Читать книгу The Rapin - H. De Vere Stacpoole - Страница 7

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“Tell me, my dear boy,” bleated old De Nani, who wanted to get the affair over and done with before dinner, “could you till the end of next month, when my rents from Normandy will be due—could you accommodate me with a little loan?”

“Yes, rather,” said Toto. “How much?”

“Seven hundred and fifty francs would save me the necessity of approaching a money-lender,” said the old fellow, trembling in his shoes at the amount for which he was asking. “But——”

Toto stopped under the lamp at the corner of the Rue de Courcelles where it cuts the Boulevard Haussmann. He took a note-case from his pocket.

“Here’s a note for a thousand. You can let me have it some time. I haven’t anything smaller.”

“A million million thanks!” cried De Nani, grabbing the note and gritting his false teeth to think that he might have asked for two thousand and obtained it just as easily—“a million thanks! Why, my dear boy, what a doleful yawn! One might fancy you bored.”

“I am, to death.”

“May I make you a little prescription?” inquired the old man, in whom the prospect of the coming dinner operated like an elixir of youth.

“A prescription for ennui? Yes.”

“Get married.”

“I have been thinking that myself.”

“She is a very charming girl.”

“Who?”

“Mlle.—what do you call her?—Powhair?”

“Bah!” said Toto. “I’d as soon think of marrying the Bank of France.”

“Parbleu!” murmured De Nani. “What an extraordinary remark! But everything that comes from Prince Toto is extraordinary, even his pictures.”

He had the bank-note safe in his pocket, and could allow himself the luxury of a little irony in the guise of praise.

“Firstly,” said Toto, “she’s too rich; and secondly, my mother wants me to marry her.”

“True,” said De Nani. “She is also gauche, and speaks through her beautiful nose like a trumpet.”

“She is good enough as a girl,” said the Prince with a frightful yawn as they turned down the Rue Tronchet.

“Well, then,” said De Nani, “try a mistress.”

“I have four,” replied Toto dolorously.

“Dismiss them.”

“I have, but they cling on.”

“Get drunk.”

“Can’t. I was born drunk, and am beginning to get sober. That is what’s the matter with me, I think.”

“Try opium.”

“Makes me sick.”

“Ether capsules.”

“Worse.”

“Go into the country and make love to a milkmaid.”

“Never done that,” said Toto reflectively.

“I did once when I was young. Mon Dieu! she followed me to Paris. No, I would advise you to leave that alone; nothing clings like a milkmaid. Try, try, try a glass of absinthe.”

They stopped at a café and had a glass of absinthe, for which Toto paid.

“I would like to get drunk on absinthe and die in my cups,” said De Nani, who was a man of original sins, frost-bound by poverty, but blossoming now under the warm influence of Toto.

“Let’s,” said the Prince, beginning to laugh.

“Now I have made you laugh!” cried the old fellow triumphantly. “And here we are at the Grand Café. No, my Toto, we will not die just yet, while there are Grand Cafés, and good dinners, and pretty girls adorning the world. Tu, tu, tu! how the lights flare!”

They entered, the old man following Toto and pursing out his hideous old lips. One could see his stomach working through his face as they passed first to the lavatory with the frescoed ceilings, where Toto washed himself vehemently with his coat off, and De Nani looked on. Then, led by the assistant head-waiter, they ascended to the private room where the Prince’s friends were waiting.

Three men only—Pelisson, of the Journal des Débats; Gaillard, a mystical poet, pantheistic, melancholic, with no very fixed belief in anything, save, perhaps, the works of Gaillard; and Otto Struve, the art critic.

Pelisson, a powerfully built fellow, singularly like De Blowitz, even to the pointed whiskers, was of the type of man who pushes the world aside with his shoulders, whilst he pushes it forward with his head. Gaillard, who was remarkable for his high collars, pointed beard, and the childish interest he took in little things unconnected with his profound art, sat astride a chair watching Pierre Pelisson juggling with a wine-glass, a fish-knife, and a serviette. By the fireplace stood Otto Struve, a man with a hatchet-shaped face, who seemed in the last stages of consumption, and weighed down by the cares of the whole world, which he bore with suppressed irritation.

Toto’s entrance was the entrance of money. Everyone forgot everyone else for a moment; the electric lamps seemed to blaze more brightly; waiters suddenly appeared, mutes shod with velvet and bearing the hors d’œuvre.

“M. le Marquis de Nani,” said Toto, introducing his friend; and they took their seats.

