Part 11

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 halfway 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 tomorrow; 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.

IV

Almost as soon as they entered the flat, French had again to hail the reappearance of his “luck.” Better, a thousand times better, to stand in this place with Donald Paul than with Horace Fingall’s widow!

Donald Paul, slipping the key into the rusty lock, had opened the door and drawn back to let the visitor pass. The studio was cold and empty—how empty and how cold! No one had lived in the flat since Fingall’s death: during the first months following it the widow had used the studio to store his pictures, and only now that the last were sold, or distributed for sale among the dealers, had the place been put in the hands of the agents—like Mrs. Morland’s house in Kensington.

In the wintry overhead light the dust showed thick on the rough paint-stained floor, on the few canvases leaning against the walls, and the painter’s inconceivably meagre “properties.” French had known that Fingall’s studio would not be the upholstered setting for afternoon teas of Lady Brankhurst’s vision, but he had not dared to expect such a scornful bareness. He looked about him reverently.

Donald Paul remained silent; then he gave one of his shy laughs. “Not much in the way of cosy corners, eh? Looks rather as if it had been cleared for a prize fight.”

French turned to him. “Well, it _was_. When he wrestled with the Angel until dawn.”

Mr. Paul’s open gaze was shadowed by a faint perplexity, and for half a second French wondered if his metaphor had been taken as referring to the former Mrs. Fingall. But in another moment his companion’s eyes cleared. “Of course—I see! Like What’s-his-name: in the Bible, wasn’t he?” He stopped, and began again impulsively: “I like that idea, you know; he _did_ wrestle with his work! Bessy says he used to paint a thing over twenty times—or thirty, if necessary. It drove his sitters nearly mad. That’s why he had to wait so long for success, I suppose.” His glance seemed to appeal to French to corroborate this rather adventurous view.

“One of the reasons,” French assented.

His eyes were travelling slowly and greedily about the vast cold room. He had instantly noted that, in Lady Brankhurst’s description of the place, nothing was exact but the blackness of the stairs that led there. The rest she must have got up from muddled memories of other studios—that of Jolyesse, no doubt, among the number. French could see Jolyesse, in a setting of _bibelots_, dispensing Turkish coffee to fashionable sitters. But the nakedness of Fingall’s studio had assuredly never been draped: as they beheld it now, so it must have been when the great man painted there—save, indeed, for the pictures once so closely covering the walls (as French saw from the number of empty nails) that to enter it must have been like walking into the heart of a sunset.

None were left. Paul had moved away and stood looking out of the window, and timidly, tentatively, French turned around, one after another, the canvases against the wall. All were as bare as the room, though already prepared for future splendours by the hand from which the brush had dropped so abruptly. On one only a few charcoal strokes hinted at a head—unless indeed it were a landscape? The more French looked the less intelligible it became—the mere first stammer of an unuttered message. The young man put it back with a sigh. He would have liked, beyond almost everything, here under Fingall’s roof to discover just one of his pictures.

“If you’d care to see the other rooms? You know he and Bessy lived here,” he heard his companion suggest.

“Oh, immensely!”

Donald Paul opened a door, struck a match in a dark passage, and preceded him.

“Nothing’s changed.”

The rooms, which were few and small, were still furnished; and this gave French the measure of their humbleness—for they were almost as devoid of comfort as the studio. Fingall must have lived so intensely and constantly in his own inner vision that nothing external mattered. He must have been almost as detached from the visible world as a great musician or a great ascetic; at least till one sat him down before a face or a landscape—and then what he looked at became the whole of the visible world to him.

“Rather doleful diggings for a young woman,” Donald Paul commented with a half-apologetic smile, as if to say: “Can you wonder that she likes the Nouveau Luxe?”

French acquiesced. “I suppose, like all the very greatest of them, he was indifferent to lots of things we think important.”

“Yes—and then....” Paul hesitated. “Then they were so frightfully poor. He didn’t know how to manage—how to get on with people, either sitters or dealers. For years he sold nothing, literally nothing. It _was_ hard on her. She saw so well what he ought to have done; but he wouldn’t listen to her!”

“Oh—” French stammered; and saw the other faintly redden.

“I don’t mean, of course, that an artist, a great creative artist, isn’t always different ... on the contrary....” Paul hesitated again. “I understand all that.... I’ve experienced it....” His handsome face softened, and French, mollified, murmured to himself: “He was awfully kind to Emily Morland—I’m sure he was.”

“Only,” Mrs. Paul’s husband continued with a deepening earnestness, as if he were trying to explain to French something not quite clear to himself, “only, if you’re not a great creative artist yourself, it is hard sometimes, sitting by and looking on and feeling that if you were just allowed to say a word—. Of course,” he added abruptly, “he was very good to her in other ways; very grateful. She was his Inspiration.”

“It’s something to have been that,” French said; and at the words his companion’s colour deepened to a flush which took in his neck and ears, and spread up to his white forehead.

“It’s everything,” he agreed, almost solemnly.

French had wandered up to a book-shelf in what had apparently been Fingall’s dressing-room. He had seen no other books about, and was curious to learn what these had to tell him. They were chiefly old Tauchnitz novels—mild mid-Victorian fiction rubbing elbows with a few odd volumes of Dumas, Maupassant and Zola. But under a loose pile the critic, with beating heart, had detected a shabby sketch-book. His hand shook as he opened it; but its pages were blank, and he reflected ironically that had they not been the dealers would never have left it there.

“They’ve been over the place with a fine-toothcomb,” he muttered to himself.

“What have you got hold of?” Donald Paul asked, coming up.

French continued mechanically to flutter the blank pages; then his hand paused at one which was scribbled over with dots and diagrams, and marginal notes in Fingall’s small cramped writing.

