The Open Question Part 42

Gano sold some valuable books, and went over to London with the proceeds to have it out with the editor. The upshot of the interview was that he declined to furnish any more "Notes." The editor seemed perfectly resigned. However, after the struggle in Paris, Gano was convinced that London was the likelier place for him to find a footing. In the background of his mind he had already, when he sold his books, foreseen and accepted the result of the further discussion of his "Notes." He would at all events be on the spot in London, and would quickly find some opening. Talent was not the drug in the market here, he told himself, that it was in France.

CHAPTER XV

And day after day, week after week, while he sought an opening, he very nearly starved. In a couple of months he had arrived at the conclusion that the fight in London was more sordid and more dispiriting than the direst poverty in Paris. About this time he came in for a distasteful piece of hack journalism, that brought him a disproportionate loathing and an inadequate reward of five pounds. He was strongly tempted to invest a part of this sole capital in returning to France. A couple of days later a letter arrived through the London branch of the Paris bankers from Henri de Poincy, back in the South of France on a holiday.

He asked for Ethan's private address, and said if he did not hear something satisfactory by return he would conclude the beastly English climate had made him ill; in which case he was straightway coming over to look Ethan up, and persuade him to return to his friends in Nice. If he did not hear by wire or letter in three days, De Poincy would come to London and see what was the matter. They were all anxious at his silence.

This determined the matter. Gano was not going to have his old friend find him in his present plight. Besides, he already owed him money, and had sworn to himself that he would not meet De Poincy again till he could go to him with the sum in his hands. Henri was far from well off, and, since his father's death the year before, had helped to support his sisters. Ethan wired: "Leaving London; quite well; remembrance to all; writing," and took the night-boat to Dieppe. He delayed further communication till he knew Henri would be back in Petersburg, and by that time he was able, by living on next to nothing, to return a part of the loan, and to represent himself as intensely glad to be in his old haunts again. These haunts were in reality very new, albeit in Paris; but he did not enter into details further than to say he was rediscovering the fact that he could write French much more easily and much better than he could English, and was doing some book-reviewing for the _Lendemain_.

He might have added, but did not, that he was getting at first-hand a very considerable knowledge of the darker side of life, but had no impulse to make artistic use of it. It did not stimulate, it did not even interest--it paralyzed him. "If I'd had the makings of a genuine poet in me," he admitted to Henri de Poincy afterwards, "those years might have buffeted some good work out of me. But _my_ muse was a miserable time-server, like the rest of my fine acquaintance. She left me when I wanted bread. The fact was, I was _feeling_ life too keenly to write about it. Poetizing in the face of such suffering as I saw and shared seemed a drivelling impertinence. Life was more terrible, more tremendous than anything any poet had said about it, or _could_ say."

Gano was unconsciously making of himself an obscure example of the fact that a man's temperament will find him out upon the removal of the artificial ballast. This removal so seldom takes place that the vaguest notions abound as to any given person's specific gravity. We go through life unconsciously floated, balanced, by family, by inherited friends, inherited pursuits, inherited opinions, inherited money--by a thousand conditions not made by ourselves, but found ready-made to our hands, an expression of other people's energy, supporting or neutralizing our own.

Gano's inclinations, not being volcanic or epoch-making, had been, up to the time of the break with his grandfather, dutifully filtered through environing circ.u.mstance. Even so, Mr. Tallmadge had had occasion to condemn his grandson's "queer tastes," his "visionary notions," his girlish compa.s.sion for suffering, his hypersensitiveness to blame, his even greater shrinking from hurting the feelings of others. The tough old New Englander's contempt for "sensitiveness" had at least done Ethan the service of giving him an exterior self-control, which seemed so far to deny the feelings it only masked, that he was able to pa.s.s comfortably in the crowd as a person more impa.s.sive, if anything, than the majority. But as soon as he was left to himself, and followed no longer by critical eyes, his natural bias announced itself. He felt less and less drawn to the insouciant artist life of the town; the happy-go-lucky ways lost their first fresh savor; the suppers, the orgies, the endless comment, quite as eager as any of the work and often more brilliant; the short, merry life of the happy little flies that buzz so busily about the flower-garden of art, and that vanish with the vanishing of day--they all ended by striking some note of discord in him, and making him feel out of place there. "Was he getting too old for this kind of thing?" he asked himself, with modern youth's morbid consciousness of the value certain people set upon one time of life to the exclusion of any other, forgetting that "to travel deliberately through one's ages is to get the heart out of a liberal education," and the heart out of enlightened satisfaction as well.

