Grey Roses by Henry Harland

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GREY ROSES

by

HENRY HARLAND

By the same Author

The Cardinal's Snuff-Box
Comedies and Errors
The Lady Paramount
Mademoiselle Miss

John Lane, The Bodley Head, London
John Lane Company, New York
Fifth Edition
Presswork by the University Press
John Wilson and Son . Cambridge, U.S.A.

1911

_'Yes, the conception was a rose,
but the achievement is a rose
grown grey.'_--PARASCHKINE

CONTENTS

THE BOHEMIAN GIRL

MERCEDES

A BROKEN LOOKING-GLASS

THE REWARD OF VIRTUE

A RE-INCARNATION

FLOWER O' THE QUINCE

WHEN I AM KING

A RESPONSIBILITY

CASTLES NEAR SPAIN

I.

I woke up very gradually this morning, and it took me a little while
to bethink myself where I had slept--that it had not been in my own
room in the Cromwell Road. I lay a-bed, with eyes half-closed,
drowsily look looking forward to the usual procession of sober-hued
London hours, and, for the moment, quite forgot the journey of
yesterday, and how it had left me in Paris, a guest in the smart new
house of my old friend, Nina Childe. Indeed, it was not until somebody
tapped on my door, and I roused myself to call out 'Come in,' that I
noticed the strangeness of the wall-paper, and then, after an instant
of perplexity, suddenly remembered. Oh, with a wonderful lightening of
the spirit, I can tell you.

A white-capped, brisk young woman, with a fresh-coloured, wholesome
peasant face, came in, bearing a tray--Jeanne, Nina's femme-de-chambre.

'Bonjour, monsieur,' she cried cheerily. 'I bring monsieur his
coffee.' And her announcement was followed by a fragrance--the
softly-sung response of the coffee-sprite. Her tray, with its pretty
freight of silver and linen, primrose butter, and gently-browned
pain-de-gruau, she set down on the table at my elbow; then she crossed
the room and drew back the window-curtains, making the rings tinkle
crisply on the metal rods, and letting in a gush of dazzling sunshine.
From where I lay I could see the house-fronts opposite glow
pearly-grey in shadow, and the crest of the slate roofs sharply print
itself on the sky, like a black line on a sheet of scintillant blue
velvet. Yet, a few minutes ago, I had been fancying myself in the
Cromwell Road.

Jeanne, gathering up my scattered garments, to take them off and brush
them, inquired, by the way, if monsieur had passed a comfortable
night.

'As the chambermaid makes your bed, so must you lie in it,' I
answered. 'And you know whether my bed was smoothly made.'

Jeanne smiled indulgently. But her next remark--did it imply that she
found me rusty? 'Here's a long time that you haven't been in Paris.'

'Yes,' I admitted; 'not since May, and now we're in November.'

'We have changed things a little, have we not?' she demanded, with a
gesture that left the room, and included the house, the street, the
quarter.

'In effect,' assented I.

'Monsieur desires his hot water?' she asked, abruptly irrelevant.

But I could be, or at least seem, abruptly irrelevant too.
'Mademoiselle--is she up?'

'Ah, yes, monsieur. Mademoiselle has been up since eight. She awaits
you in the salon. La voila qui joue,' she added, pointing to the
floor.

Nina had begun to play scales in the room below.

'Then you may bring me my hot water,' I said.

II.

The scales continued while I was dressing, and many desultory
reminiscences of the player, and vague reflections upon the
unlikelihood of her adventures, went flitting through my mind to their
rhythm. Here she was, scarcely turned thirty, beautiful, brilliant,
rich in her own right, as free in all respects to follow her own will
as any man could be, with Camille happily at her side, a well grown,
rosy, merry miss of twelve,--here was Nina, thus, to-day; and yet, a
mere little ten years ago, I remembered her ... ah, in a very
different plight indeed. True, she has got no more than her deserts;
she has paid for her success, every pennyweight of it, in hard work
and self-denial. But one is so expectant, here below, to see Fortune
capricious, that, when for once in a way she bestows her favours where
they are merited, one can't help feeling rather dazed. One is so
inured to seeing honest Effort turn empty-handed from her door.

Ten little years ago--but no. I must begin further back. I must tell
you something about Nina's father.

III.

