In the dull grey light of the short and swiftly waning winter’s day, the two young men were leaving the museum, to spend the rest of the afternoon until the time of their appointed meeting with the women, in drink and talk at one of the innumerable and seductive cafés of the magic city. Outside the Louvre, they hailed a taxi and were driven swiftly over one of the bridges of the Seine, through the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, and at length stopped and got out before La Closerie des Lilas, where they were to meet the two women later on.
They spent the remainder of the afternoon in the chill wintry air of the terrace, warm with drink, with argument or discussion, and with the gaiety of life and voices of people all around them, the pageant of life that passed for ever on the street before them — all that priceless, rare, and uncostly pleasure and excitement of café life which seemed unbelievable and magical to these two young Americans. The dull grey air, which was at once chill and wintry, and yet languorous, filled them with the sense of some powerful, strange, and inhuman excitement that was impending for them.
And the bright gaiety of the colours, the constant flash and play of life about them and along the pavements, the smell and potent intoxication of the cognac, gave them the sensation of a whole world given over without reserve or shame to pleasure. All these elements, together with that incomparable fusion of odours — at once corrupt and sensual, subtle and obscene — which exudes from the very texture of the Paris life — odours which it is impossible to define exactly but which seem in the dull wintry air to be compacted of the smells of costly perfumes, of wine, beer, brandy, and of the acrid and nostalgic fumes of French tobacco, of roasted chestnuts, black French coffee, mysterious liquors of a hundred brilliant and intoxicating colours, and the luxurious flesh of scented women — smote the two young men instantly with the sensual impact of this strange and fascinating world.
But in spite of all the magic of the scene, and the assurance and security which Starwick’s presence always gave to him, the ghost of the old unquiet doubt would not wholly be laid at rest, the ache of the old hunger stirred in Eugene. Why was he here now? Why had he come? The lack of purpose in this present life, the dozing indolence of this existence in which no one worked, in which they sat constantly at tables in a café, and ate and drank and talked, and moved on to sit at other tables, other cafés — and, most of all, the strange dull faces of the Frenchmen, the strange and alien life of this magic city which was so seductive but so unalterably foreign to all that he had ever known — all this had now begun to weigh inexplicably upon a troubled spirit, to revive again the old feelings of naked homelessness, to stir in him the nameless sense of shame and guilt which an American feels at a life of indolence and pleasure, which is part of the very chemistry of his blood, and which he can never root out of him. And feeling the obscure but powerful insistence of these troubled thoughts within his mind, he turned suddenly to Starwick, and without a word of explanation said:
“But do you really feel at home here?”
“What do you mean by ‘feeling at home’?”
“Well, I mean don’t you ever feel out of place here? Don’t you ever feel as if you didn’t belong to this life — that you are a foreigner?”
“But not at all!” said Starwick a trifle impatiently. “On the contrary, I think it is the first time in my life that I have NOT felt like a foreigner. I never felt at home in the Middle–West where I was born; I hated the place from my earliest childhood, I always felt out of place there, and wanted to get away from it. But I felt instantly at home in Paris from the moment I got here:— I am far closer to this life than to any other life I’ve ever known, for the first time in my life I feel thoroughly at home.”
“And you don’t mind being a foreigner?”
“But of course not!” Starwick said curtly. “Besides, I am NOT a foreigner. You can only be foreign in a place that is foreign to you. This place is not.”
“But, after all, Frank, you are not a Frenchman. You are an American.”
“Not at all,” Starwick answered concisely. “I am an American only by the accident of birth; by spirit, temperament, inclination, I have always been a European.”
“And you mean you could continue to lead this kind of life without ever growing tired of it?”
“What do you mean by ‘this kind of life’?” said Starwick.
His friend nodded towards the crowded and noisy terrace of the café.
“I mean sitting around at cafés all day long, going to night-clubs — eating, drinking, sitting — moving on from one place to another — spending your life that way.”
“Do you think it’s such a bad way to spend your life?” said Starwick quietly. He turned, regarding his friend with serious eyes. “Don’t you find it very amusing?”
“Yes, Frank, for a time. But after a while, don’t you think you’d get tired of it?”
“No more tired,” said Starwick, “than I would of going to an office day after day at nine o’clock and coming away at five, doing useless and dreary work that someone else could do as well. On the contrary, this kind of life —” he nodded towards the crowded tables —“seems to me much more interesting and amusing.”
“But how can you feel that you belong to it?” the other said. “I should think that would make a difference to you. It does to me — the feeling that I am a stranger here, that this is not my life, that I know none of these people.”
“Are you getting ready to tell me now that an American never really gets to know any French people?” said Starwick, repeating the banal phrase with a quiet sarcasm that brought a flush to the other’s face.
“Well, it’s not likely that he will, from what I’ve heard.”
Starwick cast a weary look around him at the chattering group of people at the other tables.
“God!” he said quietly. “I shouldn’t think he’d want to. I imagine most of them are about as dull a lot as you could find.”
“If you feel that way about them, what is the great attraction Paris holds for you? How can you possibly feel that way about the people and still say you feel at home here?”
“Because Paris belongs to the world — to Europe — more than it belongs to France. One does not come here because he wants to know the French: he comes because he can find here the most pleasant, graceful and civilized life on earth.”
“Yes, but there are other things that may be more important than leading a graceful and pleasant life.”
“What, for instance?” said Starwick, looking at him.
“Getting your work done is one of them. For you, I should think that would be a great deal more important.”
