Orientations Page 6

  'Well, my man,' he said, as Mr Clinton at last came in, 'what are you complaining of?... One moment,' he added, as Mr Clinton was about to reply. He opened his notebook and took out a stylographic pen. 'Now, I'm ready for you. What are you complaining of?'

  'I'm complaining that the world is out of joint,' answered Mr Clinton, with a smile.

  The specialist raised his eyebrows and significantly looked at the family doctor.

  'It's astonishing how much you can get by a well-directed question,' he said to him, taking no notice of Mr Clinton. 'Some people go floundering about for hours, but, you see, by one question I get on the track.' Turning to the patient again, he said, 'Ah! and do you see things?'

  'Certainly; I see you.'

  'I don't mean that,' impatiently said the specialist. 'Distinctly stupid, you know,' he added to his colleague. 'I mean, do you see things that other people don't see?'

  'Alas! yes; I see Folly stalking abroad on a 'obby 'orse.'

  'Do you really? Anything else?' said the doctor, making a note of the fact.

  'I see Wickedness and Vice beating the land with their wings.'

  'Sees things beating with their wings,' wrote down the doctor.

  'I see misery and un'appiness everywhere.'

  'Indeed!' said the doctor. 'Has delusions. Do you think your wife puts things in your tea?'

  'Yes.'

  'Ah!' joyfully uttered the doctor, 'that's what I wanted to get at--thinks people are trying to poison him. What is it they put in, my man?'

  'Milk and sugar,' answered Mr Clinton.

  'Very dull mentally,' said the specialist, in an undertone, to his colleague. 'Well, I don't think we need go into any more details. There's no doubt about it, you know. That curious look in his eyes, and the smile--the smile's quite typical. It all clearly points to insanity. And then that absurd idea of giving his money to the poor! I've heard of people taking money away from the poor, there's nothing mad in that; but the other, why, it's a proof of insanity itself. And then your account of his movements! His giving ice-creams to children. Most pernicious things, those ice-creams! The Government ought to put a stop to them. Extraordinary idea to think of reforming the world with ice-cream! Post-enteric insanity, you know. Mad as a hatter! Well, well, I must be off.' Still talking, he put on his hat and talked all the way downstairs, and finally talked himself out of the house.

  The family doctor remained behind to see Mrs Clinton.

  'Yes, it's just as I said,' he told her. 'He's not responsible for his actions. I think he's been insane ever since his illness. When you think of his behaviour since then--his going among those common people and trying to reform them, and his ideas about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, and finally wanting to give his money to the poor--it all points to a completely deranged mind.'

  Mrs Clinton heaved a deep sigh. 'And what do you think 'ad better be done now?' she asked.

  'Well, I'm very sorry, Mrs Clinton; of course it's a great blow to you; but really I think arrangements had better be made for him to be put under restraint.'

  Mrs Clinton began to cry, and the doctor looked at her compassionately.

  'Ah, well,' she said at last, 'if it must be done, I suppose it 'ad better be done at once; and I shall be able to save the money after all.' At the thought of this she dried her tears.

  The moral is plain.

  DE AMICITIA

  I

  They were walking home from the theatre.

  'Well, Mr White,' said Valentia, 'I think it was just fine.'

  'It was magnificent!' replied Mr White.

  And they were separated for a moment by the crowd, streaming up from the Français towards the Opera and the Boulevards.

  'I think, if you don't mind,' she said, 'I'll take your arm, so that we shouldn't get lost.'

  He gave her his arm, and they walked through the Louvre and over the river on their way to the Latin Quarter.

  Valentia was an art student and Ferdinand White was a poet. Ferdinand considered Valentia the only woman who had ever been able to paint, and Valentia told Ferdinand that he was the only man she had met who knew anything about Art without being himself an artist. On her arrival in Paris, a year before, she had immediately inscribed herself, at the offices of the New York Herald, Valentia Stewart, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A. She settled down in a respectable pension, and within a week was painting vigorously. Ferdinand White arrived from Oxford at about the same time, hired a dirty room in a shabby hotel, ate his meals at cheap restaurants in the Boulevard St Michel, read Stephen Mallarmé, and flattered himself that he was leading 'la vie de Bohême.'

