Читать книгу Harper of Heaven - Robert William Service - Страница 7

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I will never forget my first forenoon in Paris. As I stepped forth the morn looked like a newly minted coin—ringing with rapture. Rills of clear water glittered in the gutters and the trees flirted their first April finery. Curdles of cloud accentuated the ingenuous blue of the sky. “Notre Dame,” I called to a cabman. Cheerily he grinned and with a flourish of his whip we were off. He wore a glazed tile hat, a black cape and was as rubicund as the cocher of my dreams. Indeed, as we ambled along, so many things made me think of dreams coming true. My reading of Paris had been ravenous; from every corner remembered names leapt at me. I was living again in the pages of Hugo, Daudet, Zola. In that adorable Spring morn each twist and turn gave me a new thrill. I felt as if I were coming home and my heart sang. Here, I thought, is where I fit in. I will remain at least a couple of months ... I remained for fifteen years.

Poignant moment! Notre Dame at last. I had studied a model in the Metropolitan Museum so that the original looked like an old friend. It was even more beautiful than I had hoped, and sitting in the serene square I regarded it with beatitude. Bless the Gods who have given me the gift of rapture, for that marvellous morning I knew ecstasy as I have never known it since. Yes, all that immemorial day one radiant moment crowded on another, till I felt like shouting from sheer joy that surged within me.

After a blissful spell of contemplation I started out on the grandest walk in the world. Skirting the Seine, past hundreds of book-bins, till I came to the Institut de France, I crossed the Pont des Arts to the Louvre. Then I kept on up the Tuileries to the Place de la Concorde. From there I mounted the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe. On that brilliant day everything was at its best and I had no words to fashion my delight. So from one seductive street to another I marched on till I came to the Madeleine and from there to the Opera.

After a leisurely lunch on the terrace of the Café de la Paix I resumed my enthusiastic exploration. The Eiffel Tower, the Invalides, the Boul’ Miche’ and the Luxembourg—I visited them that afternoon and though I was footsore, in the evening I climbed to the Sacré Coeur and Montmartre. But my joy was sustained to the last, till with a prayer of thanksgiving I crowned the most delectable day of my life. To be young, free, primed with romance and with a full purse—what could be nearer Paradise than Paris in the spring?

Soon I left my seven-franc room near the station and took a four-franc mansard in an old hotel on the Quai Voltaire. From there I could watch the Seine, its toy-like steamers, its strings of barges, its torpid fishermen. The shining river, the trim quays, the gay green of the poplars and the book-bins beneath all gave me an exquisite pleasure, so that I dreamed for hours by my mansard window. From it I could see the spires of the Sainte Chapelle and the towers of Notre Dame, while down river were the gay gardens of the Tuileries, with the lace-work of bridges culminating in the Pont Alexandre. That panorama never failed to enchant me, so that from dawn to dark I could sit there entranced.

Absorbed in my city I was some time in making human contacts. The first was the Paris correspondent of a New York daily who interviewed me at my hotel after ordering a golden omelette. As he gobbled and gabbled I listened with admiration. An Englishman with a rich voice he knew every capital in Europe. “Come with me to breakfast at Ciro’s tomorrow at noon,” he said. By that he meant lunch but I took him literally, and he was a little chagrined when I asked for ham and eggs and tea. Even the great Ciro shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m cross with our New York office,” my host told me. “I sent them a story of a Prince sailing from India with a cargo of monies and they printed it ‘a cargo of monkeys.’ All the time they try to make a monkey out of me. I think I’ll resign.... Have you any girl friends? I can introduce you to some of the little dancers of the Opera, but I warn you presents of hats are very expensive, and the simpler they are the more they cost.” This discouraged me so that I declined his kind offices. How one vice will cancel out another! My Scotch parsimony has always prevented me making a fool of myself where women are concerned. To my mind not the most beautiful woman in Paris was worth a thousand francs for an evening of distraction.

I would never be a dashing blade like my newspaper friend. He had a personality I lacked and he made me look a poor dub, even though I had written best sellers. I visioned success for him and I was not wrong. In the World War he became a Colonel, wrote a book, made a handsome marriage and clinched his career with a knighthood.

My best friends were a Canadian couple, and they too symbolised the romance of destiny. Sweethearts in the same prairie village, linked by a love of art, they had studied in city schools and finally gravitated to Paris. From there they roamed with brush and sketch-book through Europe, returning with joy to their studio in Montparnasse. Theirs was an ideal marriage for not only were they devoted in their ordinary lives, but their art was a spiritual passion binding them. So in their painting and etching they shared each other’s pains and triumphs. In their perfect partnership they inspired me, and for years I enjoyed their gentle friendship, until like so many they passed on....