Starwick was again silent; the old bestial grimace, image of an unutterable anguish and confusion in his soul, for a moment contorted his pleasant ruddy face, developed, passed, was gone; he said quietly and with the infinite weariness of despair that had now become the image of his life:
“Getting my work done! My God! as if it mattered.”
“There was a time when you thought it did, Frank.”
“Yes, there was a time when I did think so,” he said lifelessly.
“And now you no longer feel that way about it?”
Starwick was silent; when he spoke again, it was not to answer directly.
—“Always the old unquiet heart,” he said wearily and sadly; he turned and looked silently at his friend for a moment. “Why? Since I first knew you, you have been like that, Eugene — wanting to devour the earth, lashing your soul to frenzy in this useless, hopeless and impossible search for knowledge.”
“Why useless or hopeless, Frank?”
“Because it is a kind of madness in you that grows worse all the time; because you cannot cure it or ever satisfy this hunger of yours while you have it; because it will exhaust you, break your heart, and drive you mad; and because, even if you could gratify this impossible desire to absorb the whole sum of recorded knowledge and experience in the world, you would gain nothing by it.”
“There I can’t agree with you.”
“Do you really think,” said Starwick wearily, “that if you could achieve this hopeless ambition of reading all the books that were ever printed — of knowing all the people — seeing all the places — that you would be any better off than you now are? Now, day after day, you go prowling up and down along the book-stalls on the Seine, pawing through tons of junk and rubbish until your very heart is sick with weariness and confusion. When you are not with us, you sit alone in a café with a dictionary beside you trying to decipher the meaning of some useless and meaningless book. You no longer enjoy what you read, because you are tortured by a consciousness of the vast number of books you have not read; you go to the museums — to the Louvre — and you no longer enjoy the pictures, because you torture your brain and exhaust your energy in a foolish effort to see and remember all of them. You no longer enjoy the crowd, you go out on the streets of Paris, you sit here in this crowded café— and instead of taking pleasure in all this gaiety and life about you, you are tortured by the thought that you know none of these people, that you know nothing about their lives, that there are four million people here in Paris and you do not know a dozen of them. . . . Eugene, Eugene,” he said sadly, “this thing in you is growing worse all the time; if you do not master it, it is a disease that will some day drive you mad and destroy you.”
“And yet, Frank, many people on this earth have had the same disease. Because of it, in order to get knowledge, Doctor Faust sold his soul to the devil.”
“Alas,” said Starwick, “where is the devil?” In a moment he continued quietly, as before: “Do you think that you will really gain in wisdom if you read a million books? Do you think you will find out more about life if you know a million people rather than yourself? Do you think you will get more pleasure from a thousand women than from two or three — see more if you go to a hundred countries instead of six? And finally, do you think you’ll get more happiness from life by ‘getting your work done’ than by doing nothing? My God! Eugene —” his voice was weary with the resigned fatality of despair that had now corrupted him —“you still feel that it is important that you ‘do your work,’ as you call it, but what will it matter if you do or don’t? You want to lead the artist’s life, to do the artist’s work, to create out of the artist’s materials — what will it matter in the end if you do this, or nothing?”
“You did not always feel so, Frank.”
“No,” said Starwick wearily, “there was a time when I felt differently. There was a time when I felt that the artist’s life was the finest life on earth — the only life I would care to lead.”
“And now?”
“Now — nothing — nothing,” he spoke so quietly that his words were scarcely audible. “It no longer matters. . . . I go to the Louvre and look at that colossal mountain of junk — up and down those endless corridors hung with the dull or worthless work of thousands of dead men who once felt as I did — that they must create, express the image of their soul — that art and the artist’s life were all that mattered. Now they are dead, their dreary works have been left behind as a kind of useless relic of their agony: in that whole gigantic storage-plant of worthless art — there are just three pictures I should have cared to paint — and I know it’s not in me to paint any of them. I thought I wanted to write plays, but now I feel the same about that, too; among all the thousands of plays I have read or seen, I doubt that there are a dozen which I should have cared to write — and I know now that I could have written none of them. . . . What does it matter? Why do you goad your spirit and exhaust your mind with these frantic efforts, these useless desires to add another book or play to the mountains of books and plays that have already been written? Why should we break our hearts to add to that immense accumulation of dull, fair, or trivial work that has already been done?” He was silent a moment longer, and then the colour in his ruddy face deepening with excitement, he said in a high, passionate tone: “What is great — what is priceless — what we would give our lives to do — is so impossible — so utterly, damnably impossible! And if we can never do the best — then why do anything?”
For a moment, there returned to the other a memory of the moonlit streets of Cambridge, and of a night when Starwick, drunk with wine and the generous and extravagant enthusiasm of youth, had turned to him and in a voice that rung along the sleeping street, had called him a mighty poet. And he remembered how his own heart had beat hot with hope and joy at the sound of those proud and foolish words, and how he had grasped Starwick’s hand and wrung it with a hard grip of passionate conviction, and told Frank what he believed at that moment with all the ardour of his heart — that Starwick was the greatest young man of his time and generation.
And remembering now those two drunk and happy boys who stood there in the moon-still streets, and spoke to each other the compact of their devotion and belief, he wanted to ask Frank if this weary acquiescence in defeat, that had now become the very colour of his life, was a better thing than the proud and foolish vision of a boy.
But he said nothing, and after a moment’s silence, Starwick looked at his watch and called the waiter, saying that it was already time for their meeting with the two women at a café in Montparnasse. Therefore, they paid the bill and departed; but what Frank had said to him that day would live in his memory in years to come. For in Frank’s words were implicit every element of the resignation, despair, and growing inertia and apathy of his will.