Feuille d'Album

He really was an impossible person. Too shy altogether. With absolutely

nothing to say for himself. And such a weight. Once he was in your

studio he never knew when to go, but would sit on and on until you

nearly screamed, and burned to throw something enormous after him when

he did finally blush his way out—something like the tortoise stove. The

strange thing was that at first sight he looked most interesting.

Everybody agreed about that. You would drift into the café one evening

and there you would see, sitting in a corner, with a glass of coffee in

front of him, a thin, dark boy, wearing a blue jersey with a little

grey flannel jacket buttoned over it. And somehow that blue jersey and

the grey jacket with the sleeves that were too short gave him the air

of a boy that has made up his mind to run away to sea. Who has run

away, in fact, and will get up in a moment and sling a knotted

handkerchief containing his nightshirt and his mother’s picture on the

end of a stick, and walk out into the night and be drowned. . . .

Stumble over the wharf edge on his way to the ship, even. . . . He had

black close-cropped hair, grey eyes with long lashes, white cheeks and

a mouth pouting as though he were determined not to cry. . . . How

could one resist him? Oh, one’s heart was wrung at sight. And, as if

that were not enough, there was his trick of blushing. . . . Whenever

the waiter came near him he turned crimson—he might have been just out

of prison and the waiter in the know. . . .

“Who is he, my dear? Do you know?”

“Yes. His name is Ian French. Painter. Awfully clever, they say.

Someone started by giving him a mother’s tender care. She asked him how

often he heard from home, whether he had enough blankets on his bed,

how much milk he drank a day. But when she went round to his studio to

give an eye to his socks, she rang and rang, and though she could have

sworn she heard someone breathing inside, the door was not answered. .

. . Hopeless!”

Someone else decided that he ought to fall in love. She summoned him to

her side, called him “boy,” leaned over him so that he might smell the

enchanting perfume of her hair, took his arm, told him how marvellous

life could be if one only had the courage, and went round to his studio

one evening and rang and rang. . . . Hopeless.

“What the poor boy really wants is thoroughly rousing,” said a third.

So off they went to cafés and cabarets, little dances, places where you

drank something that tasted like tinned apricot juice, but cost

twenty-seven shillings a bottle and was called champagne, other places,

too thrilling for words, where you sat in the most awful gloom, and

where some one had always been shot the night before. But he did not

turn a hair. Only once he got very drunk, but instead of blossoming

forth, there he sat, stony, with two spots of red on his cheeks, like,

my dear, yes, the dead image of that ragtime thing they were playing,

like a “Broken Doll.” But when she took him back to his studio he had

quite recovered, and said “good night” to her in the street below, as

though they had walked home from church together. . . . Hopeless.

After heaven knows how many more attempts—for the spirit of kindness

dies very hard in women—they gave him up. Of course, they were still

perfectly charming, and asked him to their shows, and spoke to him in

the café, but that was all. When one is an artist one has no time

simply for people who won’t respond. Has one?

“And besides I really think there must be something rather fishy

somewhere . . . don’t you? It can’t all be as innocent as it looks! Why

come to Paris if you want to be a daisy in the field? No, I’m not

suspicious. But——”

He lived at the top of a tall mournful building overlooking the river.

One of those buildings that look so romantic on rainy nights and

moonlight nights, when the shutters are shut, and the heavy door, and

the sign advertising “a little apartment to let immediately” gleams

forlorn beyond words. One of those buildings that smell so unromantic

all the year round, and where the concierge lives in a glass cage on

the ground floor, wrapped up in a filthy shawl, stirring something in a

saucepan and ladling out tit-bits to the swollen old dog lolling on a

bead cushion. . . . Perched up in the air the studio had a wonderful

view. The two big windows faced the water; he could see the boats and

the barges swinging up and down, and the fringe of an island planted

with trees, like a round bouquet. The side window looked across to

another house, shabbier still and smaller, and down below there was a

flower market. You could see the tops of huge umbrellas, with frills of

bright flowers escaping from them, booths covered with striped awning

where they sold plants in boxes and clumps of wet gleaming palms in

terra-cotta jars. Among the flowers the old women scuttled from side to

side, like crabs. Really there was no need for him to go out. If he sat

at the window until his white beard fell over the sill he still would

have found something to draw. . . .

How surprised those tender women would have been if they had managed to

force the door. For he kept his studio as neat as a pin. Everything was

arranged to form a pattern, a little “still life” as it were—the

saucepans with their lids on the wall behind the gas stove, the bowl of

eggs, milk jug and teapot on the shelf, the books and the lamp with the

crinkly paper shade on the table. An Indian curtain that had a fringe

of red leopards marching round it covered his bed by day, and on the

wall beside the bed on a level with your eyes when you were lying down

there was a small neatly printed notice: GET UP AT ONCE.

Every day was much the same. While the light was good he slaved at his

painting, then cooked his meals and tidied up the place. And in the

evenings he went off to the café, or sat at home reading or making out

the most complicated list of expenses headed: “What I ought to be able

to do it on,” and ending with a sworn statement . . . “I swear not to

exceed this amount for next month. Signed, Ian French.”

Nothing very fishy about this; but those far-seeing women were quite

right. It wasn’t all.

