 Part 3 of Part 3 of Trillby. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Estelle Jobs. Trillby by Georges de Montréal. Part 3. Part 3. One fine Sunday afternoon, Little Billy found himself studying life and character in that most delightful and festive scene, La Fête de Saint-Cloude, and met Dodor and Lzuzu there, who hailed him with delight, saying, Nous allons joliment jubiler, non d'un pipe, and insisted on his joining in their amusements and paying for them, round about swings, the giant, the dwarf, the strong man, the fat woman, to whom they made love, and were taken too seriously and turned out, the menagerie of wild beasts whom they teased and aggravated till the police had to interfere. Also of fresco dancers, where their can-can step was of the wildest and most unbridled character, till a sous-officier, or a gendarme, came in sight, and then they danced quite mincingly and demurely, or maître d'école, as they called it, to the huge delight of an immense and ever-increasing crowd, and the disgust of all truly respectable men. They also insisted on Little Billy's walking between them, arm in arm, and talking to them in English whenever they saw, coming towards them, a respectable English family with daughters. It was the dragoons' delight to get himself stared at by fair daughters of Albion, for speaking as good English as themselves, a rare accomplishment in a French trooper, and Zuzu's happiness to be thought English too. Though the only English he knew was the phrase, I will not, I will not, which he had picked up in the Crimea, and repeated over and over again, when he came with an earshot of a pretty English girl. Little Billy was not happy in these circumstances. He was no snob, but he was a respectably broad-up young Briton of the higher middle-class, and it was not quite pleasant for him to be seen, by fair country women of his own, walking arm in arm on a Sunday afternoon with a couple of French private soldiers and uncommonly rowdy ones at that. Later they came back to Paris together on the top of an omnibus, among a very proletarian crowd, and there the two facetious warriors immediately made themselves pleasant all round, and became very popular, especially with the women and children, but not, I regret to say, through the propriety, refinement, and discretion of their behaviour. Little Billy resolved that he would not go a-pleasuring with them any more. However, they stuck to him through thick and thin, and insisted on escorting him all the way back to the Quartier-Latin by the Pont de la Concorde, and the Rue de Lille in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Little Billy loved the Faubourg Saint-Germain, especially the Rue de Lille. He was fond of gazing at the magnificent old mansions, the hotels of the old French noblesse, or rather the outside walls thereof, the grand sculptured portals with the armorial bearings and the splendid old historic names above them. Hotel de this, Hotel de that, Roin-Chabot, Montmorency, La Roche-Foucault-Lien-Court, La Tour d'Auvergne. He would forget himself in romantic dreams of past and forgotten French chivalry, which these glorious names called up, for he knew a little of French history, loving to read Françard and Saint-Simon, and the genial Brandt-Dôme. Halting opposite one of the finest and oldest of all these gateways, his special favourite labelled Hotel de la Roche-Marthe, in letters of faded gold over a ducal coronette and a huge escutcheon of stone, he began to descant upon its architectural beauties and noble proportions to Le Zouzou. Bar bleu, c'est Le Zouzou, connu, farceur, why, I was born there, on the 6th of March 1834 at 5.30 in the morning, a lucky day for France, hein? Born there? What do you mean? In the porter's lodge? At this juncture the two great gates rolled back, a liveried Swiss appeared, and an open carriage and a pair came out, and in it were two elderly ladies and a younger one. To little Billy's indignation, the two incorrigible warriors made the military salute, and the three ladies bowed stiffly and gravely. And then, to little Billy's horror this time, one of them happened to look back, and Zouzou actually kissed his hand to her. Do you know that lady, asked little Billy, very sternly? Bar bleu, si je la connais, why, it's my mother, isn't she nice? She's rather cross with me just now. Your mother, why, what do you mean? What on earth would your mother be doing in that big carriage and at that big house? Bar bleu, farceur, she lives there. Lives there? Why, who and what is she, your mother? The Duchesse de la Roche Martelle Bar bleu, and that's my sister, and that's my aunt. Princess de chevagne, Baframon, she's the patron of that chic equipage. She's a millionaire, my aunt Chevagne. Well, I never. What's your name then? Oh, my name. Hang it, let me see. Well, Gontran, Xavier, François, Marie, Joseph, Damory, de Brissac, de Rencevaux, de la Roche Martelle, Bois-Ségur, at your service. Quite correct, said Donor, l'enfant dit Vrin. Well, I never. And what's your name, Donor? Oh, I'm only a humble individual, and answer to the one horse name of Theodore Rigolle de la Farce. But Zouzou's an awful swell, you know, his brother's the Duke. Little Billy was no snob, but he was a respectably brought up young Britain of the higher middle class, and these revelations, which he could not but believe, astounded him so that he could hardly speak. Much as he flattered himself that he scorned the bloated aristocracy, titles are titles, even French titles, and when it comes to dukes and princesses who live in houses like the Hotel de la Roche Martelle, it's enough to take a respectably brought up young Britain's breath away. When he saw Taffy that evening, he exclaimed, I say, Zouzou's mother's a Duchess. Yes, the Duchess de la Roche Martelle, Bois-Ségur. You never told me. You never asked me. It's one of the greatest names in France. They're very poor, I believe. Poor? You should see the house they live in. I've been there to dinner, and the dinner wasn't very good. They let a great part of it, and live mostly in the country. The Duke is Zouzou's brother, very unlike Zouzou. He's consumptive and unmarried, and the most respectable man in Paris. Zouzou will be the Duke some day. And d'odeur, he's a swell, too, I suppose. He says he's de