CHAPTER VIII

To the boy, walking slowly up and down, with eager eyes that sought the one face among the many, the scene came as a joyous revelation that called inevitably to his youth and his vitality. He made no pretence of analyzing his sensations: he was stirred, intoxicated by the movement, the lights, the naturalness and artificiality that walked hand-in-hand in so strange a fellowship. A new excitement, unlike the excitement of the morning, was at work within him; his blood danced, his brain answered to every fleeting picture. He was in that subtlest of all moods when the mind swings out upon the human tide, comprehending its every ripple with a deep intuition that seems like a retrospective knowledge. He had never until this moment stood alone in a Paris street at night; he had never before rubbed shoulders with a Parisian night crowd; but the inspiration was there—the exaltation—that made him one with this restless throng of men and women whose antecedents were unknown to him, whose future was veiled to his gaze.

The sensation culminated when, out of the crowd, a hand was laid upon his shoulder and a familiar voice rose above the babble of sound.

"Well, and are we girded for the heights?"

It came at the right moment, it lilted absolutely with his thoughts—the soft, pleasant tones, the easy friendliness that seemed to accept all things as they came. His instant answer was to smile into the Irishman's face and to press the arm that had been slipped through his.

"It's too early for anything very characteristic, but there are always impressions to be got."

Again the boy replied by a pressure of the arm, and together he and Blake began to walk. The strange pleasure of yielding himself to this man's will filtered through Max's being again, as it had done that morning, painting the world in rosy tints. The situation was anomalous, but he ignored the anomaly. His boats were burned; the great ice-bound sea protected him from the past; he was here in Paris, in the first moments of a fascinating present, under the guardianship of this comrade whose face he had never seen until yesterday, whose very name was still unfamiliar to his ears. It was anomalous, but it held happiness; and who, equipped with youth and health, starting out upon life's road, stops to question happiness? He was the adventuring prince in the fairy-tale: every step was taken upon enchanted ground.

Nothing gave him cause for quarrel as they made their way onward. Even the Boulevard de Magenta, with its prosaic tram-lines, its large, cheap shops, its common brasseries and spanning railway bridge, seemed a place of promise; and as they passed on, ever mounting toward Montmartre, his brain quickened to new joy, new curiosity in every flaunting advertisement, every cobble-stone in the long steep way of the Boulevard Barbés, the rue de la Nature, and the rue de Clignancourt, until at length they emerged into the rue André de Sarte—that narrow street, quaint indeed in its dark old houses and its small, mysterious wine shops that savor of Italy or Spain.

They paused, at the corner of the rue André de Sarte, by the doorway of an old, overcrowded curio shop—the curio shop that in time to come was destined to become so familiar a landmark to them both, to stand sentinel at the gateway of so many emotions.

The lights, the shadows, the effects were all uncertain in this strange and fascinating neighborhood. High above them, white against the winter sky, glimmered the domes of the Sacré-Coeur, looking down in symbolic silence upon the restless city; to the left stretched the rue Ronsard, with its deserted market and lonely pavement; to the right, the Escalier de Sainte-Marie, picturesque as its name, wound its precipitous way apparently to the very stars, while at their feet, creeping upward to the threshold of the church, was the plantation of rocks, trees, and holly bushes that in the mysterious darkness seemed aquiver with a thousand whispered secrets. There was deep contrast here to the excitement, the vivacity of the boulevards; it seemed as if some shadow from the white domes above had given sanctuary to the spirit of the place—the familiar spirit of the time-stained houses, the stone steps worn by many feet, the dark, naked trees.

The boy's hand again pressed his companion's arm.

"What are those steps?" He pointed to the right.

"The Escalier de Sainte-Marie; they lead up to the rue Müller, and, if you desire it, to the Sacré-Coeur itself. Shall we climb?"

"But yes! Certainly!" The boy's voice was tense and eager. He hurried forward, drawing his companion with him, and side by side they began the mounting of the stone steps—those steps, flanked by the row of houses, that rise one above the other, as if emulous to attain the skies.