He was an Englishman who lived for the greater part of his life in
Paris. I would say he was a painter, if he had not been equally a
sculptor, a musician, an architect, a writer of verse, and a
university coach. A doer of so many things is inevitably suspect; you
will imagine that he must have bungled them all. On the contrary,
whatever he did, he did with a considerable degree of accomplishment.
The landscapes he painted were very fresh and pleasing, delicately
coloured, with lots of air in them, and a dreamy, suggestive
sentiment. His brother sculptors declared that his statuettes were
modelled with exceeding dash and directness; they were certainly
fanciful and amusing. I remember one that I used to like
immensely--Titania driving to a tryst with Bottom, her chariot a lily,
daisies for wheels, and for steeds a pair of mettlesome field-mice. I
doubt if he ever got a commission for a complete house; but the
staircases he designed, the fire-places, and other bits of buildings,
everybody thought original and graceful. The tunes he wrote were
lively and catching, the words never stupid, sometimes even strikingly
happy, epigrammatic; and he sang them delightfully, in a robust,
hearty baritone. He coached the youth of France, for their
examinations, in Latin and Greek, in history, mathematics, general
literature--in goodness knows what not; and his pupils failed so
rarely that, when one did, the circumstance became a nine days'
wonder. The world beyond the Students' Quarter had never heard of him,
but there he was a celebrity and a favourite; and, strangely enough
for a man with so many strings to his bow, he contrived to pick up a
sufficient living.

He was a splendid creature to look at, tall, stalwart, full-blooded,
with a ruddy open-air complexion; a fine bold brow and nose; brown
eyes, humorous, intelligent, kindly, that always brightened
flatteringly when they met you; and a vast quantity of bluish-grey
hair and beard. In his dress he affected (very wisely, for they became
him excellently) velvet jackets, flannel shirts, loosely-knotted ties,
and wide-brimmed soft felt hats. Marching down the Boulevard St.
Michel, his broad shoulders well thrown back, his head erect, chin
high in air, his whole person radiating health, power, contentment,
and the pride of them: he was a sight worth seeing, spirited,
picturesque, prepossessing. You could not have passed him without
noticing him--without wondering who he was, confident he was
somebody--without admiring him, and feeling that there went a man it
would be interesting to know.

He was, indeed, charming to know; he was the hero, the idol, of a
little sect of worshippers, young fellows who loved nothing better
than to sit at his feet. On the Rive Gauche, to be sure, we are, for
the most part, birds of passage; a student arrives, tarries a little,
then departs. So, with the exits and entrances of seniors and
_nouveaux_, the personnel of old Childe's following varied from season
to season; but numerically it remained pretty much the same. He had a
studio, with a few living-rooms attached, somewhere up in the
fastnesses of Montparnasse, though it was seldom thither that one went
to seek him. He received at his cafe, the Cafe Bleu--the Cafe Bleu
which has since blown into the monster cafe of the Quarter, the
noisiest, the rowdiest, the most flamboyant. But I am writing (alas)
of twelve, thirteen, fifteen years ago; in those days the Cafe Bleu
consisted of a single oblong room--with a sanded floor, a dozen
tables, and two waiters, Eugene and Hippolyte--where Madame Chanve,
the _patronne_, in lofty insulation behind her counter, reigned, if
you please, but where Childe, her principal client, governed. The
bottom of the shop, at any rate, was reserved exclusively to his use.
There he dined, wrote his letters, dispensed his hospitalities; he had
his own piano there, if you can believe me, his foils and
boxing-gloves; from the absinthe hour till bed-time there was his
habitat, his den. And woe to the passing stranger who, mistaking the
Cafe Bleu for an ordinary house of call, ventured, during that
consecrated period, to drop in. Nothing would be said, nothing done;
we would not even trouble to stare at the intruder. Yet he would
seldom stop to finish his consommation, or he would bolt it. He would
feel something in the air; he would know he was out of place. He would
fidget a little, frown a little, and get up meekly, and slink into the
street. Human magnetism is such a subtle force. And Madame Chanve
didn't mind in the least; she preferred a bird in the hand to a brace
in the bush. From half a dozen to a score of us dined at her long
table every evening; as many more drank her appetisers in the
afternoon, and came again at night for grog or coffee. You see, it was
a sort of club, a club of which Childe was at once the chairman and
the object. If we had had a written constitution, it must have begun:
'The purpose of this association is the enjoyment of the society of
Alfred Childe.'