Old De Nani ate his oysters, glancing sideways, this way and that way, at the triumvirate of talent, as if to say, “Who the devil are you?” and “Who the devil are you?” Pelisson groaned and grunted; he was writing the beginning of a leading article in that wonderful head of his, where a clerk always sat taking notes in indelible ink, an artist beside him taking sketch-portraits of everyone and pictures of everything. Toto looked bored and the dinner unpromising, till suddenly Struve broke the ice by choking over his soup. With the laughter, conversation broke out and babbled. The fish was served, and one might have fancied twenty people were talking, Toto’s voice raised shrill against Gaillard’s periods, and the trumpet tones of Pelisson dominating all like the notes of a sax-horn.

“I don’t believe in God, you say?” said Gaillard, savagely attacking a fillet of sole. “Well, perhaps not, according to your ideas; according to mine, I have the pleasure of worshiping a god. He has fifty-three names. The Chinese call him Fot; benighted Asiatic tribes, Buddha; Kempfer, by the way, wrote it——”

“No, no, no!” cried Toto. “No theology, or I’ll turn M. le Marquis de Nani upon you, and he’ll eat you up, for he’s an atheist.”

“An atheist!” cried Pelisson, turning his broad face on De Nani. “I thought they were all dead. M. de Nani, beware! They’ll kill you and stuff you for the Musée Carnavalet.”

“I’ll stuff him,” shouted Toto, imagining himself a wit. “What shall it be, Marquis—bran, sawdust?”

“Ortolans,” answered De Nani, too busily engaged in stuffing himself to find passage for more than one word.

“By my soul, the Marquis is right!” cried the great newspaper man. “An atheist stuffed with ortolans is all they want to complete their collection now they have crowned their idiocy by buying ——’s collection of bronzes.”

“Talking of crowns,” came the insidious lisp of Struve, “have you heard the news? Willy Hohenzollern has—guess what.”

“Written a farce?”

“Painted his face?”

“Become a telegraph clerk?”

“Gone mad,” replied Struve.

“What’s his madness?” roared Pelisson, glaring at this opposition newsman.

“They say he fancies himself an Emperor.”

“Throw flowers over him to cool him,” cried Toto, snatching a rose out of a dish and flinging it in Struve’s face as the entrée was brought in.

De Nani listened to the random conversation as he ate, or at least seemed to; a dull flush was apparent under the paint on his face. Each guest had his own attendant, and the service was conducted with the precision of mechanism. The glass of the Marquis was always full, yet he was continually emptying it; like the old gentleman at M. de Richelieu’s feast, he felt his teeth growing again, and for a little while, under the influence of the powerful Rhone wines, his youth seemed to return.

“Talking of art,” said Gaillard, fingering the stem of his wineglass delicately and turning to Toto, “a rumor reached me to-day through De Brie, the editor of the Boulevard—you know De Brie? It was to the effect that our host——”

“Yes.”

“That our host,” continued Gaillard, turning to the others, “wearied by the incapacity of the two salons to appreciate genius——”

“To appreciate genius,” echoed Struve.

“Is about to found an art school.”

De Nani leaned back in his chair and slipped a button of his waistcoat, as if to give room for the sycophant to ramp.

“And who,” said he, “would be fitter to found an art school than our host—ahu!—who, may I ask, M. Veillard?”

“Gaillard.”

“Maillard—than our illustrious host, ahu! I have seen his works, ventre St. Gris! Ahu! I am not a man of yesterday, M. Baillard; my memory carries me back to the time before women wore hoops.”

“Indeed,” murmured Struve, who had placed the rose flung at him by Toto with its stalk in his glass of champagne, and was staring at it with the rapt air of a poet.

“Indeed yes, monsieur, I was born on the edge of the First Empire. I saw the new Napoleon rise—you, sir, have only seen him vanish.”

“I have seen many a napoleon vanish,” mourned Struve; “but go on—your tale charms me. Pelisson, listen.”

“Go to the devil!” said Pelisson, who was now writing with the speed of fire and a stylographic pen on a long strip of paper, using the table for a desk.

“I have seen the art galleries of Europe,” continued De Nani, now three parts drunk, and unconscious that he was making a fool of himself before the first art critic in Europe, “and I unhesitatingly proclaim M. le Prince’s work to be on a level—allowing of course for youth—on a level with the best I have seen.”

“Oh, rot! oh, rubbish!” cried Toto, blushing furiously and flinging flowers at the great bent head of Pelisson, whilst that journalist, wallowing in his journalese, only grunted and growled in a far-away manner and wrote the more quickly. “I can’t paint, I can’t draw—might if I took to it really. Pelisson, you pig! wake up and eat your pudding.”