But Gano was, perhaps, only following the unwritten law that rules such haunts and their frequenters, for these gay Bohemians are all young--and very young indeed. No one knows where they go when their short hour is done. Their laughter lags a little behind the rest one day, and the next they are not there. A new face is in the old place, a younger voice is screaming theories and outlaughing the laughers who are left.

Gano knew whither one of these superannuated revellers of twenty-five or so had retired. This was a great good-looking Irishman, with an unaccountable French tongue in his rough, tawny head, the hardest worker, deepest drinker, and wildest theorist in the particular little circle that Gano had of late frequented. d.i.c.k Driscoll and he had got into the habit of coming away together from the modest cafe where the circle met. Now and then the older man would drag Gano off on some wild adventure, or they would scour Paris with no definite end in view, arguing, disputing, catching effects, till midnight met the dawn. From living in the same quarter they came by-and-by to live under the same roof, as a direct result of the Irishman's being as ready to discuss theories of life in general, or even Gano's work in particular, as he had been to harangue "the painter fellows" about brushwork and values.

He p.r.o.nounced those early poems "most awfully good, you know," and prophesied great things for the future. But for all this, deeper and deeper the conviction cut into Gano that he was not of the stuff that "makes its way in the world." This without any of the feeling that usually accompanies it--of contempt for those who were differently const.i.tuted. He sometimes soothed his hara.s.sed spirit, and consoled himself for his failures, by an odd inversion of common hopes. He bade himself realize that success would not bring him happiness, so why join the thoughtless chorus condemning poverty, obscurity, and hard work?

These last were not the heads of his indictment against life. At other times he would shut his eyes to this revelation of himself to himself.

"Skin-deep! skin-deep, like yours!" he burst out at Driscoll's observation on his friend's growing dissatisfaction with the scheme of things.

The Irishman was rather proud of his Schopenhauerism. It represented to him a mere mental gymnastic. This, too, although hard work, hard living, and hard drinking had injured his health, and the fact was more and more apparent. However, it is something behind experience that determines whether a man shall be an optimist or not. Gano shrank from an imputation of pessimism, as people do in whom the tendency is inborn and inveterate. "I tell you, Driscoll, if we weren't sharing it, we would think there was some good served by the ugliness and pain in the world, just as our betters do. If we took our place again in the holiday-making cla.s.s, we should be as diverted as the rest, with all the games and make-believes. We, too, should forget the essential cruelty of things."

But behind the boast was a heart-sinking, and a sense that it was a lie.

He would try again: "Because life has treated me cavalierly I think I have little zest for it. If I weren't bruised from crown to toe, I'd think the world a bed of roses." And then he would remember that that was far from being the account he would ever have given of his consciousness of things.

Before he betook himself to Bohemia, Gano had spent no small portion of his time in the brilliant circle Madame Astier's grace and wit had gathered round her. The young American not only cherished an enthusiasm for his middle-aged hostess, but he discovered a deep admiration as well for the lady's husband, a distinguished advocate, whom she obviously adored. Gano's sensibilities did, it is true, shrink at first before the man's pitiless cynicism, which spared few persons and fewer ideals. But although merely dazzled at the beginning by his brilliancy, Gano came in time to be proud of his friendship, and to recognize in his point of view a wholesome, bitter tonic, a corrective to certain ills that young flesh is heir to. This man of fifty-four, who would have shrugged derisively at the notion of "teaching" anybody anything, was still in many young eyes the very type of the modern philosopher: believing blandly in the scientific point of view, unmoved by sentimentalities, unblinded by enthusiasms, keen-witted, farsighted, practising with eminent success, in the most highly civilized society in the world, the most difficult of the arts--the art of living.

