ONCE I was in Paris again. It was delightful, for now it was spring, or nearly so, and the weather was pleasant. People were pouring into the city in droves from all over the world. It was nearly midnight when I arrived. My trunk, which I had sent on ahead, was somewhere in the limbo of advance trunks and I had a hard time getting it. Parisian porters and depot attendants know exactly when to lose all understanding of English and all knowledge of the sign language. It is when the search for anything becomes the least bit irksome. The tip they expect to get from you spurs them on a little way, but not very far. Let them see that the task promises to be somewhat wearisome and they disappear entirely. I lost two facteurs in this way, when they discovered that the trunk was not ready to their hand, and so I had to turn in and search among endless trunks myself. When I found it, a facteur was quickly secured to truck it out to a taxi. And, not at all wonderful to relate, the first man I had employed now showed up to obtain his pourboire. “Oh, here you are!” I exclaimed, as I was getting into my taxi. “Well, you can go to the devil!” He pulled a long face. That much English he knew.
When I reached the hotel in Paris I found Barfleur registered there but not yet returned to his room. But several letters of complaint were awaiting me: Why hadn’t I telegraphed the exact hour of my arrival; why hadn’t I written fully? It wasn’t pleasant to wait in uncertainty. If I had only been exact, several things could have been arranged for this day or evening. While I was meditating on my sins of omission and commission, a chasseur bearing a note arrived. Would I dress and come to G.’s Bar. He would meet me at twelve. This was Saturday night, and it would be good to look over Paris again. I knew what that meant. We would leave the last restaurant in broad daylight, or at least the Paris dawn.
Coming down on the train from Brussels I had fallen into a blue funk—a kind of mental miasma—one of the miseries Barfleur never indulged in. They almost destroy me. Barfleur never, in so far as I could see, succumbed to the blues. In the first place my letter of credit was all but used up—my funds were growing terrifyingly low; and it did not make me any more cheerful to realize that my journey was now practically at an end. A few more days and I would be sailing for home.
When, somewhat after twelve, I arrived at G.’s Bar I was still a little doleful. Barfleur was there. He had just come in. That indescribable Parisian tension—that sense of life at the topmost level of nervous strength and energy—was filling this little place. The same red-jacketed musicians; the same efficient, inconspicuous, attentive and courteous waiters; Madame G., placid, philosophic, comfy, businesslike and yet motherlike, was going to and fro, pleasingly arrayed, looking no doubt after the interests, woes, and aspirations of her company of very, very bad but beautiful “girls.” The walls were lined with life-loving patrons of from twenty-five to fifty years of age, with their female companions. Barfleur was at his best. He was once more in Paris—his beloved Paris. He beamed on me in a cheerful, patronizing way.
“So there you are! The Italian bandits didn’t waylay you, even if they did rob you, I trust? The German Empire didn’t sit too heavily on you? Holland and Switzerland must have been charming as passing pictures. Where did you stop in Amsterdam?”
“At the Amstel.”
“Quite right. An excellent hotel. I trust Madame A. was nice to you?”
“She was as considerate as she could be.”
“Right and fitting. She should have been. I saw that you stopped at the National, in Lucerne. That is one of the best hotels in Europe. I was glad to see that your taste in hotels was not falling off.”
We began with appetizers, some soup, and a light wine. I gave a rough summary of some things I had seen, and then we came to the matter of my sailing date and a proposed walking trip in England.
“Now, I’ll tell you what I think we should do and then you can use your own judgment,” suggested Barfleur. “By the time we get to London, next Wednesday or Tuesday, England will be in prime condition. The country about Dorchester will be perfect. I suggest that we take a week’s walk, anyway. You come to Bridgely Level—it is beautiful there now—and stay a week or ten days. I should like you to see how charming it is about my place in the spring. Then we will go to Dorchester. Then you can come back to Bridgely Level. Why not stay in England and write this summer?”
I put up a hand in serious opposition. “You know I can’t do that. Why, if I had so much time, we might as well stay over here and settle down in—well, Fontainebleau. Besides, money is a matter of prime consideration with me. I’ve got to buckle down to work at once at anything that will make me ready money. I think in all seriousness I had best drop the writing end of the literary profession for a while anyway and return to the editorial desk.”
The geniality and romance that lightened Barfleur’s eye, as he thought of the exquisite beauty of England in the spring, faded, and his face became unduly severe.
“Really,” he said, with a grand air, “you discourage me. At times, truly, I am inclined to quit. You are a man, in so far as I can see, with absolutely no faith in yourself—a man without a profession or an appropriate feeling for his craft. You are inclined, on the slightest provocation, to give up. You neither save anything over from yesterday in the shape of satisfactory reflection nor look into the future with any optimism. Do, I beg of you, have a little faith in the future. Assume that a day is a day, wherever it is, and that so long as it is not in the past it has possibilities. Here you are a man of forty; the formative portion of your life is behind you. Your work is all indicated and before you. Public faith such as my own should have some weight with you and yet after a tour of Europe, such as you would not have reasonably contemplated a year ago, you sink down supinely and talk of quitting. Truly it is too much. You make me feel very desperate. One cannot go on in this fashion. You must cultivate some intellectual stability around which your emotions can center and settle to anchor.”
