AS OTHERS SEE US

This is a story I heard told by the hero of it, if hero he could be called, Raoul de Reval. When I first met him Raoul was a handsome and charming man, in the early twenties, of good medium height, with upwaving golden moustache, noticeably fairer than his brown hair and hazel brown eyes; he had good teeth and very red lips. He was well made too, slight, but better looking because of his slightness, and finished perfectly even to his hands, with their small wrists and long tapering fingers. Before he got his degree as a lawyer in Paris he had begun to write, and his stories were curiously like himself: elegant, sympathetic, attractive, charmingly finished. I used to praise them to him, and he sought me out time and again, soliciting my praise almost like a girl.

I could not tell him the truth, that his stories and articles—all he wrote, in fact—were of light weight. The characters he selected were French characters of ladies and gentlemen of the better class, and they were not deeply realised nor their circumstances deeply etched in, yet the dialogue in his stories was excellently conventional, but true to the convention. I told him one day in a fit of frankness that if he ever had a great passion or a soul-searing, tragic experience he might become a great writer.

I left Paris and did not return to it for many years. After three or four years of absence I got a letter from Raoul asking me to send him, if I could spare it, five or six thousand francs, as he was in sore need. The letter was almost incoherent, pencilled in great haste: the address given was in the rue Ramey, up in Montmartre somewhere—a common, out-of-the-way little street. Nothing less like a begging letter could be imagined. It was even a poorer specimen of the art than the worst of his stories. I happened to be in funds and sent him the money, and, strange to say, did not hear from him again, no acknowledgment even, which seemed to me curious; but as I had registered the letter I shrugged my shoulders and promised myself if I ever met him again to find out what had happened—what hole he had fallen into, for he had always seemed to me to be well off.

Curiously enough, I did not get to Paris to stay for twelve or thirteen years: my work in London had been engrossing and I only passed through Paris without stopping long enough to look up any of my old friends. One day, however, the taxi-cab I was in nearly ran into, in fact did graze, a splendid limousine. An angry face was thrust out of the window of the limousine and the owner of it told my taxi-cab driver what he thought of him in picturesque French. The voice screamed, and it was from the thinness of the voice that the thought flashed across me that this was Raoul. I called him by his name, and the next moment we were shaking hands on the pavement at the corner of the rue de la Paix—shaking hands and grinning as old friends met by happy accident.

He wanted to know where I was staying—when I could come to see him—a dozen questions; finally we fixed a rendezvous for the next day at dinner.

He was living in the Parc Monceau, and he presented me to his wife, who seemed to me older than Raoul—a good deal older. They had no children, though they had been married six or seven years.

As I sat at table with them I could not help wondering at the changes wrought by time. Raoul had got much stouter, his face had lost its character of handsome elegance. He was still good-looking, but the flesh about the jaws was sagging into a double chin. There were the beginnings of gummy bags round the eyes: in fine, he was a man who had not got better-looking with age, but commoner, coarser.

The apartment was splendid, looking out on the Parc Monceau and beautifully furnished.

After dinner Madame Raoul had coffee served in her husband’s study and left us to ourselves rather prettily, saying she knew we would have lots to talk over: she had heard so much about me from Raoul that she was sure I would have nothing but a good influence on “Toutou,” as she called him, the pet name usually given to a little dog in France.

“Well, Toutou,” I said, smiling, “you seem to have landed on your feet. You never answered my letter from that place in the rue Ramey. It is seven years ago now.”

“No,” he said, “but your help saved me at a critical moment. I shall be delighted to send you a cheque in return.”

“Won’t you tell me about it?” I asked. “You were not a wild adventurer in life,” I added, giving my surprise words.

He hesitated a little while and then began:

“You used to say that I might be a great writer if I had a great passion. Well, the great passion came. I fell in love with a girl on the Bouffes (Les Bouffes Parisiennes, a theatre for lightest comedy). She was pretty, but what took me was her perfect figure: you know I was always a lover of sculpture rather than of painting; then, too, she was impudently vivacious, with a curious understanding of life and pert shameless speech. Talk about argot! she was born in the gutter and really used the language of the Apache with most extraordinary verve.

“Is it our opposites that tempt us so in life, attract us so desperately? I was pincé, by her naked vulgarity!

“I took an apartment for her and put her, as we say, dans ses meubles, and treated her as I would have treated a wife. I wonder now I didn’t marry her; I was crazy about her. I had a little patrimony my father had left me, a couple of hundred thousand francs, just enough for me to live on with my stories, but Augustine was terribly extravagant (yes, that was her name; it suited the little grig by contrast). Money slipped through her little claws like water, and at the end of three or four years I found I had spent everything. I had not written much in the forty months, so I had to try to get work on a paper. I had a bitter year: I fell as one might fall through a tree, clutching branch after branch that broke away with me and let me down lower, but Augustine stuck to me until our apartment was to be sold up. Then I discovered that she had been deceiving me for the last six months or so, and she told me quite coolly she was going to live with my friend Levallière, who had arranged to take over the furniture and the apartment and pay the debts.”