Ah, those afternoons, those dinners, those ambrosial nights! If the
weather was kind, of course, we would begin our session on the
_terrasse_, sipping our vermouth, puffing our cigarettes, laughing our
laughs, tossing hither and thither our light ball of gossip, vaguely
conscious of the perpetual ebb and flow and murmur of people in the
Boulevard, while the setting sun turned Paris to a marvellous
water-colour, all pale lucent tints, amber and alabaster and
mother-of-pearl, with amethystine shadows. Then, one by one, those of
us who were dining elsewhere would slip away; and at a sign from
Hippolyte the others would move indoors, and take their places down
either side of the long narrow table, Childe at the head, his daughter
Nina next him. And presently with what a clatter of knives and forks,
clinking of glasses, and babble of human voices the Cafe Bleu would
echo. Madame Chanve's kitchen was not a thing to boast of, and her
price, for the Latin Quarter, was rather high--I think we paid three
francs, wine included, which would be for most of us distinctly a
_prix-de-luxe_. But oh, it was such fun; we were so young; Childe was
so delightful. The fun was best, of course, when we were few, and
could all sit up near to him, and none need lose a word. When we were
many there would be something like a scramble for good seats.

I ask myself whether, if I could hear him again to-day, I should think
his talk as wondrous as I thought it then. Then I could thrill at the
verse of Musset, and linger lovingly over the prose of Theophile, I
could laugh at the wit of Gustave Droz, and weep at the pathos ... it
costs me a pang to own it, but yes, I'm afraid ... I could weep at
the pathos of Henry Muerger; and these have all suffered such a sad
sea-change since. So I could sit, hour after hour, in a sort of
ecstasy, listening to the talk of Nina's father. It flowed from him
like wine from a full measure, easily, smoothly, abundantly. He had a
ripe, genial voice, and an enunciation that made crystals of his
words; whilst his range of subjects was as wide as the earth and the
sky. He would talk to you of God and man, of metaphysics, ethics, the
last new play, murder, or change of ministry; of books, of pictures,
specifically, or of the general principles of literature and painting;
of people, of sunsets, of Italy, of the high seas, of the Paris
streets--of what, in fine, you pleased. Or he would spin you yarns,
sober, farcical, veridical, or invented. And, with transitions
infinitely rapid, he would be serious, jocose--solemn, ribald--earnest,
flippant--logical, whimsical, turn and turn about. And in every
sentence, in its form or in its substance, he would wrap a surprise
for you--it was the unexpected word, the unexpected assertion,
sentiment, conclusion, that constantly arrived. Meanwhile it would
enhance your enjoyment mightily to watch his physiognomy, the
movements of his great, grey, shaggy head, the lightening and
darkening of his eyes, his smile, his frown, his occasional slight
shrug or gesture. But the oddest thing was this, that he could take as
well as give; he could listen--surely a rare talent in a monologist.
Indeed, I have never known a man who could make _you_ feel so
interesting.

After dinner he would light an immense brown meerschaum pipe, and
smoke for a quarter-hour or so in silence; then he would play a game
or two of chess with some one; and by and by he would open his piano,
and sing to us till midnight.

IV.

I speak of him as old, and indeed we always called him Old Childe
among ourselves; yet he was barely fifty. Nina, when I first made her
acquaintance, must have been a girl of sixteen or seventeen;
though--tall, with an amply-rounded, mature-seeming figure--if one
had judged from her appearance, one would have fancied her three or
four years older. For that matter, she looked then very much as she
looks now; I can perceive scarcely any alteration. She had the same
dark hair, gathered up in a big smooth knot behind, and breaking into
a tumult of little ringlets over her forehead; the same clear,
sensitive complexion; the same rather large, full-lipped mouth,
tip-tilted nose, soft chin, and merry mischievous eyes. She moved in
the same way, with the same leisurely, almost lazy grace, that could,
however, on occasions, quicken to an alert, elastic vivacity; she had
the same voice, a trifle deeper than most women's, and of a quality
never so delicately nasal, which made it racy and characteristic; the
same fresh ready laughter. There was something arch, something a
little sceptical, a little quizzical in her expression, as if,
perhaps, she were disposed to take the world, more or less, with a
grain of salt; at the same time there was something rich,
warm-blooded, luxurious, suggesting that she would know how to savour
its pleasantnesses with complete enjoyment. But if you felt that she
was by way of being the least bit satirical in her view of things, you
felt too that she was altogether good-natured, and even that, at need,
she could show herself spontaneously kind, generous, devoted. And if
you inferred that her temperament inclined rather towards the sensuous
than the ascetic, believe me, it did not lessen her attractiveness.