“Fairest Barfleur,” I replied, “how you preach! You have real oratorical ability at times. There is much in what you say. I should have a profession, but we are looking at life from slightly different points of view. You have in your way a stable base, financially speaking. At least I assume so. I have not. My outlook, outside of the talent you are inclined to praise, is not very encouraging. It is not at all sure that the public will manifest the slightest interest in me from now on. If I had a large bump of vanity and the dull optimism of the unimaginative, I might assume anything and go gaily on until I was attacked somewhere for a board bill. Unfortunately I have not the necessary thickness of hide. And I suffer periods of emotional disturbance such as do not appear to afflict you. If you want to adjust my artistic attitude so nicely, contemplate my financial state first and see if that does not appeal to you as having some elements capable of disturbing my not undue proportion of equanimity.” We then went into actual figures from which to his satisfaction he deducted that, with ordinary faith in myself, I had no real grounds for distress, and I from mine figured that my immediate future was quite as dubious as I had fancied. It did not appear that I was to have any money when I left England. Rather I was to draw against my future and trust that my innate capabilities would see me through.
It was definitely settled at this conference that I was not to take the long-planned walking tour in the south of England, lovely as it would be, but instead, after three or four days in Paris and three or four days in London, I was to take a boat sailing from Dover about the middle of April or a little later which would put me in New York before May. This agreed we returned to our pleasures and spent three or four very delightful days together.
It is written of Hugo and Balzac that they always looked upon Paris as the capital of the world. I am afraid I shall have to confess to a similar feeling concerning New York. I know it all so well—its splendid water spaces, its magnificent avenues, its varying sections, the rugged splendor of its clifflike structures, the ripping force of its tides of energy and life. Viewing Europe from the vantage point of the seven countries I had seen, I was prepared to admit that in so many ways we are, temperamentally and socially speaking, the rawest of raw material. No one could be more crude, more illusioned than the average American. Contrasted with the savoir faire, the life understanding, the philosophic acceptance of definite conditions in nature, the Europeans are immeasurably superior. They are harder, better trained, more settled in the routine of things. The folderols of romance, the shibboleths of politics and religion, the false standards of social and commercial supremacy are not so readily accepted there as here. Ill-founded aspiration is not so rife there as here: every Jack does not consider himself, regardless of qualifications, appointed by God to tell his neighbor how he shall do and live. But granting all this, America, and particularly New York, has to me the most comforting atmosphere of any. The subway is like my library table—it is so much of an intimate. Broadway is the one idling show place. Neither the Strand nor the Boulevard des Capucines can replace it. Fifth Avenue is all that it should be—the one really perfect show street of the world. All in all the Atlantic metropolis is the first city in the world to me,—first in force, unrivaled in individuality, richer and freer in its spirit than London or Paris, though so often more gauche, more tawdry, more shamblingly inexperienced.
As I sat in Madame G.’s Bar, the pull of the city overseas was on me—and that in the spring! I wanted to go home.
We talked of the women we had got to know in Paris—of Marcelle and Madame de B.—and other figures lurking in the background of this brilliant city. But Marcelle would expect a trip to Fontainebleau and Madame de B. was likely to be financially distressed. This cheerful sort of companionship would be expensive. Did I care to submit to the expense? I did not. I felt that I could not. So for once we decided to be modest and go out and see what we could see alone. Our individual companionship was for the time-being sufficient.
Barfleur and I truly kept step with Paris these early spring days. This first night together we revisited all our favorite cafés and restaurants—Fysher’s Bar, the Rat Mort, C——’s Bar, the Abbaye Thélème, Maxim’s, the American, Paillard’s and the like,—and this, I soon realized: without a keen sex interest—the companionship of these high-voltage ladies of Paris—I can imagine nothing duller. It becomes a brilliant but hollow spectacle.
The next day was Sunday. It was warm and sunny as a day could be. The air was charged with a kind of gay expectation. Barfleur had discovered a neo-impressionist portraitist of merit, one Hans Bols, and had agreed to have his portrait done by him. This Sunday morning was the first day for a series of three sittings; so I left him and spent a delicious morning in the Bois. Paris in spring! The several days—from Saturday to Wednesday—were like a dream. A gay world—full of the subtleties of social ambition, of desire, fashion, love-making, and all the keenest, shrewdest aspects of life. It was interesting, at the Café Madrid and The Elysée, to sit out under trees and the open sky and see an uninterrupted stream of automobiles and taxis pouring up, depositing smart-looking people all glancing keenly about, nodding to friends, now cordially, now tentatively, in a careful, selective social way.
One evening after I returned from a late ramble alone, I found on my table a note from Barfleur. “For God’s sake, if you get this in time, come at once to the Abbaye Thélème. I am waiting for you with a Mrs. L., who wants to meet you.” So I had to change to evening clothes at one-thirty in the morning. And it was the same old thing when I reached there—waiters tumbling over one another with their burdens of champagne, fruit, ices, confitures; the air full of colored glucose balls, colored balloons floating aloft, endless mirrors reflecting a giddy panorama, white arms, white necks, animated faces, snowy shirt bosoms—the old story. Spanish dancers in glittering scales, American negroes in evening clothes singing coon songs, excited life-lovers, male and female, dancing erotically in each other’s arms. Can it be, I asked myself, that this thing goes on night after night and year after year? Yet it was obvious that it did.
The lady in question was rather remote—as an English-woman can be. I’m sure she said to herself, “This is a very dull author.” But I couldn’t help it. She froze my social sense into icy crystals of “yes” and “no.” We took her home presently and continued our rounds till the wee sma’ hours.