CHAPTER I

A WASTER

It was still cold, but the skies were clear. The snow had been carted away and Paris was herself again; the note of her exhilarating, seductive, vibrant--a note at once curiously fiercer and more feminine than that of London.

René Dax, crossing the _Place du Carrousel_, stood for a moment listening to that vibrant note, sensible of its charm and challenge; looking westward, meanwhile, across the Tuileries Gardens and _Place de la Concorde_ to the ascending perspective of the _Champs-Élysées_. The superb _ensemble_ and detail of the scene, softened by lavender mist at the ground levels, was crowned by the blood-red and gold of a wide-flung frosty sunset--a city of fire, as the young man told himself, built on foundations of dreams!

He had just come away from the press view of a one-man show of his own drawings. The rooms were crowded to suffocation. The success of the exhibition was already assured, promising to be prodigious, to amount to a veritable sensation. He was aware of this, yet his mood remained an unhappy one. As usual the critics showed themselves a herd of imbeciles. They praised the wrong things, or, more exasperating still, praising the right ones praised them wrongly, extolling their weak points rather than their fine ones, misinterpreting their message and inner meaning. Had Adrian Savage been there--unluckily he was still in England--some sense might have been spoken. Adrian was an austere critic, but always an intelligent and discriminating one. As for the rest of the confraternity--René gazed mournfully at the flaming sunset splendor--they got upon his nerves, they nauseated him.

And it all went deeper than that. For those many square yards of wall, plastered with his mordant verdict upon the human species, got upon his nerves, too, and nauseated him. He recoiled, as he had often recoiled before--taking it thus wholesale--from his own merciless exposure of the follies, vulgarities, the mental and physical deformities and distortions of his fellow-creatures; recoiled from the reek of his own Rabelaisian humor, of his own extravagant ribaldry and ingenious grossness. It was his vocation, as that of other and more famous satirists, to wreak a vindictive vengeance thus upon humanity. Only, in his care, reaction invariably followed. The devil of unsanctified laughter for the time satiated and cast out of him, he wandered--as this evening--a very sad and plaintive little being, firmly resolving--as how often before!--once and for all to throw away his rather horrible pencil, and betake himself exclusively to the construction of those delicate lyrics and rondels from which, whatever minor perversions of sentiment they might exhibit, the witty bestiality common to his caricatures was conspicuously absent.

He wanted to forget the hot, close rooms, packed with admirers, male, and, though happily in a minority, female also. By René Dax that minority was held in particularly small respect. The woman who relished, or affected to relish, his art ought to be ashamed of herself--such at least was his opinion. His art was meant for men, not for women; and the women who couldn't arrive at that conclusion by instinct, unaided, were women for whom, especially in his existing mood, he had no use whatever, didn't want in the very least. That which he did want, under the head of things feminine, was something conspicuously different--a far-removed, stately, inaccessible type of womanhood. And, still more, he wanted the child who should grow into such womanhood--a tender, elusive, sprite-like, spotlessly innocent and unsoiled creature, to whom moral and physical ugliness were equally unknown and equally, saving the paradox, abhorrent.

Well, were not the tall, old-fashioned houses of the _Quai Malaquais_ across the river there just opposite, and was it not still early enough to pay a visit? But then, as he rather fretfully remembered, Madame St. Leger had been pertinaciously invisible of late. He had called several times, only to be told she was not receiving or that she was out. He had never succeeded in seeing her and little Bette; never, now that he came to think of it, since the day of the great snow, the day when Adrian, whose absence he had just been deploring, left for England.

The bringing of these two facts into any relation of cause and effect had not previously occurred to him. It did not do so seriously even now. Yet unquestionably the names of Madame St. Leger and Adrian Savage took up a position side by side in his mind, thereby subtly coloring his reflections. He had no friend upon whom he depended and who, in his capricious exacting fashion, he loved as he did Adrian. The friendship had remained practically unbroken since the time when Adrian, the healthier, happier-natured boy, protected him, the queer little Tadpole, from tormentors at school. This friendship had been among the wholesomest influences of his life, and, amid many aberrations and perversities of thought and conduct, he clung to it. But it followed on his self-absorption and selfishness, natural and assumed, that his friend's interests and concerns, save in so far as they bore direct relation to his own, were a matter of indifference to him. He had never troubled himself as to the possible state or direction of Adrian's affections, and perhaps consequently, this sudden juxtaposition of names came to him as a surprise, and an irritating one.