  After two months, the Fates brought the pair together, and Ferdinand began to take his meals at Valentia's pension. They went to the museums together; and in the Sculpture Gallery at the Louvre, Ferdinand would discourse on ancient Greece in general and on Plato in particular, while among the pictures Valentia would lecture on tones and values and chiaroscuro. Ferdinand renounced Ruskin and all his works; Valentia read the Symposium. Frequently in the evening they went to the theatre; sometimes to the Français, but more often to the Odéon; and after the performance they would discuss the play, its art, its technique--above all, its ethics. Ferdinand explained the piece he had in contemplation, and Valentia talked of the picture she meant to paint for next year's Salon; and the lady told her friends that her companion was the cleverest man she had met in her life, while he told his that she was the only really sympathetic and intelligent girl he had ever known. Thus were united in bonds of amity, Great Britain on the one side and the United States of America and Ireland on the other.

  But when Ferdinand spoke of Valentia to the few Frenchmen he knew, they asked him,--

  'But this Miss Stewart--is she pretty?'

  'Certainly--in her American way; a long face, with the hair parted in the middle and hanging over the nape of the neck. Her mouth is quite classic.'

  'And have you never kissed the classic mouth?'

  'I? Never!'

  'Has she a good figure?'

  'Admirable!'

  'And yet--Oh, you English!' And they smiled and shrugged their shoulders as they said, 'How English!'

  'But, my good fellow,' cried Ferdinand, in execrable French, 'you don't understand. We are friends, the best of friends.'

  They shrugged their shoulders more despairingly than ever.

  II

  They stood on the bridge and looked at the water and the dark masses of the houses on the Latin side, with the twin towers of Notre Dame rising dimly behind them. Ferdinand thought of the Thames at night, with the barges gliding slowly down, and the twinkling of the lights along the Embankment.

  'It must be a little like that in Holland,' she said, 'but without the lights and with greater stillness.'

  'When do you start?'

  She had been making preparations for spending the summer in a little village near Amsterdam, to paint.

  'I can't go now,' cried Valentia. 'Corrie Sayles is going home, and there's no one else I can go with. And I can't go alone. Where are you going?'

  'I? I have no plans.... I never make plans.'

  They paused, looking at the reflections in the water. Then she said,--

  'I don't see why you shouldn't come to Holland with me!'

  He did not know what to think; he knew she had been reading the Symposium.

  'After all,' she said, 'there's no reason why one shouldn't go away with a man as well as with a woman.'

  His French friends would have suggested that there were many reasons why one should go away with a woman rather than a man; but, like his companion, Ferdinand looked at it in the light of pure friendship.

  'When one comes to think of it, I really don't see why we shouldn't. And the mere fact of staying at the same hotel can make no difference to either of us. We shall both have our work--you your painting, and I my play.'

  As they considered it, the idea was distinctly pleasing; they wondered that it had not occurred to them before. Sau
ntering homewards, they discussed the details, and in half an hour had decided on the plan of their journey, the date and the train.

  Next day Valentia went to say good-bye to the old French painter whom all the American girls called Popper. She found him in a capacious dressing-gown, smoking cigarettes.

  'Well, my dear,' he said, 'what news?'

  'I'm going to Holland to paint windmills.'

  'A very laudable ambition. With your mother?'

  'My good Popper, my mother's in Cincinnati. I'm going with Mr White.'

  'With Mr White?' He raised his eyebrows. 'You are very frank about it.'

  'Why--what do you mean?'

  He put on his glasses and looked at her carefully.

  'Does it not seem to you a rather--curious thing for a young girl of your age to go away with a young man of the age of Mr Ferdinand White?'

  'Good gracious me! One would think I was doing something that had never been done before!'

  'Oh, many a young man has gone travelling with a young woman, but they generally start by a night train, and arrive at the station in different cabs.'

