by Ouida
He believed that she did not deceive herself when she thought that she could move others by the electric forces within herself. He recognised a certain volition in her which resembled that of genius. Her imagination, which could console her for so much, her quick assimilation of high thoughts and poetic fancies, her power of feeling impersonal interest, her very ignorance of real life, and imprudence in its circumstances, were all those of genius. Reared in prosaic habits, she had forced her own way to a subjective and idealistic mental life, even amidst the most opposing influences. She had heard the nightingale in the orange-boughs, though all those around her had been only busied counting the oranges to pack the crates. She had watched the shoal of fishes spread its silver over the waves beneath the moon, though all those around her at such a sight had only thought of the deep sea seine, the casks for market, and the curing brine. Surely this power of withdrawing from all familiar association, and escaping from all compelling forces of habit, could only exist where genius begat it?
But then he knew that even with the wedding-garment of genius on, yet to the wedding-feast of fame many are called but few are chosen. And it might be only a breath, a flash, a touch of inspiration, un brin de génie, as his wife had said, enough to have impelled her to push open the doors of her narrow destiny, and look thence with longing eyes, but not enough to force her with untired feet and unconquerable courage across that desert of effort which parts effort from triumph, poetic faculty from mere dreamy indolence. He who had always from his boyhood honoured and assisted talent, wherever he had found it, with a patience and a liberality very rare in this world, had suffered much disappointment from many ordinary and pretentious lives which he had been led to believe had had the hall-mark of intellectual superiority. He had too often found what deemed itself genius was mere facility; originality, mere eccentricity; ambition mere instinct of imitation; the ‘coal from the altar’ only the momentary blaze of a match. Many and many a time he might have said of the immature Muses who sought him, in the words of Victor Hugo, ‘Que de jeunes filles j’ai vues mourir!’
Damaris Bérarde appeared to him, as to his wife, a beautiful child with an uncommon nature, and with possibly uncommon gifts; but between the mere promise of the dawn of youth and the full heat of the meridian of genius what a difference there was!
CHAPTER XXVIII.
In lieu of driving homeward to Paris that day, he turned his horses’ heads in the direction of Asnières, where a once famous artist, David Rosselin, lived.
‘I will ask Rosselin,’ he thought. ‘Rosselin can judge as I have no power to do; and if he decide that she has genius she had better make a career so for herself. I have no business to stand between her and any future she may be able to create.’
He disliked the idea of his wife’s careless predictions being fulfilled. It seemed to him barbarous to let this white-souled sea-bird soar to the electric-flame life in Paris, fancying its light the sun. But who could tell?
It was a doubt which troubled and oppressed him as he drove back to Paris through the pastoral country, consecrated by the memory of Port-Royal. He felt that he had no right to make himself the arbiter of her destinies; he would be no more to her in her future than the dead thinkers whose brains had once been quick with philosophic and poetic creation amidst these quiet green meadows.
So he opened the little green trellis-work gate which was set in the acacia hedge of the cottage at Asnières, and found the once great impersonator of Alceste, of Tartuffe, of Sganarelle sitting beside his beehives and behind his rose-beds, with a white sun umbrella shading his comely and silvered head, and in his hand a miniature Aldine Plautus. His old servant was close by carefully dusting the cobwebs off the branches of an espaliered nectarine.
It was a small suburban villa which sheltered the last years of the great actor; a square white house set in a garden, over whose trim hedges of clipped acacia Rosselin could see the groups of students and work-girls going down to the landing-stairs of the Seine, and farther yet could see the grey-green shine of the river itself with its pleasure craft going to and fro in the midsummer sunshine.
David Rosselin in his prime had made many millions of francs, but they had gone as fast as they were gained, and in his old age he was poor: he had only this little square white box, so gay in summer with its roses and wistaria, and within it some few remnants of those magnificent gifts which nations and sovereigns and women and artists had all alike showered upon him in those far-off years of his greatness; and some souvenir from Othmar of an Aldine classic, or a volume bound by Clovis, which had lain on his table some New Year morning.
