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Page 31
It proved to be a _brasserie-�-femmes_; you were waited upon by
ladies, lavishly rouged and in regardless toilets, who would sit with
you and chat, and partake of refreshments at your expense. The front
part of the room was filled up with tables, where half a hundred
customers, talking at the top of their voices, raised a horrid
din--sailors, soldiers, a few who might be clerks or tradesmen, and an
occasional workman in his blouse. Beyond, there was a cleared space,
reserved for dancing, occupied by a dozen couples, clumsily toeing it;
and on a platform, at the far end, a man pounded a piano. All this in
an atmosphere hot as a furnace-blast, and poisonous with the fumes of
gas, the smells of bad tobacco, of musk, alcohol, and humanity.
The musician faced away from the company, so that only his shoulders
and the back of his grey head were visible, bent over his keyboard. It
was sad to see a grey head in that situation; and one wondered what
had brought it there, what story of vice or weakness or evil fortune.
Though his instrument was harsh, and he had to bang it violently to be
heard above the roar of conversation, the man played with a kind of
cleverness, and with certain fugitive suggestions of good style. He
had once studied an art, and had hopes and aspirations, who now, in
his age, was come to serve the revels of a set of drunken sailors, in
a disreputable tavern, where they danced with prostitutes. I don't
know why, but from the first he drew my attention; and I left my
handmaid to count her charms neglected, while I sat and watched him,
speculating about him in a melancholy way, with a sort of vicarious
shame.
But presently something happened to make me forget him--something of
his own doing. A dance had ended, and after a breathing spell he began
to play an interlude. It was an instance of how tunes, like perfumes,
have the power to wake sleeping memories. The tune he was playing now,
simple and dreamy like a lullaby, and strangely at variance with the
surroundings, whisked me off in a twinkling, far from the actual--ten,
fifteen years backwards--to my student life in Paris, and set me to
thinking, as I had not thought for many a long day, of my hero,
friend, and comrade, Edmund Pair; for it was a tune of Pair's
composition, a melody he had written to a nursery rhyme, and used to
sing a good deal, half in fun, half in earnest, to his lady-love,
Godelinette:
'Lavender's blue, diddle-diddle,
Lavender's green;
When I am king, diddle-diddle,
You shall be queen.'
It is certain he meant very seriously that if he ever came into his
kingdom, Godelinette should be queen. The song had been printed, but,
so far as I knew, had never had much vogue; and it seemed an odd
chance that this evening, in a French seaport town where I was passing
a single night, I should stray by hazard into a sailors' pothouse and
hear it again.
* * * * *
Edmund Pair lived in the Latin Quarter when I did, but he was no
longer a mere student. He had published a good many songs; articles
had been written about them in the newspapers; and at his rooms you
would meet the men who had 'arrived'--actors, painters, musicians,
authors, and now and then a politician--who thus recognised him as
more or less one of themselves. Everybody liked him; everybody said,
'He is splendidly gifted; he will go far.' A few of us already
addressed him, half-playfully perhaps, as _cher ma�tre_.
He was three or four years older than I--eight- or nine-and-twenty to
my twenty-five--and I was still in the schools; but for all that we
were great chums. Quite apart from his special talent, he was a
remarkable man--amusing in talk, good-looking, generous, affectionate.
He had read; he had travelled; he had hob-and-nobbed with all sorts
and conditions of people. He had wit, imagination, humour, and a voice
that made whatever he said a cordial to the ear. For myself, I admired
him, enjoyed him, loved him, with equal fervour; he had all of my
hero-worship, and the lion's share of my friendship; perhaps I was
vain as well as glad to be distinguished by his intimacy. We used to
spend two or three evenings a week together, at his place or at mine,
or over the table of a caf�, talking till the small hours--Elysian
sessions, at which we smoked more cigarettes and emptied more _bocks_
than I should care to count. On Sundays and holidays we would take
long walks arm-in-arm in the Bois, or, accompanied by Godelinette, go
to Viroflay or Fontainebleau, lunch in the open, bedeck our hats with
wildflowers, and romp like children. He was tall and slender, with
dark waving hair, a delicate aquiline profile, a clear brown skin,
and grey eyes, alert, intelligent, kindly. I fancy the Boulevard St.
Michel, flooded with sunshine, broken here and there by long crisp
shadows; trams and omnibuses toiling up the hill, tooting their horns;
students and _�tudiantes_ sauntering gaily backwards and forwards on
the _trottoir_; an odour of asphalte, of caporal tobacco; myself one
of the multitude on the terrace of a caf�; and Edmund and Godelinette
coming to join me--he with his swinging stride, a gesture of
salutation, a laughing face; she in the freshest of bright-coloured
spring toilets: I fancy this, and it seems an adventure of the golden
age. Then we would drink our _ap�ritifs_, our Turin bitter, perhaps
our absinthe, and go off to dine together in the garden at Lavenue's.
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