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In the little appartement every window stood gaping, thirsting for a draught of air; but no stir lightened the haze that weighed upon the atmosphere, no faintest hint of breeze ruffled the plantation shrubs, dark in their fulness of summer foliage. Stillness lay upon Montmartre—upon the rue Müller—most heavily of all, upon the home of Max.
It was an obvious, weighty stillness unconnected with repose. It seemed as though the spirit of the place were fled, and that in its stead the vacant quiet of death reigned. In the salon the empty hearth hurt the observer with its poignant suggestion of past comradeship, dead fires, long hours when the spring gales had whistled through the plantation and stories had been told and dreams woven to the spurt of blue and copper flames. The place had an aspect of desertion; no book lay thrown, face downward, upon chair or table; no flowers glowed against the white walls, though flowers were to be had for the asking in a land that teemed with summer fruitfulness.
This was the salon ; but in the studio the note of loss was still more sharply struck. Not because the easel, drawn into the full light, offered to the gaze a crude, unfinished study, nor yet because a laden palette was cast upon the floor to consort with tubes and brushes, but because the presiding genius of the place Max—Max the debonair, Max the adventurous—was seated on a chair before his canvas, a prey to black despair.
Max was thinner. The great heat of August—or some more potent cause—had smoothed the curves from his youthful face, drawn the curled lips into an unfamiliar hardness and painted purple shadows beneath the eyes. Max had fought a long fight in the three months that had dwindled since the morning of Blake's going, and a long moral fight has full as many scars to leave behind as a battle of physical issues. The saddest human experience is to view alone the scenes one has viewed through other eyes—to walk solitary where one has walked in company—to have its particular barbed shaft aimed at one from every stick and stone that mark familiar ways. All this Max had known, wrapping himself in his pride, keeping long silence, fighting his absurd, brave fight.
'The first days will be the worst!' he had assured himself, walking back from Notre Dame in the searching sun, heedless of who might notice his red eyes. 'The first days will be the worst!' And this formula he had repeated in the morning, standing uninspired and wretched before a blank canvas. Then had come Blake's first message—a note written from Sweden without care or comfort, importing nothing, indicating nothing beyond the place at which the writer might be found, and tears—torrents of tears—had testified to the fierce anticipation, the crushing disappointment for which it was responsible.
He had sent no answer to the cold communication—no answer had been desired, and calling himself by every name contempt could coin, he had pushed forward along the lonely road, companioned by his work. But he himself had once said: 'One must come naked and whole to art, as one must come naked and whole to nature,' and he had spoken a truth. Art is no anodyne for a soul wounded in other fields, and Art closed arms to him when most he wooed her. He threw himself into work with pitiable vehemence in those first black weeks. By day, he haunted the galleries and attended classes like any art student; by night, he ranged the streets and cafés , seeking inspiration, returning to his lonely room to lie wakeful, fighting his ghosts, or else to sob himself to sleep.
His theory of life had been amply proved. Blake had prated of the soul, but it had been the body he had desired! Again and again that thought had struck home, a savage spur goading him in daytime to a wild plying of his brushes, gripping him in the lonely darkness of the night-time until his sobs were suspended by their very poignancy and the scalding tears dried before they could fall.
He saw darkly, he saw untruly, but the world is according to the beholder's vision, and in those sultry days, when summer waxed and Paris emptied, opening its gates to the foreigner, all the colors had receded from existence and he had tasted the lees of life.
And now to-day it seemed that the climax had been reached. Seated idly before his canvas, the whole procession of his Paris life unwound before him—from the first tumultuous hour, when he had entered the Hôtel Railleux on fire for freedom, to this moment when, with dull resentful eyes, he confronted the sum of his labors—an unfinished, sorry study devoid of inspiration.
He stared at the flat canvas—the rough outline of his picture—the reckless splashing on of color; and, abruptly, as if a hand had touched him, he sprang to his feet, making havoc among the paint tubes that strewed the floor, and turned summarily to the open window.
It was after eight o'clock, but the hazy, unreal daylight of a summer evening made all things visible. He scanned the plantation, viewing it as if in some travesty of morning; he looked down upon the city, sleeping uneasily in preparation for the inevitable night of pleasure, and a sudden loathing of Paris shook him. It seemed as if some gauzy illusive garment had been lifted from a fair body and that his eyes, made free of the white limbs, had discerned a corpse.
By a natural flight of ideas, the loathing of the city turned to loathing of himself—to an unsatiable desire for self-forgetfulness, for self-effacement. Solitude was no longer tenable, the walls of the appartement seemed to close in about him, stifling—suffocating him. With a feverish movement, he turned from the window, picked up his hat and fled the room.
On the landing he paused for a moment before the door of M. Cartel. He had paid many visits to M. Cartel under stress of circumstances similar to this, and invariably M. Cartel—and, moving in his shadow, the demure Jacqueline—had proffered a generous hospitality—talking to him of work, of politics, of Paris, but with a Frenchman's inimitable tact.
For all this unobtrusive attention he had been silently grateful, but to-night he stood by the door hesitating; for long he hesitated, honestly fighting with his mood, but at last the desperation of the mood prevailed. Who could talk of work, when work was as an evil smell in the nostrils? Who could talk of politics, when the overthrow of nations would not stimulate the mind? He turned on his heel with a little exclamation, hopeless as it was cynical, and ran down the stairs with the gait of one whose destination concerns neither the world nor himself.