Othmar, who was quickly wearied by men in general, appreciated the intelligence and the character of this true philosophe sans le savoir, and would have made Rosselin free of all his libraries and welcome at all his houses if the old man would have left for them his white-walled and rose-covered cottage at Asnières.
‘No one who is old,’ said Rosselin, ‘should ever go out, though he may receive, because he knows that those whom he receives care to see him, or they would not come to him; but how can he be ever sure that those who invite him do not do so out of charity, out of pity, out of complacency?’
And save those of the theatres, of the Conservatoire, and of the public librairie, he crossed no threshold save his own.
‘If I had only been a grocer,’ he used to say with his mellow laugh, ‘a good plump grocer, as my poor father wished, who knows? I might have even been mayor of my native town by this, and had a son a vice-préfet!’
He was a man now nigh on eighty years, erect, vivacious, combating age with all the eternal youthfulness of genius, his black eyes had still a flash of those fires which had once scorched up the souls of women, and his handsome mouth had still the smile of fine irony which had adorned and accentuated his Alceste and his Mascarille. He dwelt alone with a servant nearly as old as himself; he had a great natural contempt for all domestic ties.
‘Had I become a grocer I would have married,’ he was wont to say. ‘If you are in trade, respectability is as necessary to you as dishonesty; but to the artist the nightcap of marriage is like the biretta which they draw over a man’s head in Spain before they garotte him. When once you put it on, adieu les rêves!’
And in his celibate old age, if he had no longer dreams, he had recollections and interests which kept him mentally young. His Paris was his one mistress, of whom he never tired.
He had left the stage five-and-twenty years and more, in his own person, but he still took the keenest interest, possessed the highest influence, in all higher dramatic art and life. The silence of David Rosselin on a first night condemned a play as an irrevocable failure, whilst his smile of approval was assurance to an author that he had successfully empoigné his public. He was the most accurate of judges, the most penetrating of critics; he would occasionally make little epigrammatic speeches which remained like little barbed steel darts, but he was indulgent to youth and encouraging to modesty. When Rosselin said that a pupil of the Conservatoire had a future, the future, when it became the present, never belied his judgment. For the rest, he was in a small way a bibliophile, delighted in rare copies and delicate bindings, and was an unerring authority on all centuries of costume and custom.
‘Incessantly acting all your life, when did you find all the time to acquire so much knowledge?’ Paul Jacob had said once to him.
David Rosselin had replied with his genial laugh:
‘Ah, mon cher, I have had all the time that I should have spent in quarrelling with my wife if I had had one!’
This love of books had been a bond of sympathy between him and Othmar ever since one night in the green-room of the Français, when they had spoken of fifteenth-century Virgils; and to him the thoughts of Othmar had turned more than once since the problem of Damaris and her destiny had come before him. There was no one in all Europe who could discern the gold from the pinchbeck in human talent with such precision; no one who could more unerringly discrimi
nate between the aspirations of genius and its capabilities, between the mere audacities of youth and the staying powers of true strength.
An absurd reluctance to speak of her, of which he was ashamed, and for which he would have assigned no definite reason even to himself, had made him indisposed to seek his old friend on such a subject; but it seemed to him, now that her soul was apparently set on the career which his wife’s careless praise had suggested to her, no other way of life was so possible for her, or so likely to afford her interest, occupation and independence.
He had seen the life of the stage near enough to loathe it. The woman whom he had adored with all a boy’s belief and passion, and who had been hired by his father’s gold to do him the cruel service of destroying all belief in him, had been an actress, famous for the brief day of splendour which beauty without genius can gain in the cities of the world. He hated to imagine that the time might come when this child, full now of ideals of heroisms, of innocence and of faithfulness, might grow to be such a woman as Sara Vernon had been! Sara Vernon, who had now turned saint and dwelt in the odour of good works on her estates in Franche-Comté: the estates which had been his father’s purchase-money of her.