“I have said what I have said,” concluded De Nani, attacking his ice-pudding with all the youthful nonchalance of your man who wears false teeth.

“And my rose is drunk,” said Struve, as the rose tumbled out of the glass.

“I can’t paint,” murmured Toto again with the air of a spoilt child.

“Toto!” demanded Struve, placing the rose languidly in his coat, “how much wine have you drunk?”

“Why?”

“Because a lot of truth is escaping from you.”

Toto laughed; he always believed Struve to be jesting when in earnest, and in earnest when jesting. Then he sat watching De Nani, and wondering at his capacity for champagne.

“Cigars, cigars!” cried Pelisson, finishing his article with a dash, flinging down his pen and bursting out like a sun. “What’s this? pudding!” He devoured it like a pig, and then roared again for cigars. Three boxes were swiftly passed in from the outside.

He placed one before him, sent his article off to the Journal des Débats office, which lies near by, and, leaning back in his chair with thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, blew clouds of smoke at the gilded ceiling, and cried: “Let’s make a noise.”

“What’s up now?” inquired Toto.

“The Ministry will be down to-morrow!” cried Pelisson, flapping the sides of his chest with his turtle-fin hands. “You’ll hear the tumble of portfolios—flip, flap, flop; and I’ve helped to pull them, ehu! Let us make a noise; it’s the only thing worth living for. I’d die in a world where I couldn’t make a noise; you couldn’t make me a worse hell than a padded room. You, Toto—how do you live without making a noise? Gaillard squeaks in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Struve grumbles in the Temps, I roar in the Débats; you, wretched child! are silent: take up a pen or a paint-brush and make a noise.”

“I would if I could,” mourned Toto.

“You mean you could if you would!” retorted Pelisson. “Write a little book of poems, and I’ll abuse them; I’ll make your name rattle like a pea in a bottle. Write an ode to the Pope or paint a modest picture—there’s two ideas for you gratis, each a fortune. Give me some coffee.”

“I wouldn’t give a pin for fame unless I earned it,” said Toto, handing the coffee. “I’d just as soon swing a rattle as have a work of art of mine”—Struve groaned—“made famous by my friends or my position.”

“Why,” cried Pelisson, “he’s talking sense, this boy is!”

“He’s talking nonsense,” said Struve.

“He’s talking divinity—I mean (hic) divinely,” said Gaillard, who was finishing his second bottle of champagne, and writing poetry on his cuffs with the stylographic pen that had just helped in the destruction of a Ministry.

De Nani was dumbly digesting; he had filled his pockets with cigars, and was wishing he had brought a sack. He was also drunk—in fact, to put it plainly, very drunk.

“I’m talking sense,” cried Toto with flashing eyes.

“He can’t paint,” suddenly broke out De Nani, the drunkenness lifting like a veil and disclosing his true thoughts. “He’s only pretending. Doesn’t want to paint—’sgot four mistresses.”

He slipped away from his chair as if sucked down by a whirlpool. A roar of laughter went up that shook the ceiling, and then, to everyone’s horror, Toto the debonair, the hero of cock-fights and what not, broke into tears.

At this extraordinary sight Gaillard first gazed with a grin, and then burst out like a firework touched off, wringing his hands and calling upon God.

“Devil take that old scoundrel!” cried Pelisson, kicking at the body of De Nani, which seemed quite flaccid now that the truth had got out of it. “Where did you pick him up?—he’s a scamp, he’s a scamp!”

“Toto, my dear Toto,” lisped Struve, “paint a picture to-morrow, and I’ll make it famouth for you. So help me God! I will, or my name’s not Struve.”

“Alas!” cried Gaillard, drinking off a glass of brandy, “I am touched at the soul. Toto, my Toto, our Toto, do not grieve. I, too, will write a little poem, and it will make your picture famous. Where is that wretch? Kick him, Pelisson!”

“Don’t let the waiters in,” choked Toto. “It’s only stupidity”—sniff, sniff—“the old fellow is drunk; don’t kick him, P-P-Pelisson, he’s an old man. I p-picked him up at my mother’s; he’s only stupid. There, I’m all right.”

“Oh, dear me!” sighed Struve; “we are all right now, let us play baccarat.”

“I am desolated,” mourned Gaillard, who had now to be comforted. “And my little poem is spoiled.” He looked at his shirt cuffs and broke into tears.