At the time of which I am writing now, the sentiment that reigned
between Nina and Old Childe's retinue of young men was chiefly an
_esprit-de-corps_. Later on we all fell in love with her; but for the
present we were simply amiably fraternal. We were united to her by a
common enthusiasm; we were fellow-celebrants at her ancestral
altar--or, rather, she was the high priestess there, we were her
acolytes. For, with her, filial piety did in very truth partake of the
nature of religion; she really, literally, idolised her father. One
only needed to watch her for three minutes, as she sat beside him, to
understand the depth and ardour of her emotion: how she adored him,
how she admired him and believed in him, how proud of him she was,
how she rejoiced in him. 'Oh, you think you know my father,' I
remember her saying to us once. 'Nobody knows him. Nobody is great
enough to know him. If people knew him they would fall down and kiss
the ground he walks on.' It is certain she deemed him the wisest, the
noblest, the handsomest, the most gifted, of human kind. That little
gleam of mockery in her eye died out instantly when she looked at him,
when she spoke of him or listened to him; instead, there came a tender
light of love, and her face grew pale with the fervour of her
affection. Yet, when he jested, no one laughed more promptly or more
heartily than she. In those days I was perpetually trying to write
fiction; and Old Childe was my inveterate hero. I forget in how many
ineffectual manuscripts, under what various dread disguises, he was
afterwards reduced to ashes; I am afraid, in one case, a scandalous
distortion of him got abroad in print. Publishers are sometimes
ill-advised; and thus the indiscretions of our youth may become the
confusions of our age. The thing was in three volumes, and called
itself a novel; and of course the fatuous author had to make a bad
business worse by presenting a copy to his victim. I shall never
forget the look Nina gave me when I asked her if she had read it; I
grow hot even now as I recall it. I had waited and waited expecting
her compliments; and at last I could wait no longer, and so asked her;
and she answered me with a look! It was weeks, I am not sure it wasn't
months, before she took me back to her good graces. But Old Childe was
magnanimous; he sent me a little pencil-drawing of his head, inscribed
in the corner, 'To Frankenstein from his Monster.'

V.

It was a queer life for a girl to live, that happy-go-lucky life of
the Latin Quarter, lawless and unpremeditated, with a cafe for her
school-room, and none but men for comrades; but Nina liked it; and her
father had a theory in his madness. He was a Bohemian, not in practice
only, but in principle; he preached Bohemianism as the most rational
manner of existence, maintaining that it developed what was intrinsic
and authentic in one's character, saved one from the artificial, and
brought one into immediate contact with the realities of the world;
and he protested he could see no reason why a human being should be
'cloistered and contracted' because of her sex. 'What would not hurt
my son, if I had one, will not hurt my daughter. It will make a man of
her--without making her the less a woman.' So he took her with him to
the Cafe Bleu, and talked in her presence quite as freely as he might
have talked had she been absent. As, in the greater number of his
theological, political, and social convictions, he was exceedingly
unorthodox, she heard a good deal, no doubt, that most of us would
scarcely consider edifying for our daughters' ears; but he had his
system, he knew what he was about. 'The question whether you can touch
pitch and remain undefiled,' he said, 'depends altogether upon the
spirit in which you approach it. The realities of the world, the
realities of life, the real things of God's universe--what have we
eyes for, if not to envisage them? Do so fearlessly, honestly, with a
clean heart, and, man or woman, you can only be the better for it.'
Perhaps his system was a shade too simple, a shade too obvious, for
this complicated planet; but he held to it in all sincerity. It was in
pursuance of the same system, I daresay, that he taught Nina to fence,
and to read Latin and Greek, as well as to play the piano, and turn an
omelette. She could ply a foil against the best of us.

And then, quite suddenly, he died.

I think it was in March, or April; anyhow it was a premature
spring-like day, and he had left off his overcoat. That evening he
went to the Odeon, and when, after the play he joined us for supper at
the Bleu, he said he thought he had caught a cold, and ordered hot
grog. The next day he did not turn up at all; so several of us, after
dinner, presented ourselves at his lodgings in Montparnasse. We found
him in bed, with Nina reading to him. He was feverish, and Nina had
insisted that he should stop at home. He would be all right to-morrow.
He scoffed at our suggestion that he should see a doctor; he was one
of those men who affect to despise the medical profession. But early
on the following morning a commissionnaire brought me a note from
Nina. 'My father is very much worse. Can you come at once?' He was
delirious. Poor Nina, white, with frightened eyes, moved about like
one distracted. We sent off for Dr. Renoult, we had in a Sister of
Charity. Everything that could be done was done. Till the very end,
none of us for a moment doubted that he would recover. It was
impossible to conceive that that strong, affirmative life could be
extinguished. And even after the end had come, the end with its ugly
suite of material circumstances, I don't think any of us realised what
it meant. It was as if we had been told that one of the forces of
Nature had become inoperative. And Nina, through it all, was like some
pale thing in marble, that breathed and moved: white, dazed, helpless,
with aching, incredulous eyes, suffering everything, understanding
nothing.