Slipping in and out between private cars, taxis, and humbler, horse-drawn vehicles, he crossed the roadway to the _Pont des Saints Pères_. The sunset glories faded, while avenues of living white and glow-worm green lights sprang into being. Still, here and there, red splashes, as of blood, stained the livid, swirling surface of the Seine, which, in half flood, fed by the melted snow, hissed and gurgled under the arches and against the masonry of the bridge.

As it happened, just then, a lull occurred in the cross-river traffic, a break in the quick-moving throng of foot-passengers, so that in front of René Dax the pale arc of the right-hand pavement showed empty in the whole of its length, save for a single tall, slouching, shabby figure, clothed in a blue-serge suit unmistakably English in cut and in pattern. As René advanced, his mind still working around those two names set in such irritating juxtaposition, he saw the man in the English-made suit first glance sharply to right and left, then bend down, grasping the outer edge of the parapet, while slowly and, as it seemed, furtively, drawing one knee up on to the flat of the coping.

--Was it possible that Madame St. Leger's repeated refusals to receive him were other than accidental? Was it possible they had some connection with Adrian's absence? Was it conceivable his friend had turned traitor, had interfered, saying or hinting at that which might, socially, justify such denial of admission? Suspicion, resentment, self-pity, a lively sense of personal injury invaded him.--

The shabby, slouching loafer's right knee was fairly upon the coping now. He threw up both arms, threw back his head, his mouth opened wide as one letting loose a great cry. René Dax saw his extended arms, his bare head, his profile with that wide-open mouth, dark against a pale background of buildings and cold, translucent sky. The effect was of the strangest, the more so that no sound came from the apparently loud-crying mouth. Suddenly his chin dropped on his breast. His hands were lowered, clutching at the edge of the parapet again, and he remained thus for a few seconds, immobile, crouched together, his left foot, in a well-cut but bulging hole-riddled boot, still resting upon the pavement.

Then in a flash, awakening from contemplation of his own lately discovered woes, René realized what was about to occur. His height and reach were insufficient, encumbered as he was, moreover, by a thick fur-lined overcoat, for him to get his arms round the crouching figure. So he just clutched whatever came handiest, the back of the fellow's jacket, the slack of the seat of his trousers. Exerting all his strength, René hauled and jerked at these well-worn garments. The attack, though neither very forcible nor very scientific, was completely unexpected. The man's grip relaxed. His knee slipped and he fell back, an amorphous indigo and sandy-red heap, upon the pallid asphalt.

René pulled a scented pocket-handkerchief out of the breast-pocket of his coat and proceeded delicately to wipe the fingers and palms of his gray _suède_ gloves. He was unaccustomed to such exertion. His heart thumped against his ribs. His sight was blurred. He felt slightly faint and light-headed and was grateful for the cold back-draught of air off the rapidly flowing river. It was his pride, part of his pose, in fact, never to display emotion; and he now found himself excited and shaken, by no means fully self-possessed. He needed a space of quiet in which to regain his accustomed affectations of bearing and manner. He was aware, too, that those shabby garments were decidedly unpleasant to touch. Therefore he stood still, breathing rather hard through his nostrils, and daintily wiping the neat, little gray suede gloves incasing his quick, clever little fingers.

"I must express regret for my violence," he said, with the utmost civility, to the heap on the pavement, as soon as he judged his voice sufficiently steady for speech. "I must apologize to you for such absence of ceremony, but really, my dear sir, it appeared to me no time should be lost. You had, unconsciously of course, placed yourself in a highly ridiculous position from which it was clearly incumbent upon me, as an amiable and sympathetic person, immediately to remove you. At times one is compelled to act with decision rather than politeness. This was a case in point. Doubtless you are at present annoyed with me. But a few moments' reflection will, I feel sure, commend my action to you. You will recognize how right, even to the point of an apparent sacrifice of personal dignity, I was."

The man by now had got upon all fours, looking like some unsightly, shambling animal. Limply he rose to his feet and, supporting himself against the balustrade, turned upon his savior a dissipated boyish countenance, down which tears dribbled miserably.