Through them I met other painters till gradually my life took an artistic trend, and I conceived myself in the role of a rapin. At school I had been tops in design and had a knack of sketching from life. When other boys were playing I spent happy hours copying pictures from Punch. In those days I dreamed of being a real artist, and here I was playing at being one; for I bought a sketch-book and took lessons in the studio of Colorossa in the Rue de la Grande Chaumiére.

For one franc we were admitted to the life class where with some trepidation I watched the girl model undress. As it was the first time I had seen a naked female I fear my conscientious nudes were affected by my modesty. However, with sepia pencils sharpened to a long point I succeeded in getting good effects of light and shade. I learned a lot of painter lingo and looked wise when I stood before a picture. I went to salons dressed in a broad-brimmed hat with a butterfly tie and velveteen jacket. I dramatised myself in my new role, for, like an actor, I was never happy unless I was playing a part. Most people play one character in their lives; I have enacted a dozen, and always with my whole heart.

This Vie de Bohème phase must have lasted a year, during which I learned to loaf on the terrace of the Dôme Café, waggle a smudgy thumb as I talked of modelling, make surreptitious sketches of my fellow wine-bibbers and pile up my own stack of saucers. Drinking so continuously I stuck to small bocks which did me little harm and I reverted to my pipe. I also visited the picture galleries, of which the Luxembourg was most to my taste—the Louvre lulling me to somnolence. On the other hand excessive modernism irritated me, and when a Russian woman showed me a cubistic nude in which even the sex organ was rectangular I gazed without conviction....

I got to know many of the long-haired freaks who spent their time between the Dôme and the Rotonde, crossing from the one to the other their only exercise. Poles and Swedes were peculiar enough but the Muscovites were the maddest of all. There were middle-west Americans, too, who absorbed the colour of the Quarter to the point of eccentricity. One of the charms of living in Europe is its leisurely appeal. There is not the goad to achievement of the New World and life often becomes a protracted holiday in which one dreams of doing things instead of getting them done.

On the other hand, however, were American artists who worked with passion, grudging every moment they could not be at their easels. They would be off in the early morning to the country, painting with eager intensity, and when the light failed returning tired but tranquil to their studios. Often I would accompany them on their daily excursions to the banks of the Marne, sketching amateurishly while they plied the professional brush. Yet I had a feeling they were exploiting beauty while I was worshipping it.

For outside of their own job I found them singularly uninteresting. Their beloved work done, all they wanted was to play snooker or go to a silly cinema. As a rule they cared neither for music nor for literature. Outside of painting nothing much mattered. But what a blithe brotherhood! Their technical absorption saved them from that introspection that is the curse of the author. Yet writers are more broadminded. The whole world is their atelier and their lives are richer. So, though I would have loved to be either an artist or a musician I think that I would still prefer to be a modest inkslinger.

But soon I began to weary of my assumed role of a camp follower of art. This came to a head when a man invited me to tea one Sunday. He was a designer of book plates, balanced between literature and art. In his studio were two men—the first small and thin, with a pear-shaped head, a Swinburnian brow, dark eloquent eyes and crinkly black hair. The other was also short, but sturdy, with a round face, sharp eyes peering through glasses, and a virile manner. I was introduced to them: “James Stephens, the Irish poet, and Gellett Burgess, the American humorist.”

I was thrilled—two men I had always admired yet never hoped to meet. Long before I had dreamed of writing I had read Burgess, when to quote his book on Bromides was a cachet of cleverness. Stephens I knew through his Crock of Gold, and though I never dared to emulate his poetry I feel that he inspired me. And now to have both launched at me casually over the tea cups! ...

In my velveteen coat and Lavallière tie I felt something of a poseur, but when Burgess asked me why I was not whooping it up in the Yukon I answered with dignity that I was an art student, experimenting in the life of the Quarter.

Soon the talk turned to poetry. Stephens asked me what I thought was finest in Tennyson and I answered: “Ulysses.” When the others seemed to agree I felt rather bucked. Then both men recited some of their poems and I was asked to give one of mine. This I did with diffidence, for I felt that a chap who recites his own stuff is a bit of an ass. However, I tried my best and Stephens said loftily: “Very good newspaper verse.” I was so humble at that time I felt flattered at the compliment.

Burgess was the finest swimmer of any writer I have ever known. I am myself a water-dog and like de Maupassant love to float far from shore, enjoying between sea and sky an ineffable remoteness from the world. But Burgess with powerful strokes would cleave the waves till finally he vanished from sight. I would watch anxiously for a long spell, fearing he might have taken cramp. Then suddenly, with that same swishing stroke, he would disengage himself from the horizon and soon his short, sturdy form would emerge from the foam.

