all that first evening in paris the vision of his book grew and grew in french’s mind. much as he loved the great city, nothing it could give him was comparable, at that particular hour, to the rapture of his complete withdrawal from it into the sanctuary of his own thoughts. the very next day he was to see horace fingall’s widow, and perhaps to put his finger on the clue to the labyrinth: that mysterious tormenting question of the relation between the creative artist’s personal experience and its ideal expression. he was to try to guess how much of mrs. fingall, beside her features, had passed into her husband’s painting; and merely to ponder on that opportunity was to plunge himself into the heart of his subject. fingall’s art had at last received recognition, genuine from the few, but mainly, no doubt, inspired by the motives to which jolyesse had sneeringly alluded; and, intolerable as it was to french to think that snobbishness and cupidity were the chief elements in the general acclamation of his idol, he could not forget that he owed to these baser ingredients the chance to utter his own panegyric. it was because the vulgar herd at last wanted to know what to say when it heard fingall mentioned that willis french was to be allowed to tell them; such was the base rubble the temple of fame was built of! yes, but future generations would enrich its face with lasting marbles; and it was to be french’s privilege to put the first slab in place.
the young man, thus brooding, lost himself in the alluring and perplexing alternatives of his plan. the particular way of dealing with a man’s art depended, of course, so much on its relation to his private life, and on the chance of a real insight into that. fingall’s life had been obdurately closed and aloof; would it be his widow’s, wish that it should remain so? or would she understand that any serious attempt to analyse so complex and individual an art must be preceded by a reverent scrutiny of the artist’s personality? would she, above all, understand how reverent french’s scrutiny would be, and consent, for the sake of her husband’s glory, to guide and enlighten it? her attitude, of course, as he was nervously aware, would greatly depend on his: on his finding the right words and the convincing tone. he could almost have prayed for guidance, for some supernatural light on what to say to her! it was late that night when, turning from his open window above the throbbing city, he murmured to himself: “i wonder what on earth we shall begin by saying to each other?”
her sitting-room at the nouveau luxe was empty when he was shown into it the next day, though a friendly note had assured him that she would be in by five. but he was not sorry she was late, for the room had its secrets to reveal. the most conspicuous of these was a large photograph of a handsome young man, in a frame which french instantly recognized as the mate of the one he had noticed on mrs. morland’s writing-table. well — it was natural, and rather charming, that the happy couple should choose the same frame for each other’s portraits, and there was nothing offensive to fingall’s memory in the fact of donald paul’s picture being the most prominent object in his wife’s drawing-room.
only — if this were indeed donald paul, where had french seen him already? he was still questioning the lines of the pleasant oft-repeated face when his answer entered the room in the shape of a splendidly draped and feathered lady.
“i’m so sorry! the dressmakers are such beasts — they’ve been sticking pins in me ever since two o’clock.” she held out her hand with a click of bracelets slipping down to the slim wrist. “donald! do come — it’s mr. french,” she called back over her shoulder; and the gentleman of the photograph came in after her.
the three stood looking at each other for an interval deeply momentous to french, obviously less stirring to his hosts; then donald paul said, in a fresh voice a good deal younger than his ingenuous middle-aged face: “we’ve met somewhere before, surely. wasn’t it the other day at brighton — at the metropole?”
his wife looked at him and smiled, wrinkling her perfect brows a little in the effort to help his memory. “we go to so many hotels! i think it was at the regina at harrogate.” she appealed to their visitor for corroboration.
“wasn’t it simply yesterday, on the channel?” french suggested, the words buzzing a little in his own ears; and mrs. paul instantly remembered.
“of course! how stupid of me!” her random sweetness grew more concentrated. “you were talking to a dark man with a beard — andre jolyesse, wasn’t it? i told my husband it was jolyesse. how awfully interesting that you should know him! do sit down and let me give you some tea while you tell us all about him.”
french, as he took the cup from her hand, remembered that, a few hours earlier, he had been wondering what he and she would first say to each other.
it was dark when he walked away from the blazing front of the nouveau luxe. mrs. donald paul had given him two generous hours, and had filled them with talk of her first husband; yet as french turned from the hotel he had the feeling that what he brought away with him had hardly added a grain to his previous, knowledge of horace fingall. it was perhaps because he was still too blankly bewildered — or because he had not yet found the link between what had been and what was — that he had been able to sift only so infinitesimal a residue out of mrs. paul’s abundance. and his first duty, plainly, if he were ever to thread a way through the tangle, was to readjust himself and try to see things from a different point of view.
his one definite impression was that mrs. paul was very much pleased that he should have come to paris to see her, and acutely, though artlessly, aware of the importance of his mission. artlessness, in fact, seemed her salient quality: there looked out of her great sphinx-eyes a consciousness as cloudless as a child’s. but one thing he speedily discovered: she was keenly alive to her first husband’s greatness. on that point french saw that she needed no enlightenment. he was even surprised, sitting opposite to her in all the blatancy of hotel mirrors and gilding, to catch on her lips the echoes of so different a setting. but he gradually perceived that the words she used had no meaning for her save, as it were, a symbolic one: they were like the mysterious price-marks with which dealers label their treasures. she knew that her husband had been proud and isolated, that he had “painted only for himself” and had “simply despised popularity”; but she rejoiced that he was now at last receiving “the kind of recognition even he would have cared for”; and when french, at this point, interposed, with an impulse of self-vindication: “i didn’t know that, as yet, much had been written about him that he would have liked,” she opened her fathomless eyes a little wider, and answered: “oh, but the dealers are simply fighting for his things.”