"Why the devil couldn't you leave me alone?" he asked, petulantly, in English. "What earthly concern is it of yours? Aren't I my own master?"

His voice rose to a wail.

"I've been trying to--to do it all day, but there have been too many people about. They stared at me. They suspected and followed me. I could not dodge them. Now I thought the opportunity had come. I was rid of them at last. I never saw you, curse you, you're so short. After all, one doesn't think of looking on the ground, except for vermin. And I'd just pulled myself together. I mayn't have the nerve to try again. I've lost my chance," he wailed, childishly, his weak, loose-lipped mouth twisted by the wretchedness of crying. "I've lost my chance through you, you beast. And you've torn my coat, too. It's the only one I have left; and I did want to look decent, when they found me, when I was dead."

He flung away passionately, pressing his face down on his folded arms upon the parapet, while his angular shoulders heaved and his body shuddered under the ragged blue-serge jacket.

"I shall not have the pluck again. I know myself, and I sha'n't have it. By now I should have been out of the whole accursed tangle. The whole show would have been over--over--I should know nothing more. I should be quit of my misery. I should be dead--ah! my God, dead--dead--"

But René Dax continued to wipe his neat, little gray _suède_ gloves. For his mood had changed. The taunt regarding his smallness of stature had turned him wicked, so that the exquisite minor poet, yearning for the companionship of things pure, lovely, and of good report, fled away. The injured friend fled away likewise. And the satirist, the caricaturist, impure and unsimple, greedy of human ugliness and degradation, malignant, mercilessly scoffing, reigned in their stead. And here, in this loose-limbed, blue-eyed, tawny-headed foreign youth--whose voice and speech, coarseness of expression notwithstanding, witnessed to education and gentle blood--vainly essaying to drown himself under the dying sunset skies of the city of fire built on foundations of dreams, was a subject, surely made to the satirist's hand, a subject of great price! The despotism of his art came upon René Dax, that necessity for vengeance upon humanity; and this time, for him, the edge of vengeance was sharpened by personal insult. For this was no common vagabond wastrel, thrown up from the foul underlying dregs of the population, but a person of condition, once his social equal, whose insolence therefore touched his honor as that of a man of the people could not.

"You are offensive, my young friend," he said, in careful, slightly over-pronounced, but fluent English. "You are also remarkably unattractive and wanting in intelligence. But I, being happily none of these things--offensive, I would say, unattractive or wanting in intelligence--can afford to be magnanimous. Learn, then, that had I not intervened--at much inconvenience to myself--to prevent your projecting your unsavory carcass into the river, but permitted you to carry out your thrice-idiotic purpose, it would not, as you say, have been all over by now and you quit of your misery, not one bit of it! Were you less crude in idea, less bestially ignorant, you would be aware that the principle of life is indestructible. Choking and struggling in the black water there you would have suffered abominable discomfort. But, even when the process of asphyxiation was complete, you yourself would have been still alive, still conscious, and would have discovered, to your infinite chagrin, that you had merely exchanged one state of being for an other and more odious one."

René rested his elbows upon the top of the balustrade, and, putting his little, tired baby face close, spoke with incisive clearness of enunciation into the young man's ear.

"Be under no delusion," he said. "Once alive, always alive. There is no breaking out of that prison. It is too cleverly constructed. You cannot get away. Your sentence is for life; and there is no term to living--none, absolutely none, forever and forever. You might have killed your present very unpleasing body, I grant, but this would not have advanced matters. For your essential self, the Me, the ego, would have remained and would have been compelled by incalculable and indomitable natural forces to surround itself with another body, in which to endure the shame of birth, the agonizing sorrows of childhood, and all that which, from childhood, has rendered existence intolerable to you, over again. Or you might, very probably, have come to rebirth lower down in the scale of creation--as a beetle to be crushed under foot, a dog to be pinned out on the vivisector's table, a lamb to be flayed at the abattoir, a worm to writhe on the fisherman's hook, a formless grub to bloat itself with carrion."

Here the wretched youth raised his head and stared at his self-constituted mentor. Tearful wretchedness had given place to an expression of moral terror, almost trenching on insanity--terror of immeasurable possibilities, of conceptions monstrous and unnatural.

