The Harbor Part 10

"Technique?" he cried. "It is nothing! To grip your soul in your two hands and press it on your canvas--that is art, that is Matisse!"

He took me night after night through old buildings up in Montparna.s.se, immense and dismal rookeries crowded with Poles, Bohemians and G.o.d knows what other races, all feverish post-impressionists. Often we would find three together close around one candle, scowling and squinting at their easels, gaunt, silent, eager. Matisse--Matisse!

"Most of them," said my guide, "are just mad. They cannot paint. All think they are going to do great things, but all they are going to do is to die."

It was through this little Hungarian that I made my first study of female life.

Why delay any longer? I had been in Paris over six months, and I had qualms almost of guilt at the thought of this chast.i.ty of mine. At first I said, "Art is a jealous mistress." And this did splendidly for a time.

But then a stout German youth came along and laid it down as an absolute law that no writer could do a woman right until he had lived with a dozen. Hence that scented little cat with whom he had lived for the past year. She was the first of the dozen, eh? d.a.m.n the fellow, how much was there in it? De Maupa.s.sant certainly hadn't held off. In fact there were few of my idols who had. Why not be brave and take the plunge? It need not be such a terrific plunge; no doubt if I went at it right I could find a safe, easy kind of a _her_, friendly and confiding, a thoroughly good fellow with none of these wild ups and downs. The less temperament the better; she must have a good quiet head on her shoulders; no doubt we would need it. And she must not be too young. Let her have had affairs enough to know that ours was only one more and would probably be as brief as the rest--the briefer the better.

So tamely I pictured my first love. And the gay old city of Paris smiled, and in that bantering way of hers she brought to me in a cafe one night a perfect young tigress of a girl, a lithe, dusky beauty with smouldering eyes, and said:

"Without doubt this one is better for you. Regard what loveliness, what fire! Oh, my son, why not be brave?"

I was not brave, I barely spoke, and my friend the little Hungarian Jew who had brought her to my table was forced to do the talking. For she, too, was silent. But how different was her silence from the quiet I had pictured. Presently, however, I became a little easier, and by degrees we began to talk. She told me she was a painter. An Armenian by birth, she had run away from home at eighteen, and here for two years in Julien's she had tried to paint till she felt she'd go mad. She talked in abrupt, eager sentences, breaking off to watch people around us. How her big eyes fastened upon them. "To watch faces until you are sure--and then paint! There is nothing else in the world!" she said. And I found this rea.s.suring.

After that I saw her many nights. And from time to time breaking that silence of hers, she became so fiercely confiding, not only about her painting, but about what she called her innermost soul, that soon I could look my De Maupa.s.sant square in the face, man to man, for I was learning a lot about women. As yet we were friends and nothing more, but I could feel both of us changing fast. "In a little while," I thought.

But alas. One night she took me up to her room and showed me her paintings. They were bad. They were fearfully bad, and my face must have shown the impression they made.

"You consider them frightful!" she exclaimed. I stoutly denied it, but things only went from bad to worse. Here was that temperament I had dreaded. Now she was clutching both my arms.

"Mon dieu! Why not say it? Why cannot you say it?"

"No," I replied. "You have done some extremely powerful work!" Anything to quiet her nerves. "Especially this one--look--over here!" And I pointed to one of her pictures.

"I will show you how I shall look at it!" she cried in a perfect frenzy of tears. She s.n.a.t.c.hed up a knife that lay on her table, a very old, curved, Armenian knife, and went at the painting and slashed it to shreds, and then scattered the shreds all over the room.

And watching this little festival, I thought to myself excitedly,

"I know enough about this girl!"

My retreat was so precipitate as to appear almost a flight.

"Yes," I said to myself, outside, "De Maupa.s.sant knew women. And he went insane at forty-five."

And so my next case was a chap from Detroit, whose aim, he told me, was no less than to make himself "by the sheer force of my will a perfect, all-round, modern man."

It was over his case that I lost what was left of my sense of honor. For I not only wrote him down, I kept what I had written. "Ten years from now," I said in excuse, "I won't believe him unless he's on paper." But having kept this, I began keeping others, until my locked drawer was filled with the dreams and ambitions and even the loves of my confiding, innocent friends. At last I was a writer.

What a relief when my mother wrote that my father had consented to a second year abroad for me. In my grat.i.tude I even grew just a trifle homesick.

"Hadn't I better come home for the summer?" I wrote her.

"No," she replied, "we cannot afford it. I want you to keep right on with your work. I feel so sure you are working hard and will do things I shall be proud of."

