Читать книгу The Harbor - Ernest Poole - Страница 11

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I was in Paris for two years.

In those first weeks of deep delight I called it, "The Beautiful City of Grays." For this town was certainly mellowed down. No jar of an ugly present here, no loud disturbing harbor. But on the other hand, no dullness of a fossilized past. What college had been supposed to do this city did, it took the past and made it alive, richly, thrillingly alive, and wove it in with the present. In the first Sorbonne lectures, even with my meager French, I felt this at once, I wanted to feel it. These profs were brilliant, sparkling, gay. They talked as though Rousseau and Voltaire, Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert, Maupassant and all the rest were still vital dazzling news to the world, because these men were still molding the world. And from here exploring out over the town, I was smilingly greeted everywhere by such affable gracious old places, that seemed to say:

"We've been written about for a thousand years, and now you also wish to write. How charming of you. Please sit down. Garçon, un bock."

And I sat down. Scenes from the books of my great idols rose around every corner, or if they didn't I made them rise. There was pride in the process. To go to the Place de la République, take a seat before some cheap, jolly café, squint out at the Place with an artist's eye, reconstruct the Bastille, the Great Revolution, dream back of that to Rousseau and Voltaire and the way they shook the world by their writings—and then wake up and find that I had been at it for three mortal hours! What a chap I was for dreams. I must be quite a genius. There were hours with Hugo in Notre Dame in one of its most shadowy corners; with Zola on top of a 'bus at night as it lumbered up into the Belleville slums; with Balzac in an old garden I found; with Guy de Maupassant everywhere, in the gay hum and lights of those endless cafés, from bridges at sunset over the Seine, or far up the long rich dusk of the Champs Élysées, lights twinkling out, and his women laughing, chattering by.

Nothing left in this rich old world but the harbor? Nothing beautiful, fine or great for an eager, hungry, happy young man? I could laugh! I knew now that the harbor had lied! For into this radiant city not only the past but the whole present of the earth appeared to me to be pouring in. Painters, sculptors, writers and builders were here from all nations, with even some Hindus and Japs thrown in, young, bringing all their dreams and ambitions, their gaiety, their vigor and zest.

"Young men are lucky. They will see great things."

Voltaire had said that about thirty years before the French Revolution. It had been true then, true ever since, it was true to-day and here—though our great things I felt very sure were not to come in violence—the world had gone beyond all that. No, these immense surprises that were lurking just before us, these astounding miracles that were to rise before our eyes, would come in the unfolding of the powers in men's minds, working free and ranging wide, with a deep resistless onward rush—in the stirring times of peace!

And we were not only to see great things but we were all to do them! That was the very keynote of the place. Here a fellow could certainly write if only he had it in him. Impatiently I slaved at my French. Five hours sleep was plenty.

In the small apartment we had taken just on the edge of the Luxembourg Gardens, on the nights when we were working at home, one of us at his easel, another at his drafting board, myself at my desk, we would knock off at about eleven o'clock and come down for beer and a long smoke in front of the café below. A homely little place it was, with two rows of small iron tables in front, and at one of these we would seat ourselves. Behind us in the window was a long glass tank of gold fish, into which from time to time a huge cat would reach an omnivorous paw. Often from within the café we would hear Russian folk songs played on balalaikas by a group of Russian students there. And between the songs a low hubbub rose, in French and many other tongues, for here were French and Germans, English and Bohemians, Russians and Italians, all gathered here while they were young.

How serene the old city seemed those nights. The street outside was quiet. The motor 'bus, that pest of Paris, had not yet appeared. Only an occasional cab would come tinkling on its way. Our street was absurdly short. At one end was a gay cluster of lights from the crowded cafés of the "Boul' Mich'," at the other were the low lighted arches at the back of the Odéon, from which when the play was over fluffy feminine figures would emerge from the stage entrance; we would hear their low musical voices as they came merrily by us in cabs. Other figures would pass. Across the street before us rose the trees and the lofty iron fence of the Gardens, with a rich gloom of shrubs behind, and against this background figures in groups and alone and in couples would come strolling by with their happiness or hurrying eagerly toward it. Or to what else were they hurrying? From what were they coming so slowly away?

These strangers in this setting thrilled me. Comedy, tragedy, character, plot—there seemed nothing in life but the writing of tales—watching, listening, dreaming, finding, then becoming deeply excited, feeling them grow inside of you, planning them out and writing them off, then working them over and over and over, little by little building them up. What a rich absorbing life for a fellow, and for me it still lay all ahead. I had used but twenty-two years of my life, there were fifty left to write in, and what couldn't you write in fifty years!

Often, sitting here at night, I would get an idea and begin to work, and I would keep on until at last the enormous old woman who kept the café—we called her "The Blessed Damozel"—would come lumbering out and good humoredly growl,

"Couches-toi donc. Une heure vient de sonner."

There came a brief interruption. Into our street's procession one evening, over its round cobblestones on a bicycle that wearily wobbled, there came a lean dusty figure with something distinctly familiar in the stoop of the big shoulders.

"Hello, boys," said a deep gruff voice.

"J. K.!"

It was. Joe Kramer arriving in Paris at midnight on a punctured tire, and cursing the cobblestone pavements over which he had hunted us out.

A hot supper, a bottle of wine, a genial beam on all three of us, and Joe told his story. After leaving college, from New York he had gone to Kansas City, and by the "livest paper" there he had been sent abroad with a bike to do a series of "Sunday specials." He had come over steerage and written an exposé of his passage. He had two weeks for Paris and then was off to Berlin and Vienna.

"I'm just breaking ground this time, boys," he said. "I want to get the hang of the countries and a start in their infernal languages."

The next day he began to break ground in our city. Early the next morning I found Joe propped up in bed scowling into Le Matin as he tried to butt his way through the language into the news events of the day. What I tried to tell him of the Paris I had found made no appeal whatever.

"All right, Kid," he said indulgently. "If I had a dozen lifetimes I might be a poet. But I haven't, so I'll just be a reporter."

And he and his bike plunged into the town. He found its "newspaper row" that day and a Frenchman to whom he had a letter. With this man Joe went to the Bourse and that night to the Chamber of Deputies. He got "Sunday specials" out of them both, and then went on to the Bourse de Travail. And in the few spare moments he had, Joe told us of the things he had seen. Rumors of war and high finance, trade unions, strikes and sabotage burst on my startled artist's ears. It made me think of the harbor! This was not my Paris!

"It is," said J. K. stoutly. "There's no place like a newspaper office to put you right next to the heart of a town."

He would not hear to our seeing him off. I remember him that last night after supper strapping his bag onto his bike and starting off down our quiet old street on his way to the station.

"To-morrow," he said, "I'll stop off in Leipsic. I want to have a look at the college that stirred my young grandfather up for life. I've got his diary with me."

Again, in spite of the gruffness, I felt that wistful quality in him. J. K. was hunting for something too.