  'But surely, Popper, you don't mean to insinuate--Mr White and I are going to Holland as friends.'

  'Friends!'

  He looked at her more curiously than ever.

  'One can have a man friend as well as a girl friend,' she continued. 'And I don't see why he shouldn't be just as good a friend.'

  'The danger is that he become too good.'

  'You misunderstand me entirely, Popper; we are friends, and nothing but friends.'

  'You are entirely off your head, my child.'

  'Ah! you're a Frenchman, you can't understand these things. We are different.'

  'I imagine that you are human beings, even though England and America respectively had the intense good fortune of seeing your birth.'

  'We're human beings--and more than that, we're nineteenth century human beings. Love is not everything. It is a part of one--perhaps the lower part--an accessory to man's life, needful for the continuation of the species.'

  'You use such difficult words, my dear.'

  'There is something higher and nobler and purer than love--there is friendship. Ferdinand White is my friend. I have the amplest confidence in him. I am certain that no unclean thought has ever entered his head.'

  She spoke quite heatedly, and as she flushed up, the old painter thought her astonishingly handsome. Then she added as an afterthought,--

  'We despise passion. Passion is ugly; it is grotesque.'

  The painter stroked his imperial and faintly smiled.

  'My child, you must permit me to tell you that you are foolish. Passion is the most lovely thing in the world; without it we should not paint beautiful pictures. It is passion that makes a woman of a society lady; it is passion that makes a man even of--an art critic.'

  'We do not want it,' she said. 'We worship Venus Urania. We are all spirit and soul.'

  'You have been reading Plato; soon you will read Zola.'

  He smiled again, and lit another cigarette.

  'Do you disapprove of my going?' she asked after a little silence.

  He paused and looked at her. Then he shrugged his shoulders.

  'On the contrary, I approve. It is foolish, but that is no reason why you should not do it. After all, folly is the great attribute of man. No judge is as grave as an owl; no soldier fighting for his country flies as rapidly as the hare. You may be strong, but you are not so strong as a horse; you may be gluttonous, but you cannot eat like a boa-constrictor. But there is no beast that can be as foolish as man. And since one should always do what one can do best--be foolish. Strive for folly above all things. Let the height of your ambition be the pointed cap with the golden bells. So, bon voyage! I will come and see you off to-morrow.'

  The painter arrived at the station with a box of sweets, which he handed to Valentia with a smile. He shook Ferdinand's hand warmly and muttered under his breath,--

  'Silly fool! he's thinking of friendship, too!'

  Then, as the train steamed out, he waved his hand and cried,--

  'Be foolish! Be foolish!'

  He walked slowly out of the station, and sat down at a café. He lit a cigarette, and, sipping his absinthe, said,--

  'Imbeciles!'

  III

  They arrived at Amsterdam in the evening, and, after dinner, gathered together their belongings and crossed the Ij as the moon shone over the waters; then they got into the little steam tram and started for Monnickendam. They stood side by side on the platform of the carriage and watched the broad meadows bathed in moonlight, the formless shapes of the cattle lying on the grass, and the black outlines of the mills; they passed by a long, sleeping canal, and they stopped at little, silent villages. At last they entered the dead town, and the tram put them down at the hotel door.

  Next morning, when she was half dressed, Valentia threw open the window of her room, and looked out into the garden. Ferdinand was walking about, dressed as befitted the place and season--in flannels--with a huge white hat on his head. She could not help thinking him very handsome--and she took off the blue skirt she had intended to work in, and put on a dress of muslin all bespattered with coloured flowers, and she took in her hand a flat straw hat with red ribbons.

  'You look like a Dresden shepherdess,' he said, as they met.

  They had breakfast in the garden beneath the trees; and as she poured out his tea, she laughed, and with the American accent which he was beginning to think made English so harmonious, said,--

  'I reckon this about takes the shine out of Paris.'