One evening he was sitting at the side window eating some prunes and

throwing the stones on to the tops of the huge umbrellas in the

deserted flower market. It had been raining—the first real spring rain

of the year had fallen—a bright spangle hung on everything, and the air

smelled of buds and moist earth. Many voices sounding languid and

content rang out in the dusky air, and the people who had come to close

their windows and fasten the shutters leaned out instead. Down below in

the market the trees were peppered with new green. What kind of trees

were they? he wondered. And now came the lamplighter. He stared at the

house across the way, the small, shabby house, and suddenly, as if in

answer to his gaze, two wings of windows opened and a girl came out on

to the tiny balcony carrying a pot of daffodils. She was a strangely

thin girl in a dark pinafore, with a pink handkerchief tied over her

hair. Her sleeves were rolled up almost to her shoulders and her

slender arms shone against the dark stuff.

“Yes, it is quite warm enough. It will do them good,” she said, putting

down the pot and turning to some one in the room inside. As she turned

she put her hands up to the handkerchief and tucked away some wisps of

hair. She looked down at the deserted market and up at the sky, but

where he sat there might have been a hollow in the air. She simply did

not see the house opposite. And then she disappeared.

His heart fell out of the side window of his studio, and down to the

balcony of the house opposite—buried itself in the pot of daffodils

under the half-opened buds and spears of green. . . . That room with

the balcony was the sitting-room, and the one next door to it was the

kitchen. He heard the clatter of the dishes as she washed up after

supper, and then she came to the window, knocked a little mop against

the ledge, and hung it on a nail to dry. She never sang or unbraided

her hair, or held out her arms to the moon as young girls are supposed

to do. And she always wore the same dark pinafore and the pink

handkerchief over her hair. . . . Whom did she live with? Nobody else

came to those two windows, and yet she was always talking to some one

in the room. Her mother, he decided, was an invalid. They took in

sewing. The father was dead. . . . He had been a journalist—very pale,

with long moustaches, and a piece of black hair falling over his

forehead.

By working all day they just made enough money to live on, but they

never went out and they had no friends. Now when he sat down at his

table he had to make an entirely new set of sworn statements. . . . Not

to go to the side window before a certain hour: signed, Ian French. Not

to think about her until he had put away his painting things for the

day: signed, Ian French.

It was quite simple. She was the only person he really wanted to know,

because she was, he decided, the only other person alive who was just

his age. He couldn’t stand giggling girls, and he had no use for

grown-up women. . . . She was his age, she was—well, just like him. He

sat in his dusky studio, tired, with one arm hanging over the back of

his chair, staring in at her window and seeing himself in there with

her. She had a violent temper; they quarrelled terribly at times, he

and she. She had a way of stamping her foot and twisting her hands in

her pinafore . . . furious. And she very rarely laughed. Only when she

told him about an absurd little kitten she once had who used to roar

and pretend to be a lion when it was given meat to eat. Things like

that made her laugh. . . . But as a rule they sat together very

quietly; he, just as he was sitting now, and she with her hands folded

in her lap and her feet tucked under, talking in low tones, or silent

and tired after the day’s work. Of course, she never asked him about

his pictures, and of course he made the most wonderful drawings of her

which she hated, because he made her so thin and so dark. . . . But how

could he get to know her? This might go on for years. . . .

Then he discovered that once a week, in the evenings, she went out

shopping. On two successive Thursdays she came to the window wearing an

old-fashioned cape over the pinafore, and carrying a basket. From where

he sat he could not see the door of her house, but on the next Thursday

evening at the same time he snatched up his cap and ran down the

stairs. There was a lovely pink light over everything. He saw it

glowing in the river, and the people walking towards him had pink faces

and pink hands.

He leaned against the side of his house waiting for her and he had no

idea of what he was going to do or say. “Here she comes,” said a voice

in his head. She walked very quickly, with small, light steps; with one

hand she carried the basket, with the other she kept the cape together.

. . . What could he do? He could only follow. . . . First she went into

the grocer’s and spent a long time in there, and then she went into the

butcher’s where she had to wait her turn. Then she was an age at the

draper’s matching something, and then she went to the fruit shop and

bought a lemon. As he watched her he knew more surely than ever he must

get to know her, now. Her composure, her seriousness and her

loneliness, the very way she walked as though she was eager to be done

with this world of grown-ups all was so natural to him and so

inevitable.

“Yes, she is always like that,” he thought proudly. “We have nothing to

do with these people.”

But now she was on her way home and he was as far off as ever. . . .

She suddenly turned into the dairy and he saw her through the window

buying an egg. She picked it out of the basket with such care—a brown

one, a beautifully shaped one, the one he would have chosen. And when

she came out of the dairy he went in after her. In a moment he was out

again, and following her past his house across the flower market,

dodging among the huge umbrellas and treading on the fallen flowers and

the round marks where the pots had stood. . . . Through her door he

crept, and up the stairs after, taking care to tread in time with her

so that she should not notice. Finally, she stopped on the landing, and

took the key out of her purse. As she put it into the door he ran up

and faced her.

Blushing more crimson than ever, but looking at her severely he said,

almost angrily: “Excuse me, Mademoiselle, you dropped this.”

And he handed her an egg.