When it came to the worst of the dreadful necessary businesses that
followed, some of us somehow, managed to draw her from the
death-chamber into another room, and to keep her there, while others
of us got it over. It was snowing that afternoon, I remember, a
melancholy, hesitating snowstorm, with large moist flakes that
fluttered down irresolutely, and presently disintegrated into rain;
but we had not far to go. Then we returned to Nina, and for many days
and nights we never dared to leave her. You will guess whether the
question of her future, especially of her immediate future, weighed
heavily upon our minds. In the end, however, it appeared to have
solved itself--though I can't pretend that the solution was exactly
all we could have wished.

Her father had a half-brother (we learned this from his papers),
incumbent of rather an important living in the north of England. We
also learned that the brothers had scarcely seen each other twice in a
score of years, and had kept up only the most fitful correspondence.
Nevertheless, we wrote to the clergyman, describing the sad case of
his niece, and in reply we got a letter, addressed to Nina herself,
saying that of course she must come at once to Yorkshire, and consider
the rectory her home. I don't need to recount the difficulties we had
in explaining to her, in persuading her. I have known few more painful
moments than that when, at the Gare du Nord, half a dozen of us
established the poor, benumbed, bewildered child in her compartment,
and sent her, with our godspeed, alone upon her long journey--to her
strange kindred, and the strange conditions of life she would have to
encounter among them. From the Cafe Bleu to a Yorkshire parsonage! And
Nina's was not by any means a neutral personality, nor her mind a
blank sheet of paper. She had a will of her own; she had convictions,
aspirations, traditions, prejudices, which she would hold to with
enthusiasm because they had been her father's, because her father had
taught them to her; and she had manners, habits, tastes. She would be
sure to horrify the people she was going to; she would be sure to
resent their criticism, their slightest attempt at interference. Oh,
my heart was full of misgivings; yet--she had no money, she was
eighteen years old--what else could we advise her to do? All the same,
her face, as it looked down upon us from the window of her railway
carriage, white, with big terrified eyes fixed in a gaze of blank
uncomprehending anguish, kept rising up to reproach me for weeks
afterwards. I had her on my conscience as if I had personally wronged
her.

VI.

It was characteristic of her that, during her absence, she hardly
wrote to us. She is of far too hasty and impetuous a nature to take
kindly to the task of letter-writing; her moods are too inconstant;
her thoughts, her fancies, supersede one another too rapidly. Anyhow,
beyond the telegram we had made her promise to send, announcing her
safe arrival, the most favoured of us got nothing more than an
occasional scrappy note, if he got so much; while the greater number
of the long epistles some of us felt in duty bound to address to her,
elicited not even the semblance of an acknowledgment. Hence, about the
particulars of her experience we were quite in the dark, though of its
general features we were informed, succinctly, in a big, dashing,
uncompromising hand, that she 'hated' them.

VII.

I am not sure whether it was late in April or early in May that Nina
left us. But one day towards the middle of October, coming home from
the restaurant where I had lunched, I found in my letter box, in the
concierge's room, two half sheets of paper, folded, with the corners
turned down, and my name superscribed in pencil. The handwriting
startled me a little--and yet, no, it was impossible. Then I hastened
to unfold, and read, and of course it was the impossible which had
happened.

'Mon cher, I am sorry not to find you at home, but I'll wait at the
cafe at the corner till half-past twelve. It is now midi juste.' That
was the first. The second ran: 'I have waited till a quarter to one.
Now I am going to the Bleu for luncheon. I shall be there till three.'
And each was signed with the initials, N.C.

It was not yet two, so I had plenty of time. But you will believe that
I didn't loiter on that account. I dashed out of the _loge_--into the
street--down the Boulevard St. Michel--into the Bleu, breathlessly. At
the far end Nina was seated before a marble table, with Madame Chanve
in smiles and tears beside her. I heard a little cry; I felt myself
seized and enveloped for a moment by something like a whirlwind--oh,
but a very pleasant whirlwind, warm and fresh, and fragrant of
violets; I received two vigorous kisses, one on either cheek; and then
I was held off at arm's length, and examined by a pair of laughing
eyes.

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