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Page 32
Godelinette was a child of the people, but Pair had done wonders by
way of civilising her. She had learned English, and prattled it with
an accent so quaint and sprightly as to give point to her otherwise
perhaps somewhat commonplace observations. She was fond of reading;
she could play a little; she was an excellent housewife, and generally
a very good-natured and quite presentable little person. She was
Parisian and adaptable. To meet her, you would never have suspected
her origin; you would have found it hard to believe that she had been
the wife of a drunken tailor, who used to beat her. One January night,
four or five years before, Pair had surprised this gentleman publicly
pummelling her in the Rue Gay-Lussac. He hastened to remonstrate; and
the husband went off, hiccoughing of his outraged rights, and calling
the universe to witness that he would have the law of the meddling
stranger. Pair picked the girl up (she was scarcely eighteen then, and
had only been married a sixmonth), he picked her up from where she had
fallen, half fainting, on the pavement, carried her to his lodgings,
which were at hand, and sent for a doctor. In his manuscript-littered
study, for rather more than nine weeks, she lay on a bed of fever, the
consequence of blows, exhaustion, and exposure. When she got well
there was no talk of her leaving. Pair couldn't let her go back to her
tailor; he couldn't turn her into the streets. Besides, during the
months that he had nursed her, he had somehow conceived a great
tenderness for her; it made his heart burn with grief and anger to
think of what she had suffered in the past, and he yearned to sustain
and protect and comfort her for the future. This perhaps was no more
than natural; but, what rather upset the calculations of his friends,
she, towards whom he had established himself in the relation of a
benefactor, bore him, instead of a grudge therefor, a passionate
gratitude and affection. So, Pair said, they were only waiting till
her tailor should drink himself to death, to get married; and
meanwhile, he exacted for her all the respect that would have been due
to his wife; and everybody called her by his name. She was a pretty
little thing, very daintily formed, with tiny hands and feet, and big
gipsyish brown eyes; and very delicate, very fragile--she looked as if
anything might carry her off. Her name, Godeleine, seeming much too
grand and medi�val for so small and actual a person, Pair had turned
it into Godelinette.
We all said, 'He is splendidly gifted; he will do great things.' He
had studied at Cambridge and at Leipsic before coming to Paris. He was
learned, enlightened, and extremely modern; he was a hard worker. We
said he would do great things; but I thought in those days, and indeed
I still think--and, what is more to the purpose, men who were
themselves musicians and composers, men whose names are known, were
before me in thinking--that he had already done great things, that the
songs he had already published were achievements. They seemed to us
original in conception, accomplished and felicitous in treatment; they
were full of melody and movement, full of harmonic surprises; they had
style and they had 'go.' One would have imagined they must please at
once the cultivated and the general public. I could never understand
why they weren't popular. They would be printed; they would be praised
at length, and under distinguished signatures, in the reviews; they
would enjoy an unusual success of approbation; but--they wouldn't
_sell_, and they wouldn't get themselves sung at concerts. If they had
been too good, if they had been over the heads of people--but they
weren't. Plenty of work quite as good, quite as modern, yet no whit
more tuneful or interesting, was making its authors rich. We couldn't
understand it, we had to conclude it was a fluke, a question of
chance, of accident. Pair was still a very young man; he must go on
knocking, and some day--to-morrow, next week, next year, but some day
certainly--the door of public favour would be opened to him. Meanwhile
his position was by no means an unenviable one, goodness knows. To
have your orbit in the art world of Paris, and to be recognised there
as a star; to be written about in the _Revue des Deux-Mondes_; to
possess the friendship of the masters, to know that they believe in
you, to hear them prophesy, 'He will do great things'--all that is
something, even if your wares don't 'take on' in the market-place.
'It's a good job, though, that I haven't got to live by them,' Pair
said; and there indeed he touched a salient point. His people were
dead; his father had been a younger son; he had no money of his own.
But his father's elder brother, a squire in Hampshire, made him rather
a liberal allowance,--something like six hundred a year, I believe,
which was opulence in the Latin Quarter. Now, the squire had been
aware of Pair's relation with Godelinette from its inception, and had
not disapproved. On his visits to Paris he had dined with them, given
them dinners, and treated her with the utmost complaisance. But when,
one fine morning, her tailor died, and my quixotic friend announced
his intention of marrying her, _dans les d�lais l�gaux_, the squire
protested. I think I read the whole correspondence, and I remember
that in the beginning the elder man took the tone of paradox and
banter. 'Behave dishonourably, my dear fellow. I have winked at your
mistress heretofore, because boys will be boys; but it is the _man_
who marries. And, anyhow, a woman is so much more interesting in a
false position.' But he soon became serious, presently furious, and,
when the marriage was an accomplished fact, cut off the funds.
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