Gano was very much shaken by the terrible story of the double suicide of this brilliant pair, whose marriage had been so romantic, whose life together had seemed the one ideal of the old kind that they admitted into their smiling existence.

M. Astier, as all the world was being told, had returned home as usual on this particular afternoon from the Palais de Justice. His wife had been holding a reception. One lady remained after the other visitors had gone. When at last the door closed upon her, too, Madame Astier went to her husband's library and told him that the last visitor had outstayed the others to say that her husband was going to fight a duel on her account the next day with M. Astier, with whom she (the visitor) had an intrigue of three years' standing. She had come to Madame Astier to prevent the men's meeting.

A violent scene between husband and wife.

"The end has come!'" exclaims Astier.

"Yes, yes; we can't go on living after this!" cries the distracted wife.

She flies to her dressing-room and attempts to swallow poison. Astier's secretary rushes after her. While he is wrenching the poison away, the report of fire-arms. Both rush back to the library, where they find M.

Astier bathed in blood, dying. The wife, before she can be hindered, puts the smoking pistol to her head, fires another fatal shot, and the tragedy is done.

Gano had talked to Driscoll from time to time of the Astiers, of Clemenceau, and the other habitues of those delightful soirees, and of the regret he sometimes felt that he had not told his friends frankly of the change in his fortunes, and the reason he did not any longer frequent the Faubourg St. Honore.

"But I couldn't, somehow, talk to them of a thing we couldn't either laugh at or satirize. Still, they'd be among the first people that I'd go to if I had a stroke of luck."

And now, out of that atmosphere of gayety and _blague_, this! No sky apparently so cloudless but from its blue a bolt may fall. Ethan had rushed out and bought the _Justice_. He read Clemenceau's article aloud, translating hurriedly as he went on for a compatriot of Driscoll's, who had happened to drop in for a pipe and a crack:

"'This pitiless scoffer, Astier, this despairing sceptic, who spoke so slightingly of women and love, is now discovered to have been a man of soft and sentimental nature, without any reserve of appliances against woman's wiles or surging pa.s.sion. The so-called libertine, cauterized by Paris against Paris, was upset by an event which could have been easily foreseen. In a situation of the most commonplace kind, he so thoroughly lost all self-control that he could hit upon no other remedy than self-destruction.' How contemptuously he writes of his old friend's 'losing self-control' and the rest of it," said Gano, angrily, "as if the double death was the real tragedy!"

"What then?"

"Why, the moment when that nice woman discovered that the husband she had married so romantically, and who had been so devoted to her all those years, had turned round and betrayed her in the last chapter. I agree with them both: it wasn't much use to go on living after that."

"Oh, as to going on living," observed Driscoll, shortly, "it would puzzle most people to tell why they think that much use."

"But _these_ people--" began Gano.

"More like the rest of the world than they pretended, that's all," the visitor summed up, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe. "I've once or twice come near to some tragedy, as Gano has to this. It does feel a bit odd to realize we're all living our peaceful lives on the edge of a volcano. But, bless you!"--he clapped on his hat with a rakish air--"we get so used to it we forget all about it till our turn comes."

"Meanwhile, we're all in the conspiracy to pretend that tragedy is dead and buried in the works of the great dramatists," said Driscoll.

"Good job, too," commented the departing visitor, nodding to the two friends as he went off.

"Your cheerful compatriot is right," said Ethan, shaken suddenly out of his role as Nature's apologist. "Life simply doesn't bear being thought about."

Whereupon they proceeded to talk about it for hours on end. They uttered a deal of raw philosophy in those days, often with pa.s.sion, sometimes with hope. Driscoll, for all his profession of pessimism, had moments of splendid confidence that he had stumbled upon the Perfect Way. Gano would shake his head, repeating:

"'Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent Doctor and saint, and heard great argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by the same door as in I went.

"'... Their words to scorn Are scattered, and their mouths are stopped with dust.'"

Through a young painter from Basle, these two were among the first outside of the German circle to have some realization of the magnitude of Friedrich Nietzsche as a force to be reckoned with. But Gano shrank from the sound and fury of the iconoclast as much as from his more coherently expressed doctrines. It was as abhorrent to his new doubts as it was to his old faiths to hear that Nietzsche had said (speaking of Germany), "Nowhere else has there been so vicious a misuse of the two great European narcotics--alcohol and Christianity." Driscoll, knowing a good deal more about the first than he did about the last, professed his withers to be unwrung. What was there in the utterance that Gano should gibe at?

