V NIGHTS IN PARIS (continued 2)

Anyway, another adventure I liked better was still to come before that long Paris night was at an end. It was so characteristic of Harland and his joy in the humorous and the absurd that I do not quite see why he did not let his Mademoiselle Miss share it. Outside the Rat Mort, in the early hours of the next morning, we picked up an old-fashioned one-horse, closed cab, built to hold two people, and of a type almost as extinct in Paris as the three-horse omnibus. It was the only cab in sight and we packed into and outside of it, not two but eight. As it crawled down one of the steep streets from Montmartre there was a creak, the horse stopped and, as quickly as I tell it, the bottom was out of the cab and we were in the street. Harland, as if prepared all along for just such a disaster, whisked the top hat so conspicuous in everything we did from the astonished Architect's head, handed it round, made a pitiful tale of le pauvr' cocher and his hungry wife and children, and implored us to show, now or never, the charitable stuff we were made of. Considering it was the end of a long evening, he collected a fairly decent number of francs and presented them to the cocher with an eloquent speech, which it was a pity someone could not have taken down in shorthand for him to use in his next story. The cocher, the least concerned of the group, thanked us with a broad grin, drew up his broken cab close to the sidewalk, took the horse from the shaft, clambered on its back, rode as fast as he could go down the street, and disappeared into the night. A sergent-de-ville, who had been looking on, shrugged his shoulders; in his opinion, cet animal là was in luck and probably would like nothing better than the same accident every night, provided at the time he was driving ladies and gentlemen of such generosity. Allez! Didn't we know the cab was heavily insured, all Paris cabs were, we had made him a handsome present—Voilà tout!

And so wonderful is it to be young and in Paris that we laughed our way back as we trudged on foot through the now dark and empty and silent streets between Montmartre and our rooms. I doubt if I could laugh now at the fatigue of it. Of all the many ghosts that walk with me along the old familiar ways, the one keeping most obstinately at my side is that of my own youth, reminding me of the prosaic, elderly woman I am, who, even if the zest for adventure remained, would be ashamed to be caught plunging into follies like those of the old foolish nights in Paris that never can be again, or who, if not ashamed, would be without the energy to see them through to the end.

VII

In Paris, as in London, a further ramble down those crowded, haunted, resounding Corridors of Time would lead me to many other nights of gaiety and friendliness and loud persistent talk.

Again, I would have my Whistler nights, the background now not our chambers, but the memorable apartment in the Rue du Bac rez-de-chaussée opening upon the spacious garden where, in the twilight, often we lingered to listen to the Missionary Monks in their spacious garden on the other side of the wall, singing the canticles for the Month of Mary so dear to me from my convent days—nights in the dining-room with its beautiful blue-and-white china, the long table and the Japanese "something like a birdcage" hanging over it in the centre, many once-friendly faces all about me, Whistler presiding in his place or filling the glasses of his guests as he passed from one to the other, always talking, saying things as nobody else could have said them, witty, serious, exasperating, delightful things, laughing the gay laugh or the laugh of malice that said as much as his words;—nights in the blue and white drawing-room, with the painting of Venus over the mantel, and the stately Empire chairs, and the table a litter of papers among which was always the last correspondence to be read, interrupted by his own comments that to those who heard were the best part of it—nights that will never perish as long as even one man, or woman, who shared in them lives to remember;—Whistler nights even after Whistler had left us for the land where there is neither night nor day: nights these with the old friends who had loved him, with the painter Oulevey and the sculptor Drouet who had been his fellow students, with Théodore Duret who had been faithful during his years of greatest trial, friends who rejoiced in talking of Whistler and of all that had gone to make him the great personality and the greater artist; but of the Whistler nights in Paris, as in London, I have already made the record with J. The story of them is told.

And along the same rich Corridors, I would come to nights only less worth preserving in the studios of artists, American and English, who studied and worked and lived in Paris—nights that have bequeathed to me the impression of great space, and lofty ceilings, and many canvases, and big easels, and bits of tapestry, and the gleam of old brass and pottery, and excellent dinners, and, of course, vehement talk, and a friendly war of words—nights with men irrevocably in the movement, whose work was conspicuous on the walls of the New Salon and had probably, a few hours earlier, kept us busy arguing in front of it and writing voluminous notes in our note-books—nights not the least stirring and tempestuous of the many I have spent in Paris, but nights of which my safe rule of silence where the living are concerned forbids me to tell the tale.

And one special year stands out when the little hotel in the Rue St. Roch was deserted for the Grand Hotel, and when all the nights seemed swallowed up in the International Society's business—not the International Society of Anarchists, but the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers in London, which, in those terribly enterprising Nineties, sent its deputation—J. included in it—to collect all that was most individual and distinguished in the Salons for its next Exhibition. It was a year of many wanderings in many directions to many studios of French artists, or foreign artists working in Paris—a year of many meetings of many artists night after night. But this clearly is not a story for me to tell, since the International was J.'s concern, not mine. In the hours away from my work I looked on, an outsider, but an amused outsider, marvelling as I have never ceased to marvel since the faraway nights in Rome, at the inexhaustible wealth of art as a subject of talk wherever artists are gathered together.

And rambling still further into that past, I would stumble into American nights—nights with old friends, established there or passing through and run across by chance—nights of joy in being with my own people again, of hearing not English, but my native tongue and having life readjusted to the American point of view. Nobody knows how good it is to be with one's fellow-countrymen who has not been years away from them. But these also are nights that come within the forbidden zone—the zone where Silence is Golden.

VIII

I have put down these memories of Paris nights and my yearly visit to Paris in the year when, for the first time since I began my work in its galleries, no Salon has opened to take me there in the springtime. With the coming of May the lilacs and horse-chestnuts bloomed with the old beauty and fragrance along the Champs-Elysées outside the Grand Palais, but inside no prints and paintings were on the walls, no statues in the great courts. To those admitted, the only exhibition was of the wounded, the maimed, the dying. Does it mean, I wonder, the end of all old days and nights for me in Paris, as the war that has shut fast the Salon door means the end of the old order of things in the Europe I have known? Shall I never go to Paris again in the season of lilacs and horse-chestnuts? Already I have ceased to meet my old friends by day in front of the picture of the year and to quarrel with them over it by night at a café table, or in the peaceful twilight of the suburban town and park and garden. Am I to lose as well the link with the past I had in the Salon, am I to lose perhaps Paris? Who can say at the moment of my writing, when the echo of shells and bullets is thundering in my ears? The pleasure of what has been becomes the dearer possession in the mad upheaval that threatens to sweep all trace of it away, and so I cling to the remembrance of my Paris nights the more tenderly and even with the hope, if far-fetched, that others may understand the tenderness. Youth sees little beyond youth, but as the years go on I begin to believe youth exists for no other end than to supply the incidents that age transforms into memories to warm itself by. If I have reached the time for looking back, I have my compensation in the invigorating glow, for all its sadness, that I get from my new occupation.