Up they went, their ears attentive to the conflicting sounds that drifted forth from the doorways, their nostrils assailed by the faintly pungent scent of the shrubs in the plantation. Higher and higher they climbed, sensible with each step of a greater isolation, of a rarer, clearer air. Above them, in one of the higher houses in the rue Müller, some one was playing a fiddle, and the piercing sweet sounds came through the night like a human voice, adding the poignancy, the passion and pathos of human things to the aloofness and unreality of the scene.

The boy was the first to catch this lonely music, and as though it called to him in some curious way, he suddenly freed his arm from Blake's and ran forward up the steps.

When Blake overtook him he had passed up the rue Müller, and was leaning over the wooden paling that fronts the Sacré-Coeur, his elbows resting upon it, his face between his hands, his eyes held by the glitter of Paris lying below him.

Blake came quietly up behind him. "I thought you had given me the slip."

He turned. Again the light of inspiration, the curious illumination was apparent in his face.

"This is most wonderful!" he said. "Most wonderful! It is here that I shall live. Here—here—with Paris at my feet."

Blake laughed—laughed good-humoredly at the finality, the artless arrogance of the tone.

"It may not be so easy to find a dwelling in the shadow of the Sacré-Coeur."

Max looked at him with calm, grave eyes. "I do not consider difficulties, monsieur. It is here that I shall live. My mind is made up."

"But this is not the artists' quarter. You may seek your inspiration in Montmartre, but you must have your studio across the river."

"Why must I? What compels me?"

The Irishman shrugged his shoulders. "Nothing compels you, but it is the thing to do. You can live here, certainly, if you want to—there is no law to forbid it—and you can find a studio on the Boulevard de Clichy; but the other is the thing to do."

The boy smiled his young wise smile. "Monsieur, there is only one thing to do—the thing one wants to do, the thing the heart compels. If I am to know Paris I will know her from here—study her, love her from here. This place is one of miracle. One might know life here, living in the skies. Listen! That musician knows it!" He thrust out his hand impulsively and caught Blake's in a pressure full of nervous tension, full of magnetism. "What is it he plays? Tell me! Tell me!"

His touch, his excitement fired Blake's Celtic blood, banishing his mood of criticism.

"The man is playing scraps from Louise —Charpentier's Louise ."

"I have never heard Louise ."

"What! And you a student of Paris? Why, it's Charpentier's hymn to Montmartre. Listen, now!" His voice quickened. "He's playing a bit out of the night scene. He's playing the declaration of the Noctambule :

He murmured the words below his breath, pausing as the music deepened with the passion of the player and the sinister song poured into the night.

Then came a break, a pause, and the music flowed forth again, but curiously altered, curiously softened in character.

Max's fingers tightened. "Ah, but listen now, my friend!"

Blake turned to him in quick appreciation. "Good! Good! You are an artist! That's Louise singing in the third act, on the day she is to be Muse of Montmartre. It is up here in the little house her lover has provided for her; it is twilight, and she is in the garden, looking down upon all this"—he waved his hand comprehensively—"it is her moment—the triumph and climax of love. Try to think what she is saying!" He paused, and they stood breathless and enchained, while the violin trembled under the hand of its master, vibrant and penetrating.

"What is it she says?" Max whispered the words.

Blake's reply was to murmur the burden of the song in the same hushed way as he had spoken the song of the Noctambule .

But, abruptly—abruptly as a light might be extinguished—the music ceased, and Max released Blake's hand.

"It is all most wonderful," he said; "but the words of that song—they do not quite please me."

"Why? Have you never sung that ' l'âme encore grisée de ton premier baiser !'"

Then, as if half ashamed of the emotional moment, he gave a little laugh, satirical and yet sad.

"Was there never a little dancer," he added, "never a little model in all these years—and you so very ancient?"

The boy ignored the jest.