the shock was severe; but presently french rallied enough to understand that she was not moved by a spirit of cupidity, but was simply applying the only measure of greatness she knew. in fingall’s lifetime she had learned her lesson, and no doubt repeated it correctly — her conscientious desire for correctness was disarming — but now that he was gone his teaching had got mixed with other formulas, and she was serenely persuaded that, in any art, the proof and corollary of greatness was to become a best seller. “of course he was his own worst enemy,” she sighed. “even when people came to buy he managed to send them away discouraged. whereas now —!”
in the first chill of his disillusionment french thought for a moment of flight. mrs. paul had promised him all the documentation he required: she had met him more than half-way in her lavish fixing of hours and offering of material. but everything in him shrank from repeating the experience he had just been subjected to. what was the use of seeing her again, even though her plans included a visit to fingall’s former studio? she had told him nothing whatever about fingall, and she had told him only too much about herself. to do that, she had not even had to open her beautiful lips. on his way to her hotel he had stopped in at the luxembourg, and filled his eyes again with her famous image. everything she was said to have done for fingall’s genius seemed to burn in the depths of that quiet face. it was like an inexhaustible reservoir of beauty, a still pool into which the imagination could perpetually dip and draw up new treasure. and now, side by side with the painter’s vision of her, hung french’s own: the vision of the too-smiling beauty set in glasses and glitter, preoccupied with dressmakers and theatre-stalls, and affirming her husband’s genius in terms of the auction room and the stock exchange!
“oh, hang it — what can she give me? i’ll go straight back to new york,” the young man suddenly resolved. the resolve even carried him precipitately back to his hotel; but on its threshold another thought arrested him. horace fingall had not been the only object of his pilgrimage: he had come to paris to learn what he could of emily morland too. that purpose he had naturally not avowed at the nouveau luxe: it was hardly the moment to confess his double quest. but the manifest friendliness of donald paul convinced him that there would be no difficulty in obtaining whatever enlightenment it was in the young man’s power to give. donald paul, at first sight, seemed hardly more expressive than his wife; but though his last avatar was one so remote from literature, at least he had once touched its borders and even worn its livery. his great romance had originated in the accident of his having written an article about its heroine; and transient and unproductive as that phase of his experience had probably been, it must have given him a sense of values more applicable than mrs. paul’s to french’s purpose.
luck continued to favour him; for the next morning, as he went down the stairs of his hotel, he met donald paul coming up.
his visitor, fresh and handsome as his photograph, and dressed in exactly the right clothes for the hour and the occasion, held out an eager hand.
“i’m so glad — i hoped i’d catch you,” he smiled up at the descending french; and then, as if to tone down what might seem an excess of warmth, or at least make it appear the mere overflow of his natural spirits, he added: “my wife rushed me off to say how sorry she is that she can’t take you to the studio this morning. she’d quite forgotten an appointment with her dressmaker — one of her dressmakers!” donald paul stressed it with a frank laugh; his desire, evidently, was to forestall french’s surprise. “you see,” he explained, perhaps guessing that a sense of values was expected of him, “it’s rather more of a business for her than for — well, the average woman. these people — the big ones — are really artists themselves nowadays, aren’t they? and they all regard her as a sort of inspiration; she really tries out the coming fashions for them — lots of things succeed or fail as they happen to look on her.” here he seemed to think another laugh necessary. “she’s always been an inspiration; it’s come to be a sort of obligation to her. you see, i’m sure?”
french protested that he saw — and that any other day was as convenient —
“ah, but that’s the deuce of it! the fact is, we’re off for biarritz the day after to-morrow; and st. moritz later. we shan’t be back here, i suppose, till the early spring. and of course you have your plans; ah, going back to america next week? jove, that is bad.” he frowned over it with an artless boyish anxiety. “and tomorrow — well, you know what a woman’s last day in paris is likely to be, when she’s had only three of them! should you mind most awfully — think it hopelessly inadequate, i mean — if i offered to take you to the studio instead?” he reddened a little, evidently not so much at the intrusion of his own person into the setting of his predecessor’s life, as at his conscious inability to talk about horace fingall in any way that could possibly interest willis french.
“of course,” he went on, “i shall be a wretched substitute . . . i know so little . . . so little in any sense . . . i never met him,” he avowed, as if excusing an unaccountable negligence. “you know how savagely he kept to himself . . . poor bessy — she could tell you something about that!” but he pulled up sharp at this involuntary lapse into the personal, and let his smile of interrogation and readiness say the rest for him.
“go with you? but of course — i shall be delighted,” french responded; and a light of relief shone in mr. paul’s transparent eyes.
“that’s very kind of you; and of course she can tell you all about it later — add the details. she told me to say that if you didn’t mind turning up again this afternoon late, she’ll be ready to answer any questions. naturally, she’s used to that too!”
this sent a slight shiver through french, with its hint of glib replies insensibly shaped by repeated questionings. he knew, of course, that after fingall’s death there had been an outpouring of articles on him in the journals and the art-reviews of every country: to correct their mistakes and fill up their omissions was the particular purpose of his book. but it took the bloom — another layer of bloom — from his enthusiasm to feel that mrs. paul’s information, meagre as it was, had already been robbed of its spontaneity, that she had only been reciting to him what previous interrogators had been capable of suggesting, and had themselves expected to hear.
perhaps mr. paul read the disappointment in his looks, and misinterpreted it, for he added: “you can’t think how i feel the absurdity of trying to talk to you about fingall!”
his modesty was disarming. french answered with sincerity: “i assure you i shall like nothing better than going there with you,” and donald paul, who was evidently used to assuming that the sentiments of others were as genuine as his own, at once brightened into recovered boyishness.
“that’s jolly. — taxi!” he cried, and they were off.