In contrast Stephens looked pale and frail, a man of delicate health, due no doubt to the privations of a youth inured to poverty. I saw something of him as at one time we rented his Paris apartment. It was a loft over a machine shop converted into living quarters, and when the various machines got going the place vibrated with a demoniac intensity. In an ear-shattering din we jiggled and joggled. Afflicted as with Saint Vitus’ dance I could not steady my hand to shave, and when I went down to the bistro for a bock I jerked most of my beer on to the table. How could my landlord have written his radiant poetry in such a racket?

But I think most of it was achieved as he strode the streets or in the midst of a crowded café, for he had a most enviable gift of detachment. In the hubbub of some busy bistro he could write of linnets and lonely gods. As I saw him stride the grey streets he made me think of a faun and I half expected him to break into a dance to the playing of inaudible pipes of Pan. Or as he huddled in some sordid pub I fancied him squatting with nimble goats on a thymy hill.

Sitting under the leafy foam of the Closerie des Lilas he would read me his latest poem written on the back of an old envelope. He sang rather than recited, weaving to and fro in lyric ecstasy and chanting the lovely words with a thick brogue. Like many poets he was an egoist and surveyed the writing fraternity from a Hill of Derision. “There are only two great living authors,” he would tell me, “and the other is meself.” He would not say who the first was. He spoke rather patronisingly of a new book called Ulysses written by one James Joyce. I listened to him reverently. I suspected he scorned me, but I admired his work so much I yielded him homage.

Once he asked me if I had any offspring, and I answered: “No, I’m afraid I have not the paternal temperament.” He said: “Neither have I but begorra! I have the childer.” He wore an eye-glass, though his collar was attached in some weird way to his singlet, and once when I remarked on the disparity between his attire and his monocle he snapped: “Ye can look at me clothes and ye can look at me eye-glass and ye can strike an average.” ... His wife was the most charming of women, pretty as a picture. She once said: “The Services are the best tenants I ever had and the only ones who left the apartment as clean as they found it.”

These literary lights of my salad days looked, I fear, with a justifiable disdain on the brash boy from the Yukon, but one who put me severely in my place was the great Edmund Gosse. I was asked to meet him by a friend who was a collector of celebrities and bought an evening-dress suit for the occasion. Gosse was handsome, distinguished, a famous talker. On this occasion he held us enthralled with his stories of Browning, Rosetti, Swinburne. As he did so he gestured with a nice edition of my latest book of verse, but never had the grace to open it. “Rather a pretty binding,” he remarked grudgingly, but the author he ignored. He did not address a word to me during the entire evening. I was rather relieved because, if he had never read a line of my work neither had I of his, and between writers that creates an awkward situation. Nevertheless, his supercilious attitude galled me and as the party broke up I observed to Edmund: “We have at least one thing in common—our names are French.” As gosse is a slang term for “kid” my remark was received in freezing silence.

In those days I took contumely meekly. I regarded myself as a cross between Kipling and G. R. Sims. I was inclined to agree with the dispraise of the mandarins of letters. If people did not buy my books they might purchase others more worthy. I was sorry I was an obstructionist in the fair path of poesy but I did not see what I could do about it. Alas, I write as I feel! I fear I can never do otherwise.

I am shortish by New World standards but average by European ones. However, most of the literati I met at this time were “sawn-offs.” I have mentioned Burgess and Stephens. Another was blond James Hopper, writer of short stories. He was half French and perhaps that was why he loved to live in France. Like myself he was reticent and self-effacing, so that when we sat together on the terrace of a café conversation languished. No doubt he was hypnotised by the passing throng, or maybe dreaming one of his distinguished stories.

Another short man, a contrast to the brooding Hopper, was dark, loquacious Jeffrey Farnol. He gobbled life with avidity. We had the same publishers and when he offered them The Broad Highway they objected that it was too lengthy. Savagely he tore out a chunk from the middle, saying: “That will make it short enough.” Even then it was overlong but they accepted it and it was an instantaneous success. In Paris society he wore a huge pair of knee-high boots, but despite them he was gay and ebullient as if he had on dancing pumps.

By way of a change I met a Big Man in Brentano’s. He had a distinguished look and the salesman whispered: “Richard Harding Davis.” My old hero! I watched him with admiring respect. He was well groomed and handsome, but he did not look a hale man. As I saw myself the picture of health I did not wish to be in his shoes. I was wise, for shortly after I read of his death.

Meeting those masters of my craft was to turn my mind to writing again. For long the very thought of it had irked me; till I wondered if I would pen another line. Then suddenly the old urge came back. For months it had not mattered; now it seemed to be all that mattered. My fallow period was over; I was desperate to rid myself of the thoughts that seethed in my brain. But what really started me was a chance meeting with a man who was to become my dearest friend.