  They had agreed to start work at once, losing no time, for they wanted to have a lot to show on their return to France, that their scheme might justify itself. Ferdinand wished to accompany Valentia on her search for the picturesque, but she would not let him; so, after breakfast, he sat himself down in the summer-house, and spread out all round him his nice white paper, lit his pipe, cut his quills, and proceeded to the evolution of a masterpiece. Valentia tied the red strings of her sun-bonnet under her chin, selected a sketchbook, and sallied forth.

  At luncheon they met, and Valentia told of a little bit of canal, with an old windmill on one side of it, which she had decided to paint, while Ferdinand announced that he had settled on the names of his dramatis personæ. In the afternoon they returned to their work, and at night, tired with the previous day's travelling, went to bed soon after dinner.

  So passed the second day; and the third day, and the fourth; till the end of the week came, and they had worked diligently. They were both of them rather surprised at the ease with which they became accustomed to their life.

  'How absurd all this fuss is,' said Valentia, 'that people make about the differences of the sexes! I am sure it is only habit.'

  'We have ourselves to prove that there is nothing in it,' he replied. 'You know, it is an interesting experiment that we are making.'

  She had not looked at it in that light before.

  'Perhaps it is. We may be the fore-runners of a new era.'

  'The Edisons of a new communion!'

  'I shall write and tell Monsieur Rollo all about it.'

  In the course of the letter, she said,--

  'Sex is a morbid instinct. Out here, in the calmness of the canal and the broad meadows, it never enters one's head. I do not think of Ferdinand as a man--'

  She looked up at him as she wrote the words. He was reading a book and she saw him in profile, with the head bent down. Through the leaves the sun lit up his face with a soft light that was almost green, and it occurred to her that it would be interesting to paint him.

  'I do not think of Ferdinand as a man; to me he is a companion. He has a wider experience than a woman, and he talks of different things. Otherwise I see no difference. On his part, the idea of my sex never occurs to him, and far from being annoyed as an ordinary woman might be, I am proud of it. It shows me that, when I chose a companion, I chose well. To him I am not a woman; I am
a man.'

  And she finished with a repetition of Ferdinand's remark,--

  'We are the Edisons of a new communion!'

  When Valentia began to paint her companion's portrait, they were naturally much more together. And they never grew tired of sitting in the pleasant garden under the trees, while she worked at her canvas and green shadows fell on the profile of Ferdinand White. They talked of many things. After a while they became less reserved about their private concerns. Valentia told Ferdinand about her home in Ohio, and about her people; and Ferdinand spoke of the country parsonage in which he had spent his childhood, and the public school, and lastly of Oxford and the strange, happy days when he had learnt to read Plato and Walter Pater....

  At last Valentia threw aside her brushes and leant back with a sigh.

  'It is finished!'

  Ferdinand rose and stretched himself, and went to look at his portrait. He stood before it for a while, and then he placed his hand on Valentia's shoulder.

  'You are a genius, Miss Stewart.'

  She looked up at him.

  'Ah, Mr White, I was inspired by you. It is more your work than mine.'

  IV

  In the evening they went out for a stroll. They wandered through the silent street; in the darkness they lost the quaintness of the red brick houses, contrasting with the bright yellow of the paving, but it was even quieter than by day. The street was very broad, and it wound about from east to west and from west to east, and at last it took them to the tiny harbour. Two fishing smacks were basking on the water, moored to the side, and the Zuyder Zee was covered with the innumerable reflections of the stars. On one of the boats a man was sitting at the prow, fishing, and now and then, through the darkness, one saw the red glow of his pipe; by his side, huddled up on a sail, lay a sleeping boy. The other boat seemed deserted. Ferdinand and Valentia stood for a long time watching the fisher, and he was so still that they wondered whether he too were sleeping. They looked across the sea, and in the distance saw the dim lights of Marken, the island of fishers. They wandered on again through the street, and now the lights in the windows were extinguished one by one, and sleep came over the town; and the quietness was even greater than before. They walked on, and their footsteps made no sound. They felt themselves alone in the dead city, and they did not speak.