manner with sanctities.

  "I see!" he said, "I see! You are already corded and labelled, andwill be shipped over by the next mail,--'To Miss Semiramis Wilcox, 100199th St., Philadelphia, U.S.A. Man with care.' Well, I did thinkyou'd got an eye in your head. Look here, don't be a fool! I supposeshe said you were the first and last. The last you certainly were.There are limits even to the speed of American girls; but the first, myboy! You are more like the twelfth, to my ocular knowledge. Herecomes Dubois the poet. He can tell you something about Miss Semiramis.Eh! Dubois, you know Miss Semiramis Wilcox, don't you?"

  The Frenc
hman smiled and shrugged.

  "Un peu," he said.

  "Don't be an ass and get angry," William continued; "it's all for yourown good."

  "The little Semiramis has been seducing my susceptible friend here.Like many of us, he has been captivated by her naturalness, hernaivete, her clear good eyes,--that look of nature that is always art!May I relate the idyl of your tragic passion, dear Dubois, as an objectlesson?"

  The Frenchman bowed, and signed William to proceed.

  "You dined with us one evening, and you thus met for the first time.You sat together at table. What happened with the fish?"

  "She swore I was the most beautiful man she had ever seen,--and I amnot beautiful, as you perceive."

  If not beautiful, the poet was certainly true.

  "What happened at the entree?"

  "Oh, long before that we were pressing our feet under the table."

  "And the coffee--"

  "Mon Dieu! we were Tristram and Yseult, we were all the great lovers inthe Pantheon of love."

  "And what then?"

  "Oh, we went to the Cafe d'Harcourt--mon ami."

  "Did she wear a veil?" I asked.

  "Oui, certainement!"

  "And did you say, 'Why do you wear a veil,--setting a black cloudbefore the eyes and gates of heaven'?"

  "The very words," said the Frenchman.