At this Raoul got up: “It nearly killed me, you know,” he said. “I had no idea one could suffer so intensely, and as time went on the ache of loss seemed to increase. I could not write or work; but I had a dear student friend who lived in the rue Ramey, and I went there and he took me in. I had a sort of brain fever, and it was when I had recovered from the fever and had made up my mind in my weak state to take up life again and not be beaten by a gourgandine that I wrote you that letter and you sent me the money, which practically saved me, gave me a chance anyhow to go home to Brittany and get quite sane again, and there on the plage I met my wife.

“She was a Mademoiselle Pousset, daughter of the great grocer and rich. She fell in love with me, and I saw that the sensible thing to do was to fall in love with her as far as I could and marry her, which I did promptly. She has many good qualities, my wife, and the Augustines teach you how valuable goodness is: a little heart is worth a lot of body—in anyone.

“We went to spend our honeymoon in Switzerland, in Lucerne, and the honeymoon was extended to three months because my father-in-law and mother-in-law were arranging our apartment for us.”

I interrupted him by saying: “At any rate, they have treated you very well in that respect.”

He burst out laughing.

“Oh,” he said carelessly, “this is the price of The Wingless Victory.” He pointed to a statue in the corner, an original from the Acropolis. “You know my story of that name?” he went on.

I replied politely: “Oh yes, I have heard of it.”

“You have not read it, then?”

I replied: “No, I have had so much to do in England.”

“Then I will give it to you to read, because it explains my life, or a good deal of it. I shall never forget the disappointment and depression of my marriage. I think I will tell you the real truth. My wife has a habit of falling asleep, and she slept in the train as we neared Paris. Very few women look their best when they are asleep. That little beast of an Augustine used to, but Madeline, my wife, doesn’t, and she slept all the way to Paris, I remember, as we returned. Every now and then she would wake herself with a loud snore and go to sleep again, and I was feeling woefully depressed: life seemed trivial and worthless: in fact I had a bad taste in my mouth, so to say.

“No one met us at the station, though I had told my father-in-law when we were due to arrive. My wife found nothing extraordinary in it; she yawned and said it was very kind of her mother to leave us alone the first day, and we drove straight to the apartment they had prepared for us.

“You never saw such an apartment! It was ugly and it was prim, business-like, and while my wife tried to go into ecstasies over it, I yawned myself stiff and thought of how to find some way to alter it.

“Pousset, my father-in-law, was proud of me as a writer, and when he came round next day he showed me how he had arranged my study with books of accounts and a proper desk to write at, and he hoped I would begin to work as soon as possible! And Madame Pousset pousséed, so to speak—very worthy people in their way. Next morning I found that my wife had arranged my desk, put out pens and paper, everything; like her father, she urged me to sit down to work.

“I don’t know whether it was the spirit of contradiction inherent in humanity or some ebb after the flood-tide of the honeymoon, but I could think of nothing but Augustine and the way she used to flit about the room, often in a chemise or less, and come and curl up on my knees and coax me not to write, but to come out for this, that, or the other piece of fun. So I let myself go and began describing her. She really had the prettiest figure I have ever seen in my life. She was just like one of the little Greek statuettes on the famous balustrade of the temple in Athens; she might even have stood for that statuette there of The Wingless Victory. I began eagerly, passionately, to write the whole story of our relations, and especially I tried to picture her slim loveliness and make it vivid by her crude bold speech and gutter phrases.”

Again he laughed.

“What are you laughing at?” I asked.

“I am laughing,” he replied, “because my wife got hold of the chapter where I described the girl’s perfect figure and her comment was characteristic:

“‘It is wonderful, you know, Toutou,’ she said, ‘but everybody will recognise that you are sketching me, and, though I like the picture enormously, I’m afraid your heroine wasn’t a good woman.’ Good!

“I stood in the room when she went out and held my head in my hands and asked myself was it possible that she could see herself in this lovely figure I had described. After all, you know, my wife is a certain weight.

“Ah, women are funny creatures. I went on with the book and it had an enormous success, and my father-in-law, when I told him I was going to have this new apartment on the strength of my first big cheque, was good enough to double the cheque, which enabled me to buy that little statuette of The Wingless Victory there in the corner and furnish this flat.”

“I must read the book,” I said; “but you have written some others, notably that wonderful study of a gourgandine, which can be compared only to the Odyssée d’une Fille of de Maupassant.”

“Really? You think that, do you!” he cried. “I know I have no genius,” he went on; “you made that clear to me years ago, but that book of mine is a book of pure observation.”

“Where on earth did you observe an ordinary woman as closely as that?—the little passing tempers of her, the funny view of life that such a woman has got, the extraordinary calculation in her and the everyday little phrases by which bit by bit she reveals herself—commonplace phrases that yet light up the character in a most extraordinary way? Where did you get all that?”

Raoul rose and stretched himself, smiling:

“To you I can tell everything. Well, all those sayings were taken down absolutely after little talks and quarrels with my wife, taken down absolutely from her lips—her very words. It is merely a close study of married life.”

“Good God!” I exclaimed.

“The curious part of it is,” he went on, “that she thought La Gourgandine a poor book. ‘It may be like some common girl,’ she would say, ‘but now only a year after our marriage you have left me out of your pages: I shall always prefer The Wingless Victory, where you described my very figure.’

“My wife has never recognised any likeness to herself in the exact portrait and that’s the key to her contentment: our mortal happiness is all—illusion and self-deception.”

A LUNATIC?