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Page 4
At the time of which I am writing now, the sentiment that reigned
between Nina and Old Childe's retinue of young men was chiefly an
_esprit-de-corps_. Later on we all fell in love with her; but for the
present we were simply amiably fraternal. We were united to her by a
common enthusiasm; we were fellow-celebrants at her ancestral
altar--or, rather, she was the high priestess there, we were her
acolytes. For, with her, filial piety did in very truth partake of the
nature of religion; she really, literally, idolised her father. One
only needed to watch her for three minutes, as she sat beside him, to
understand the depth and ardour of her emotion: how she adored him,
how she admired him and believed in him, how proud of him she was,
how she rejoiced in him. 'Oh, you think you know my father,' I
remember her saying to us once. 'Nobody knows him. Nobody is great
enough to know him. If people knew him they would fall down and kiss
the ground he walks on.' It is certain she deemed him the wisest, the
noblest, the handsomest, the most gifted, of human kind. That little
gleam of mockery in her eye died out instantly when she looked at him,
when she spoke of him or listened to him; instead, there came a tender
light of love, and her face grew pale with the fervour of her
affection. Yet, when he jested, no one laughed more promptly or more
heartily than she. In those days I was perpetually trying to write
fiction; and Old Childe was my inveterate hero. I forget in how many
ineffectual manuscripts, under what various dread disguises, he was
afterwards reduced to ashes; I am afraid, in one case, a scandalous
distortion of him got abroad in print. Publishers are sometimes
ill-advised; and thus the indiscretions of our youth may become the
confusions of our age. The thing was in three volumes, and called
itself a novel; and of course the fatuous author had to make a bad
business worse by presenting a copy to his victim. I shall never
forget the look Nina gave me when I asked her if she had read it; I
grow hot even now as I recall it. I had waited and waited expecting
her compliments; and at last I could wait no longer, and so asked her;
and she answered me with a look! It was weeks, I am not sure it wasn't
months, before she took me back to her good graces. But Old Childe was
magnanimous; he sent me a little pencil-drawing of his head, inscribed
in the corner, 'To Frankenstein from his Monster.'
V.
It was a queer life for a girl to live, that happy-go-lucky life of
the Latin Quarter, lawless and unpremeditated, with a caf� for her
school-room, and none but men for comrades; but Nina liked it; and her
father had a theory in his madness. He was a Bohemian, not in practice
only, but in principle; he preached Bohemianism as the most rational
manner of existence, maintaining that it developed what was intrinsic
and authentic in one's character, saved one from the artificial, and
brought one into immediate contact with the realities of the world;
and he protested he could see no reason why a human being should be
'cloistered and contracted' because of her sex. 'What would not hurt
my son, if I had one, will not hurt my daughter. It will make a man of
her--without making her the less a woman.' So he took her with him to
the Caf� Bleu, and talked in her presence quite as freely as he might
have talked had she been absent. As, in the greater number of his
theological, political, and social convictions, he was exceedingly
unorthodox, she heard a good deal, no doubt, that most of us would
scarcely consider edifying for our daughters' ears; but he had his
system, he knew what he was about. 'The question whether you can touch
pitch and remain undefiled,' he said, 'depends altogether upon the
spirit in which you approach it. The realities of the world, the
realities of life, the real things of God's universe--what have we
eyes for, if not to envisage them? Do so fearlessly, honestly, with a
clean heart, and, man or woman, you can only be the better for it.'
Perhaps his system was a shade too simple, a shade too obvious, for
this complicated planet; but he held to it in all sincerity. It was in
pursuance of the same system, I daresay, that he taught Nina to fence,
and to read Latin and Greek, as well as to play the piano, and turn an
omelette. She could ply a foil against the best of us.
And then, quite suddenly, he died.
I think it was in March, or April; anyhow it was a premature
spring-like day, and he had left off his overcoat. That evening he
went to the Od�on, and when, after the play he joined us for supper at
the Bleu, he said he thought he had caught a cold, and ordered hot
grog. The next day he did not turn up at all; so several of us, after
dinner, presented ourselves at his lodgings in Montparnasse. We found
him in bed, with Nina reading to him. He was feverish, and Nina had
insisted that he should stop at home. He would be all right to-morrow.
He scoffed at our suggestion that he should see a doctor; he was one
of those men who affect to despise the medical profession. But early
on the following morning a commissionnaire brought me a note from
Nina. 'My father is very much worse. Can you come at once?' He was
delirious. Poor Nina, white, with frightened eyes, moved about like
one distracted. We sent off for Dr. R�noult, we had in a Sister of
Charity. Everything that could be done was done. Till the very end,
none of us for a moment doubted that he would recover. It was
impossible to conceive that that strong, affirmative life could be
extinguished. And even after the end had come, the end with its ugly
suite of material circumstances, I don't think any of us realised what
it meant. It was as if we had been told that one of the forces of
Nature had become inoperative. And Nina, through it all, was like some
pale thing in marble, that breathed and moved: white, dazed, helpless,
with aching, incredulous eyes, suffering everything, understanding
nothing.
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