I was not only working, but living, feeling, listening hard, under the stimulus day and night of the tense, rich life around me. About this time I made a friend of a gaunt, bearded Russian chap, whose dream for years had been, like mine, to become a writer of fiction. His G.o.d had been Turgenief. And a year ago, leaving his home, a little town near Moscow, with forty roubles in his purse he had set out on foot with a pack on his back to tramp the long and winding road that stretched away two thousand miles to the distant city of Paris, the place where his idol had lived and studied and written for so many years. Through this young Russian pilgrim I came to know the books of some of his countrymen, and through him I caught glimpses down into the vast, mysterious soul of that people in the North.

Through other chaps I met those days, other deep, tremendous vistas opened up as backgrounds for these Paris friends of mine. Half the night, in that cafe endeared to so many youths of all nations under its name of "The Dirty Spoon," I heard talk about all things under the sun, talk that was a merry war of words, ideas and points of view as wide apart as that of a j.a.p and a German. For every land upon the earth had sent its army of ideas, and they all charged together here, and the walls of the Dirty Spoon resounded with the battle--with roars of laughter and applause. For we were of free, tolerant minds. We were gay, young dogs of war who had left our tails behind us--our tails of prejudice, distrust--and our emanc.i.p.ated souls had only scorn for hatreds born of race or creed. Like J. K., we had rid ourselves of all creeds past and present--but J. K. had always been free with a scowl, his feet set grimly on the ground--we here were free with a verve and a dash that took us careering up into the stars to laugh at the very heavens.

There was breadth in our very manner of speech. For here were we from all over the earth, all speaking one tongue, the language in which half the things that had moved the world had been said by men before us. And what sparkling things there were still to be said, what dazzling things we would see and do, in this prodigious onward march of the armies of peace, out of all dark ages into a glad new world for men, where our great smiling G.o.ddess of all the arts would reign supreme, where we would dream mighty visions of life and all these visions would come true.

So we saw the world those days in the radiant city on the Seine.

And meanwhile far up in the North, the Russian Czar, having started with loud ostentation the movement for a world-wide peace, was swiftly completing his preparations to strike with his armies at j.a.pan. And the other nations of Europe, jealous and suspicious of each other's every secret plan--they, too, were making ready for what the future years might bring.

"Young men are lucky. They will see great things."

And these young men have seen great things. But they have not been lucky.

CHAPTER XI

It was about a year after this that again Joe Kramer broke in on my dreams.

He arrived early on a raw, wet morning in the following winter. His all-night ride from Cherbourg had left him disheveled, unshaven and hungry.

"Well, boys," he asked when our greetings were over, "what do you think of the news?"

"What news?"

Joe gave us a grim, fatherly smile.

"Say. Do I have to come all the way from Chicago to tell you what's happening down the street? Well, you young beauty boosters, there's a panic on the Bourse this week that's got your fair city flat on her back. And the cause of the said panic is that France is in deep on Russian bonds, which are now worth about a cent to the dollar. Because the Russian people--already dead sick of the war with j.a.pan--have risen in a howling mob against their government. See?"

"I did hear of that," said the painter among us. "A Polish chap in the studio said something about it yesterday."

"Now, did he?" said the ironical Joe. "Just kind of murmured it, I suppose, while bending reverently over his art." He rose. "Well, boys, I'm sorry for you, but I've only got a day in this town, I'm off for Russia on the night train. Bill, I wish you'd help me here. I've got an awful lot to do and my French is still a little weak."

It was not at all weak, it was strong and loud. I can hear it still, Joe Kramer's French, and it is a fitting memory of that devastating day.

The day began so splendidly, so big with promise of great ideas. I grew quite excited about it. Here was Joe on his way to a real revolution.

Sent out by his Chicago paper, he was going to Russia to see a whole people fight to be free--a struggle prophesied long ago by Turgenief, Tolstoy and other big Russians whose work I admired. And now it was actually coming off--and Joe, the lucky devil, was going to be right on hand! From some mysterious source in New York he had secured a letter to a Russian revolutionist leader who for many years had been an exile here in Paris. Joe was anxious to see him at once.

"All right," I said eagerly. "Give me his address."

"Hold on," J. K. retorted. "It's not so easy as all that. I want to get into Russia. This man's house in Paris is watched day and night by the Russian secret police, and n.o.body who's seen with him has a chance of crossing the frontier. We've got to go slow."

"What'll we do?"

"I want you to steer me first to a Frenchman. He's an anarchist. Here's his address."

The anarchist was a bit disappointing. A mild little man, we found him in an attic room receiving a vigorous scolding from the huge blonde with whom he lived. But after reading Joe's letter, he, too, took on a mysterious air. He came with us in our cab, and off we went over Paris until I thought we should never end. Again and again the cab would stop and our guide would darkly disappear. But from one of these trips he returned triumphant.

"I have found his wife," he announced. "But she says she must have a look at you first." The cab rattled off, and the next stop was in front of a public library.