"Who are you, what are you," he cried, "you mincing little devil? Isn't it all horrible enough already without you trying to scare me? I hate you. And you haven't been dead. How can you know?"

"Ah! you begin to take notice, to listen. And although you continue offensive, that you should listen is satisfactory, as it assures me my amiable attentions and instructive conversation are not altogether wasted. Learn then, my cherished pupil," René added, in a soft, easy, small-talk tone, "that you are still in error, since I--I who so patiently reason with you--have unquestionably been dead scores, hundreds, probably thousands of times. I have sampled many different incarnations, just as you, doubtless, under less indigent circumstances, have sampled dinners at many different restaurants; with this distinction, however, that whereas, in Paris at all events, you must have eaten a number of quite passable dinners, I have never yet experienced an incarnation which was not in the main detestable, a flagrant outrage on sensibility and good taste. Hence, you see, I do not speak at random, but from a wide basis of fact. I know all about it. And, therefore, I just emphasize this point once more. Engrave it upon the tablets of your memory. It is well worth remembering,

## particularly in reckless and exaggerated moments. Life is

indestructible. To end it is merely to begin it under slightly altered material conditions, with a prelude of acute mental and physical discomfort thrown in; hideous disappointment, moreover, waiting to transfix you when your higher faculties are--like mine--sufficiently developed for you to have acquired the power of looking backward and visualizing the premutations of your past."

The speaker turned sideways, leaning on one elbow. He took his handkerchief neatly from his breast-pocket again and held it to his nose.

"Really, you do need washing rather badly, my young friend!" he said. "But not down there, not in the but dubiously cleanly waters of our beloved Seine. A Turkish bath, and a vigorous shampoo afterward, and, subsequently, a change of linen.--However, that, for the moment, must wait. To return to our little lesson in practical philosophy.--I have rescued you from the disaster of premature reincarnation. I have also striven to improve your mind, to enlighten you, and that at considerable discomfort to myself, for I find it very cold standing and instructing you in the fundamental principles of being, here on this remarkably draughty bridge. I risk double pneumonia in your service. Be grateful, then, and make suitable acknowledgment of the immense charity I have shown you."

"You are a devil, and I hate you. Why can't you go away?" the young man answered in a terrified sulkiness.

"Truly you are mistaken," René returned, imperturbably. "My charity is too great to permit me to go away until you, my pupil, are provided for. You have so much which it would be to your advantage to learn! I am not a devil. No--but I admit that I am, to-day, one of the most-talked-about persons in Paris. I must therefore entreat you to adopt a more respectful tone and less accentuated manner. We have ceased to be alone. Many people are crossing the bridge. Among them must be those to whom my appearance is familiar; and, if I am remarked pleading thus with a debauched, would-be suicide, I shall certainly read in the morning papers that M. René Dax has discovered a new method of self-advertisement, a catchy puff for his picture-show. This would be disagreeable to me. My work is big enough to stand on its own merits. Self-advertisement, in my case, is as superfluous as it is vulgar. Compose yourself. Cease to be ridiculous. And above all do not call me rude names in the hearing of the public. Ah! excellent!--There is an empty cab."

He hailed a passing taxi, and, as the chauffeur drew up to the curb, put his arm within that of his companion, persuasively, even affectionately.

"Come, then, my child," he said. "See, my charity is really inexhaustible! I will take you home with me, though I confess you are a far from fragrant fellow-traveler, pending that so desirable Turkish bath. And, listen--I will take you home, I will also feed you. And I will draw little pictures of you, several little pictures, because I find in you a singularly edifying example of a singularly degraded type. After I have drawn as many little pictures as pleases me, I will have you washed, I will give you clothes, I will give you money, and then I will send you away without asking any questions, without so much as inquiring your name."

He moved toward the waiting car, the door of which the chauffeur held open. But the young man showed a disposition to struggle and hang back.

"Get in, dirty animal, or I call the police," René Dax ordered, sharply, "and recount to them your recent exploit. They will not give you money or clothes, nor will they abstain from asking inconvenient questions. Ah! you decide to accompany me? That is well."

And, with a roughly helping hand from the chauffeur, he projected the limp, wretched figure into the cab.

"A good tip, my son, and drive smartly," he added, after giving an address in the _Boulevard du Mont Parnasse_.

##