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Page 18
Yes, he was a gentleman. This disreputable old man, whose grey hairs,
far from making him venerable, but emphasised his sodden degradation;
this tipsy, filthy, obscene old man; this gaol-bird, this doer of
dirty work, this pandar, beggar, outcast, who bore without offence
such a title of contempt as Bibi Rago�t, was a fallen gentleman, the
wreck of something that had once been noble.
More than the fragmentary outline of his history we did not know. We
knew that he was a Russian; that his name was Kasghine; that he had
started in life as an officer in the Russian army; that many years
ago, for crimes conjectural, he had fled his country; and that long
before our day he had already gravitated to where we found him, the
mud of the Boulevard St. Michel.
For crimes conjectural. Some of us believed them to have been
political, and fancied that we had in Bibi a specimen of the decayed
Nihilist. In view of the fact that he often proclaimed himself a
socialist, this seemed to bear some colour of probability; but against
it argued the circumstance that of the members of that little clan of
Russian refugees which inhabits the southern borderland of the Latin
Quarter, not one would have aught to say to Bibi. They gave him the
widest of wide berths, and when questioned as to their motives, would
only shrug their shoulders, and answer that he was a disgraceful old
person, a drunken reprobate, whom, the wonder was not that they
avoided, but that any decent people could tolerate. This sounded
plausible; still we felt that if his crimes had been political, they
might have regarded him with more indulgence.
Of Bibi himself it was equally futile to inquire. There was one
subject on which he would never touch--his previous condition--his
past, before he came to be what we saw. 'Yes, I am a gentleman. I am
Captain Kasghine. I am a gentleman in allotropic form'; that was as
much as I ever heard him say. He enjoyed cloaking himself in mystery,
he enjoyed the curiosity it drew upon him; but perhaps he had some
remnants of pride, some embers of remorse, some little pain and shame,
as well.
Of the other legends afloat, one ran to the effect that he had
murdered his wife; a second, that he had poisoned the husband of a
lady friend; a third, that he had shown the white feather in battle; a
fourth, that he had cheated at cards. Bibi would neither admit nor
deny any of these imputations, nor would he manifest the faintest
resentment when they were discussed in his presence. He would parry
them, smiling complaisantly: and (if it be considered that they were
all, as it turned out, abominably false) that seems to show better
than anything else to what abysmal depths the man had sunk. Perhaps it
shows also, incidentally, how very heartless and unimaginative young
people in the Latin Quarter used to be. I have seen Bibi swagger; I
have seen him sullen, insolent, sarcastic; I have seen him angry, I
have heard him swear; but anything like honestly indignant I never saw
him.
I remember one night in the Caf� de la Source, when Fil de Fer had
been treating him to brandy and trying to get him to tell his story; I
remember his suddenly turning his one eye in the direction of us men,
and launching himself upon a long flight of rhetoric. I can see him
still--his unwashed red hand toying with the stem of his
liqueur-glass, or rising from time to time to push his hair from his
forehead, over which it dangled in soggy wisps, while, in a
dinner-table tone of voice, he uttered these somewhat surprising
sentiments.
'You would be horrified, you others, lads of twenty, with your careers
before you,--you would be horrified if you thought it possible that
you might end your days like Bibi, would you not? You wish to walk a
clean path, to prosper, to be respectable, to wear sweet linen, to die
honoured, regretted. And yet, believe me, we poor devils who fail, who
fall, who sink to the bottom, we have our compensation. We see vastly
more of the realities of life than those do who succeed and rise to
the top. We have an experience that is more essential, more
significant. We get the real flavour of life. We sweat in the mire; we
drink the lees. But the truth is in the mire; the real flavour is in
the lees. Oh, we have our compensation. We wear rags, we eat scraps
fit for dogs, we sleep under the arches of bridges. We lie in gaols,
we are hustled by the police, we are despised by all men. If you offer
us drink, and stop to gossip with us for a moment, you only do so to
please yourselves with the spectacle of our infamy, our infirmity, our
incongruity. We have lost all hope, all self-respect. We are ships
that have come to grief, that are foundering, that will presently go
down. Yet we are not altogether to be pitied: we know life. To the
respectable man, the prosperous, life shows herself only in the world,
decently attired: we know her at home in her nudity. For him she has
manners, a good behaviour, a society smile; with us she is frankly
herself--brutal, if you please, corrupt with disease and vice, sordid,
profane, lascivious, but genuine. She is kind to him, but
hypocritical, affecting scruples, modesties, pieties, a heart and
conscience, attitudinising, blushing false blushes, weeping crocodile
tears; she is cruel to us, but sincere. She is at her ease with
us--unashamed. She shows us her thousand moods. She doesn't trouble to
keep her secrets from us. She throws off the cloak that hid her
foulness, the boot that constrained her cloven hoof. She gives free
play to her appetites. We know her.
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