"I am not a believer in love," he said, evasively.

"Not a believer in love! Well, upon my soul, the world is getting very old! You look like a child from school, and you talk like some quaint little book I might have picked up on the quais . What does it all mean?"

At the perplexity of the tone Max laughed. "Very little, mon ami ! I am no philosopher; but about this love, I have thought a little, and have gained to a conclusion. It is like this! Light love is desire of pleasure; great love is fear of being alone."

"Then you hold that man should be alone?"

"Why not?" Max shrugged his shoulders. "We come into the world alone; we go out of it alone."

"A cold philosophy!"

"A true one, I think. If more lives were based upon it we would have more achievement and less emotion."

The Irishman's enthusiasm caught sudden fire.

"And who wants less emotion? Isn't emotion the salt of life? Why, where would a poor devil of a wanderer like myself be, if he hadn't the dream in the back of his head that the right woman was waiting for him somewhere?"

Max watched him seriously.

"Then you have never loved?"

"Never loved? God save us! I have been in and out of love ever since I was seventeen. But, bless your heart, that has nothing to do with the right woman!"

Max's intent eyes flashed. "And you think the right woman will be content to take you—after all that?"

Blake came a step nearer, leaning over the parapet, his shoulder touching his companion's.

"Boy," he said, in a changed tone, "listen to me. It's a big subject, this subject of love and liking—too big for me to riddle out, perhaps. But this I know, the world was made as it is, and neither you nor I can change it; no, nor ten thousand cleverer than we! It's all a mystery, and the queerest bit of mystery in it is that a man may go down into the depths and rub shoulders with the worst, and yet keep the soul of him clean for the one woman."

"Don't you think there are men who can do without either the depths or the one woman?"

"There are abnormalities, of course."

Max waived the words. "I am serious. I ask you if you do not believe that there are certain people to whom these things you speak of are poor things—people who believe that they are sufficient unto themselves?"

The other's mouth twisted into a sarcastic smile.

"Show me the man who is sufficient unto himself!"

Swiftly—as swiftly as he had whipped the pencil from his pocket in the café that morning—Max stepped back, his head up, his hand resting lightly on the wooden parapet.

"Monsieur! You see him!"

Blake's expression changed to keen surprise; he turned sharply and peered into the boy's face.

"You?" he said, incredulously. "You, a slip of a boy, to ignore the softer side of life and set yourself up against Nature? Take that fairy-tale elsewhere!"

Max laughed. "Very well, my friend, wait and see!"

"And do you know how long I give you to defy the world, the flesh, and the devil? A full-blooded young animal like you!"

"How long?"

"Three months—not a day more."

"Three months!" Max laughed, and, as had happened before, his mood altered with the laugh. The moment of artistic exaltation passed; again he was the boy—the adventurer, brimming with spirits, thirsting to break a lance with life. "Three months! Very well! Wait and see! And, in the mean time, Paris is awake, is she not?"

Blake looked at the laughing face, the bright eyes, and shook his head.

"I believe you're a cluricaun, come all the way from the bogs of Clare! Come here, and take my arm again, or you'll be vanishing into that plantation!"

It is unlikely that Max understood all the other's phrases, but he understood the lenient, bantering tone that had in it a touch of something bordering upon affection, and with a gracious eagerness he stepped forward and slipped his hand through the proffered arm.

"Where are you going to take me?" All the lightness, all the arrogance had melted from his voice, his tone was almost as soft, almost as submissive as a woman's.

Blake looked down upon him. "I hardly know—after that philosophy of yours! I thought of taking you to a little Montmartre cabaret , where many a poet wrote his first verses and many an artist sang his first song—a dingy place, but a place with atmosphere."

Max clung to his arm, the light flashing into his eyes. "Oh, my friend, that is the place! That is the place! Let us go—let us run, lest we miss a moment!"

"Good! Then hey for the Boulevard de Clichy and the quest of the great idea!"

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