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Page 8
In a word, she managed very well, and by no means died of hunger. She
could scarcely afford Madame Chanve's three-franc table d'h�te, it is
true; but we could dine modestly at L�on's, over the way, and return
to the Bleu for coffee,--though, it must be added, that establishment
no longer enjoyed a monopoly of our custom. We patronised it and the
Vachette, the Source, the Ecoles, the Souris, indifferently. Or we
would sometimes spend our evenings in Nina's rooms. She lived in a
tremendously swagger house in the Avenue de l'Observatoire,--on the
sixth floor, to be sure, but 'there was a carpet all the way up.' She
had a charming little salon, with her own furniture and piano (the
same that had formerly embellished our caf�), and no end of books,
pictures, draperies, and pretty things, inherited from her father or
presented by her friends.
By this time the inevitable had happened, and we were all in love with
her,--hopelessly, resignedly so, and without internecine rancour, for
she treated us, indiscriminately, with a serene, impartial, tolerant,
derision; but we were savagely, luridly, jealous and suspicious of
all new-comers and of all outsiders. If _we_ could not win her, no one
else should; and we formed ourselves round her in a ring of fire. Oh,
the maddening, mock-sentimental, mock-sympathetic face she would pull,
when one of us ventured to sigh to her of his passion! The way she
would lift her eyebrows, and gaze at you with a travesty of pity,
shaking her head pensively, and murmuring, 'Mon pauvre ami! Only
fancy!' And then how the imp, lurking in the corners of her eyes, with
only the barest pretence of trying to conceal himself, would suddenly
leap forth in a peal of laughter! She had lately read Mr. Howells's
'Undiscovered Country,' and had adopted the Shakers' paraphrase for
love: 'Feeling foolish.'--'Feeling pretty foolish to-day, air ye,
gentlemen?' she inquired, mimicking the dialect of Chalks. 'Well, I
guess you just ain't feeling any more foolish than you look.'--If she
would but have taken us seriously! And the worst of it was that we
knew she was anything but temperamentally cold. Chalks formulated the
potentialities we divined in her, when he remarked, regretfully,
wistfully, as he often did, 'She could love like Hell.' Once, in a
reckless moment, he even went so far as to tell her this pointblank.
'Oh, naughty Chalks!' she remonstrated, shaking her finger at him. 'Do
you think that's a pretty word? But--I dare say I could.'
'All the same, Lord help the man you marry,' Chalks continued
gloomily.
'Oh, I shall never marry,' Nina cried. 'Because, first, I don't
approve of matrimony as an institution. And then--as you say--Lord
help my husband. I should be such an uncomfortable wife. So
capricious, and flighty, and tantalising, and unsettling, and
disobedient, and exacting, and everything. Oh, but a horrid wife! No,
I shall never marry. Marriage is quite too out-of-date. I shan't
marry; but, if I ever meet a man and love him--ah!' She placed two
fingers upon her lips, and kissed them, and waved the kiss to the
skies.
This fragment of conversation passed in the Luxembourg Garden; and the
three or four of us by whom she was accompanied glared threateningly
at our mental image of that not-impossible upstart whom she might some
day meet and love. We were sure, of course, that he would be a beast;
we hated him not merely because he would have cut us out with her, but
because he would be so distinctly our inferior, so hopelessly unworthy
of her, so helplessly incapable of appreciating her. I think we
conceived of him as tall, with drooping fair moustaches, and
contemptibly meticulous in his dress. He would probably not be of the
Quarter; he would sneer at _us_.
'He'll not understand her, he'll not respect her. Take her peculiar
views. We know where she gets them. But he--he'll despise her for
them, at the very time he's profiting by 'em,' some one said.
Her peculiar views of the institution of matrimony, the speaker meant.
She had got them from her father. 'The relations of the sexes should
be as free as friendship,' he had taught. 'If a man and a woman love
each other, it is nobody's business but their own. Neither the Law nor
Society can, with any show of justice, interfere. That they do
interfere, is a survival of feudalism, a survival of the system under
which the individual, the subject, had no liberty, no rights. If a man
and a woman love each other, they should be as free to determine for
themselves the character, extent, and duration of their intercourse,
as two friends should be. If they wish to live together under the same
roof, let them. If they wish to retain their separate domiciles, let
them. If they wish to cleave to each other till death severs them--if
they wish to part on the morrow of their union--let them, by heaven.
But the couple who go before a priest or a magistrate, and bind
themselves in ceremonial marriage, are serving to perpetuate tyranny,
are insulting the dignity of human nature.' Such was the gospel which
Nina had absorbed (don't, for goodness' sake, imagine that I approve
of it because I cite it), and which she professed in entire good
faith. We felt that the coming man would misapprehend both it and
her--though he would not hesitate to make a convenience of it. Ugh,
the cynic!
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