“Tea-party,” it was cryptically entitled, with a date beneath; and on the next page, under the heading: “For tea-party,” a single figure stood out—the figure of a dowdily-dressed woman seated in a low chair, a cup in her hand, and looking up as if to speak to some one who was not yet sketched in. The drawing, in three chalks on a gray ground, was rapidly but carefully executed: one of those light and perfect things which used to fall from Fingall like stray petals from a great tree in bloom. The woman’s attitude was full of an ardent interest; from the forward thrust of her clumsily-shod foot to the tilt of her head and the high light on her eye-glasses, everything about her seemed electrified by some eager shock of ideas.

“Who was talking to her—and what could he have been saying?” was the first thought the little drawing suggested. But it merely flashed through French’s mind, for he had almost instantly recognized the portrait—just touched with caricature, yet living, human, even tender—of the woman he least expected to see there.

“Then she _did_ know him!” he triumphed out aloud, forgetting who was at his elbow. He flushed up at his blunder and put the book in his companion’s hand.

Donald Paul stared at the page.

“She—who?”

French stood confounded. There she sat—Emily Morland—aquiver in every line with life and sound and colour: French could hear her very voice running up and down its happy scales! And beside him stood her lover, and did not recognize her....

“Oh—” Paul stammered at length. “It’s—you mean?” He looked again. “You think he meant it for Mrs. Morland?” Without waiting for an answer he fixed French with his large boyish gaze, and exclaimed abruptly: “Then you knew her?”

“Oh, I saw her only once—just once.” French couldn’t resist laying a little stress on the _once_.

But Donald Paul took the answer unresentfully. “And yet you recognized her. I suppose you’re more used than I am to Fingall’s way of drawing. Do you think he was ever very good at likenesses? I _do_ see now, of course ... but, come, I call it a caricature, don’t you?”

“Oh, what does that matter?”

“You mean, you think it’s so clever?”

“I think it’s magnificent!” said French with emotion.

The other still looked at him ingenuously, but with a dawning light of eagerness. It recalled to French the suppressed, the exaggerated warmth of his greeting on the hotel stairs. “What is it he wants of me? For he wants something.”

“I never knew, either,” Paul continued, “that she and Fingall had met. Some one must have brought her here, I suppose. It’s curious.” He pondered, still holding the book. “And I didn’t know _you_ knew her,” he concluded.

“Oh, how should you? She was probably unconscious of the fact herself. I spent a day with her once in the country, years ago. Naturally, I’ve never forgotten it.”

Donald Paul’s eyes continued obscurely to entreat him. “That’s wonderful!”

“What—that one should never forget having once met Emily Morland?” French rejoined, with a smile he could not repress.

“No,” said Emily Morland’s lover with simplicity. “But the coincidence. You see, I’d made up my mind to ask you—.” He broke off, and looked down at the sketch, as if seeking guidance where doubtless he had so often found it. “The fact is,” he began again, “I’m going to write her Life. She left me all her papers—I daresay you know about all that. It’s a trust—a sacred trust; but it’s also a most tremendous undertaking! And yesterday, after hearing something of what you’re planning about Fingall, I realized how little I’d really thought the book out, how unprepared I was—what a lot more there was in that sort of thing than I’d at first imagined. I used to write—a little; just short reviews, and that kind of thing. But my hand’s out nowadays; and besides, this is so different. And then, my time’s not quite my own any longer.... So I made up my mind that I’d consult you, ask you if you’d help me ... oh, as much as ever you’re willing....” His smile was irresistible. “I asked Bessy. And she thought you’d understand.”

“Understand?” gasped French. “Understand?”

“You see,” Paul hurried on, “there are heaps and heaps of letters—her beautiful letters! I don’t mean—” his voice trembled slightly—“only the ones to me; though some of those ... well, I’ll leave it to you to judge.... But lots of others too, that all sorts of people have sent me. Apparently everybody kept her letters. And I’m simply swamped in them,” he ended helplessly, “unless you will.”

French’s voice was as unsteady as his. “Unless I will? There’s nothing on earth I’d have asked ... if I could have imagined it....”

“Oh, really?” Paul’s voice dropped back with relief to its everyday tone. He was clearly unprepared for exaltation. “It’s amazingly kind of you—so kind that I don’t in the least know how to thank you.”

He paused, his hand still between the pages of the sketch-book. Suddenly he opened it and glanced down again at the drawing, and then at French.

“Meanwhile—if you really like this thing; you _do_?” He smiled a little incredulously and bent his handsome head to give the leaf a closer look. “Yes, there are his initials; well, that makes it all the more....” He tore out the page and handed it to French. “Do take it,” he said. “I wish I had something better of her to give you—but there’s literally nothing else; nothing except the beautiful enlarged photograph she had done for me the year we met; and that, of course—”

V

Mrs. Paul, as French had foreseen she would be, was late at their second appointment; later even than at the first. But what did French care? He could have waited contentedly for a week in that blatant drawing-room, with such hopes in his bosom and such a treasure already locked up in his portmanteau. And when at last she came she was just as cordial, as voluble and as unhelpful as ever.

The great difficulty, of course, was that she and her husband were leaving Paris so soon, and that French, for his part, was under orders to return at once to America. “The things I could tell you if we only had the time!” she sighed regretfully. But this left French unmoved, for he knew by now how little she really had to tell. Still, he had a good many more questions to ask, a good many more dates and facts to get at, than could be crowded into their confused hour over a laden tea-table, with belated parcels perpetually arriving, the telephone ringing, and the maid putting in her head to ask if the orange and silver brocade was to go to Biarritz, or to be sent straight on with the furs and the sports clothes to St. Moritz.