Almost from the beginning they wore their rue with a difference.

Driscoll raged at concrete mistakes and injustices in the scheme of things as presented to Richard Driscoll. The other, seeming to think he had fewer personal wrongs to complain of, capable of too keen a self-criticism to imagine himself a genius to whom the world owed special privileges, was coming rapidly to a more serious indictment of life on the basis of "the dread irrationality of the whole affair."

It is not a happy subject for contemplation, perhaps, but it is possible to ignore too absolutely that this is the att.i.tude of mind of a vast number of the young people of the time. No one with his cla.s.sics in his mind, no one even who has not forgotten Montaigne and Shakespeare, thinks that this desperate guessing at "the riddle of the painful earth" is an exercise peculiar to our day. What is perhaps new is the commonness of the interrogation among young men, rich and poor, industrious and idle, who have not genius wherewith to clothe and deck their failure to produce the answer. Such men have not the distractions and rewards of genius to take their minds off the fact of failure.

What does it matter if you, in common with all the laboring earth, are feeling in every fibre the force of the Duke's bitter exhortation to Claudio? what does it matter if you can turn life's discords into music such as this? Even a less lofty strain is reward sufficient for the singer, reason enough to reconcile the monstrous egoism of genius to the presence in the world of great sorrows that can be trans.m.u.ted into little songs. But to those whose music is shut up within them all their days, what shall help them bear the deafening discord of the jangling on and on of things that hurries them towards silence? There is an answer to this question, but it is not found among those usually given, which are for the most part variations of the philosophy of the ostrich.

Gano used to tell, laughing, of the way a great English lady met her son's shrinking confession of some deep, intellectual difficulty: "Do rouse yourself, St. John. Low spirits are such bad form."

"What was cultivated society?" Gano demanded of the Irishman. "A device for preventing people from serious thinking. Acceptance of this view was implicit in the very roots of language. You had to 'divert,' to 'distract' a man from the peril of looking facts in the face before you could expect him to be moderately happy. Games for grown-up children, the puerilities of country-house parties, what are they? Sage devices for preventing people from thinking, traps to snare and cage the intelligence--civilization's harmless anaesthetics. Oh yes, no mistake about our diversions being more wisely chosen in these 'scientific'

times than in the days when the one escape was into the wine-cup's _cul-de-sac_. What were they all--drinking, opium-eating, and the rest--but simply forms of that protest most thinking creatures find themselves making at some stage of their too-conscious life?"

Driscoll accepted this view of his excesses with equanimity, reminding Ethan in turn that there are in all ages bystanders at the board while the cup goes round--old ladies of both s.e.xes ready to ask, "What pleasure can men take in making beasts of themselves?" and there is not always a philosopher at the objector's elbow to answer, "He, madam, who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." The great moralist knew from personal experience what he was talking about. He had the sincerity to admit that his own long-abandoned drinking had not at any time been from love of good-fellowship. Away with the genial lie, "I drank to be rid of myself!"

But Gano's point was that these old childish ways of hiding the head under the bedclothes to keep out of the dark no longer comfort so many of the grown-up children of the world. "They are afraid," he said, "not only of the night, but, with a surer wisdom, of the morning. It is not so easy to keep to-morrow at bay. Men need less and less the warning of the taverner's wife: 'They one and all regret it in the morning.'"

Said Gano to himself, summing up his survey: "We should not depend on, but keep in reserve, some draught with no such menace in the dregs. What one surer than that which brings a good-night and no morrow at all forever any more?"

Not, he felt, as a result of his own hard knocks, but out of unbia.s.sed observation of the common lot, again and again, without personal resentment and without pa.s.sion, he found himself reverting to the thought of the unlivableness of life, unless a man should carry about a conviction of freedom in his soul--a freedom that should be not a phrase but a potent fact, conferring sovereignty over life and death, and so lifting men above the meaner tricks of chance.