But it seemed to him that he had no right to let his personal prejudices, his personal sentiments or sentimentality, stand between Damaris and any possibility of future independence, of future happiness which might open out before her through her natural gifts. He felt nothing for her except a great compassion and a passionless admiration, and he had a sense of indefinite self-blame and of infinite embarrassment for the position towards her into which circumstances had drifted him. It was not possible to retreat from it: he had become her only friend, her sole support; but the sense that to the world, and perhaps even to his wife, his too impulsive actions would bear a very different aspect, haunted him with a feeling which was foreboding rather than regret.
‘Ah! my friend!’ said Rosselin in some surprise, as he passed through the gate. ‘Is it possible you are in Paris while Sirius reigns over the asphalte? It is charming and gracious of you to remember a decrepit old gardener. Come and sit by me in the shade here, and Pierre shall bring you the biggest of the nectarines. If Virgil could have tasted a nectarine! There may be doubts about every other form of progress, but there can be no manner of doubt that we have improved fruits since the Georgics, and wines.’
Othmar answered a little at random, and accepted the nectarine. The quick regard of Rosselin read easily that there was something in the air graver than their usual talk of rare editions and coming book-sales which his visitor desired to say to him, and with a sign dismissed the old servant to the strip of kitchen garden on the other side of the house.
Othmar made his narrative as brief, his own share in it as small, and the facts as prosaic as he could; but he could not divest them of a tinge of romance which he was ill-pleased to discover to the shrewd comprehension of the great artist who listened to him.
‘Do what I will, tell it all how I may,’ he thought angrily, ‘how ridiculous I shall look to him, playing knight-errant like this!’
And as he related the story of Damaris to Rosselin he seemed in fancy to hear the voice of his wife behind him commenting in her delicate suggestive tones on his own exaggerated share in it. What she would say, and what the world would say, seemed to him to be said for both in the momentary smile which passed over Rosselin’s face.
‘Of course he does not believe me,’ he thought. ‘Nobody will ever believe me. They will always suppose that I have base reasons which have never even approached me; they will always accredit me with the coarsest of motives.’
Rosselin, with his power of divining the thoughts of others, guessed what was thus passing through his mind.
‘Yes, they will certainly never accredit you with a good motive,’ he said, answering the unspoken thoughts of his visitor. ‘For that you must be prepared. But if you think that I shall do so, you mistake. You are a man, my dear Count Othmar, who is much more likely to be fascinated by a disinterested action than by a vulgar amour. I understand you, but I warn you that nobody else will.’
‘I suppose not,’ said Othmar. ‘That must be as it may. How did you divine so well what I was thinking of?’
‘Divination of that kind is easy after experiences as long as mine are,’ answered Rosselin, gathering one of his carnations and fastening it in his linen coat. ‘If we do not acquire that much from life we live to be old to little purpose. You have done a generous thing, and probably the world will punish you for it; it always does. The position your chivalry has led you into is of course certain to be explained in one way, and one only, by people in general. The world is not delicate, and it never appreciates delicacy.’
‘Of that I am well aware,’ returned Othmar. ‘It is on account of the coarseness of all hasty and ordinary judgments that I wish to keep my own name and personality hidden as much as possible in relation to this child. If her own talents could secure independence for her, it would be very much to be desired that they should do so. Will you do me the favour to judge of them?’
Rosselin hesitated.
‘You can command me in all ways,’ he added. ‘But I think it only fair to warn you that, even if she have very great talent, as you seem to believe, neither technique nor culture come by nature. Training, long, arduous, severe, and to the young most odious, is the treadmill on which everyone must work for years before being admitted into the kingdom of art. Has she enough to live on during these years of probation?’
‘Yes,’ answered Othmar; he did not feel called upon to confess his device for supplying this necessity. ‘All I would ask of you is your judgment of her talents. Of course she is only a child; she has seen and heard nothing; even the poorest stage she has never seen. She has not had any of those indirect lessons which the very poverty and misery of their surroundings gave Rachel and Desclée. They were always in the road of their art, even though they went to it through mire. She knows nothing, absolutely nothing; I tell you she has not been even inside the booth of strolling players at a fair. Yet she gave to my wife and to me the impression of latent genius. Will you see her and hear her, and then give me your opinion?’
‘I would do much more for you, my dear friend,’ replied Rosselin with a vague sense of reluctance. ‘But I have seen so many of these maidens who dream of the stage — little, quiet, good girls, with mended stockings and holes in their umbrellas, thronging to the Conservatoire to pipe out “O sire! je vais mourir” or “Infame! croyez-vous,” going away with their mothers like chickens under the hen’s wing when a big dog is in the poultry-yard; falling in love with the student who gives them the réplique, keeping chocolate in their pockets to nibble at like little mice between the scenes; little good girls, some pretty, some ugly, some saucy, some shy, all of them as poor as church rats, all of them with hair-pins tumbling out of their braids — j’en ai vu tant! And hardly a spark of genius amongst them! When they have fine shoulders and big eyes, then their career is certain — in a way; when they have no figure at all and no complexion, then they go into the provinces and one hears no more of them; or, perhaps, they leave their illusions altogether at the Conservatoire, and take a place behind a counter. It is the prudent ones who do that: “elles commencent où les autres finissent.” Some clever woman has said so before me. Is it not better to begin so? Why not get a little snug shop for Mademoiselle Bérarde from the first?’
Othmar moved impatiently.
‘And the two or three who are better than the rest,’ he asked; ‘those whose lips the bees of Hymettus have really kissed?’
‘My dear friend, you know how it is with these also,’ sighed Rosselin: ‘immense success, immense insouciance, immense enjoyment for the first few years; lovers like the leaves on the trees in midsummer; debts as numerous as the leaves; enormous sums thrown away like waste paper; beauty, health, power, all spent like a rouleau of gold in a fool’s hand at Monte Carlo; and then the dégringolade, the apathy of the public,
the indifference of the lovers, the persecution of the creditors whose ardour grows as hotly as that of the others cools, the infinite mortifications, humiliations, chagrins, disappointments; then the death from anæmia or from consumption, or the still worse end, which is a fifty-year-long obscurity: Sophie Arnould sweeping out her garret with a two-sous broom! Ah bah! Marry Mlle. Bérarde to one of your cashiers, and buy her a cottage at Neuilly.’
‘Do you suppose Desclée or Rachel would have married a clerk, and lived in a little house in the suburbs?’ said Othmar with some impatience.
‘Ah, who can say? Neither would have stayed with the clerk certainly,’ replied Rosselin, lifting up the drooped stalk of one of his picotees and fastening it to its deserted stick. ‘It is all a matter of chance and circumstance. Temperament goes for much, but accident counts for more, and opportunity for most. You say yourself, for instance, that Mlle. Bérarde might have lived and died on her island but for some careless words of Madame Nadine and an invitation to St. Pharamond. While we are young life is always inviting us somewhere, and we accept the invitations, without thinking whether they will lead us to Bicêtre or to a quiet cottage garden in our old age. Allons donc! Let us do our best to secure the garden and the sunshine for your little friend from the South. I need not assure you that you shall have my perfect honesty of opinion and my absolute discretion concerning her. Will you come into the house a moment? I picked up yesterday, at a bookstall, a precious little bouquin; nothing less than a copy of the “Terentii Comœdiæ” of 1552 by Roger Payne.’
Othmar went in and admired the bouquin, and stayed a few moments longer, while the evening grew duskier and the scent of the carnations and stocks and great cabbage-roses came richer and sweeter through the open windows into the small rooms, clean and cosy, and raised from the commonplace by the rare volumes which were gathered in them, and the fine pieces of porcelain standing here and there on their wooden shelves.