something, o'other. Yes, rigolo de la France. I've no doubt he descends from the Crusaders, too. His name seems to favour it, anyhow, and such lots of them do in this country. His mother was English and bore the worthy name of Brown. He was at school in England, that's why he speaks English so well, and behaves so badly, perhaps. He's got a very beautiful sister, married to a man in the 60th Rifles, Jack Reeve, a son of Lord Reevely's. A selfish sort of chap. I don't suppose he gets on very well with his brother-in-law. Poor d'odeur. His sister's about the only living thing he cares for, except Zouzou. I wonder if the bland and genial Monsieur deud'or, Notre Monsieur deud'or, now junior partner in the great haberdashery firm of Passville et Rigolo on the Boulevard des Capucines, and a pillar of the English chapel in the Rue Marbeuf, is very hard on his employees and his employees if they are a little late at their counters on a Monday morning. I wonder if that stuck-up Stingy Stodgy communard shooting church going, time-serving, place-hunting, pious-eyed, pompous, or prig, Martinette and Philistine, Monsieur le Maréchal-duke de la Roche-Martel-bois-Segure ever tells Madame la Maréchal-duchesse-née, hanks of Chicago, how once upon a time deud'or and he, we will tell no tales out of school. The prison scribe is no snob. He is a respectably brought-up old Britain of the higher middle class, at least he flatters himself so, and he writes for just such old Philistines as himself, who date from a time when titles were not thought so cheap as to-day. Alas, all reverence for all that is high and time-honoured and beautiful seems at a discount. So he has kept his black-guard ducal suave for the bouquet of this little show, the final bon bouche in his Bohemian menu, that he may make it palatable to those who only look upon the good old Cartier-Latin. Now, no more to speak of, as a very low, common vulgar quarter, indeed, deservedly swept away, where, Mrs. the students, shocking bounders and cadds, had nothing better to do, day and night, than mount up to a horrid place called the Thatched House, La Chaumière, pour y danser le concan, ou le Robert Maccaire, toujours, toujours, toujours, la nuit, a youp-youp-youp, tra-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la. Christmas was drawing near. There were days when the whole Cartier-Latin would veil its iniquities under fogs almost worthy of the Thames Valley between London Bridge and Westminster, and out of the studio window the prospect was a dreary blank. No morgue, no towers of Notre-Dame, not even the chimney pots over the way, not even the little medieval toy turret at the corner of the Rivier des Trois mauvais Ladres, Little Billy's Delight. The stove had to be crammed till its sides grew a dull deep red before one's fingers could hold a brush or squeeze a bladder. One had to box offence at nine in the morning that one might recover from the cold bath and get warm for the rest of the day. Taffy and the lad grew pensive and dreamy, childlike and bland, and when they talked it was generally about Christmas at home in Merry England and the distant land of cakes and how good it was to be there at such a time, hunting, shooting, curling, and endless carousers. It was ho for the jolly west riding and hay for the bonnets of Bonnie Dundee till they grew quite homesick and wanted to start by the very next train. They didn't do anything so foolish. They wrote over to friends in London for the biggest turkey, the biggest plum pudding that could be got for love or money, with mince pies and holly and mistletoe and sturdy short thick English sausages, half a stilton cheese, and a saloon of beef, two saloons, in case one should not be enough. For they meant to have a Homeric feast in the studio on Christmas Day, Taffy, the lad and Little Billy, and invite all the delightful chums I have been trying to describe and that is just why I tried to describe them, Durian, Vincent, Antony, Lorimé, Carnegie, Petrolico, Conor Zay, Zuzu, and Dodore. The cooking and waiting should be done by Trilby, her friend, Angèle Bois, Monsieur and Madame Vinard, and such little vinaurs as could be trusted with glass and crockery and mince pies, and if that was not enough they would also cook themselves and wait upon each other. When dinner should be over supper was to follow with scarcely any interval to speak of, and to partake of this other guests should be bidden, Spangali and Gekko, and perhaps one or two more, no ladies. For as the unsusceptible layered expressed it in the language of a ghillie he had once met at a servant's dance in a highland country house, them women spiled the ball. Elaborate cards of invitation were sent out in the designing and ornamentation of which the Laird and Taffy exhausted all their fancy. Little Billy had no time. Wines and spirits and English beers were procured at great cost from M.I. de Le Vignes. In the rue Saint-en-Hauré, and the cures of every description, Chartreuse, Corasso, Ratafia du Gassis, and Anisset, no expense was spared. Also truffled gallantines of turkey, tongues, hams, rillettes de tour, pâté de foie gras, fromage d'italie, which has nothing to do with cheese, saucisson d'arls et de liens, with and without garlic, cold jellies, peppery and salt, everything that French charcutiers and their wives can make out of French pigs, or any other animal, whatever, beast, bird or fowl, even cats and rats, for the supper, and sweet jellies and cakes, and sweet meats and confections of all kinds, from the famous pastry cook at the corner of the rue Castillonne. Mouths went watering all day long in joyful anticipation. They watered somewhat sadly now at the mere remembrance of these delicious things, the mere immediate sight or scent of which in these degenerate latter days would no longer avail to promote any such delectable secretion. Oh, in point of fact, alas, that is the very exclamation I wanted. Christmas Eve came round. The pieces of resistance and plum pudding and mince pies had not yet arrived from London, but there was plenty of time. Les Trois Anglices dined at Le Père Trance, as usual, and played billiards and dominoes at the Café du Luxembourg, and possessed their souls in patience till it was time to go and hear the midnight mass at the Madeleine, where Rue Couly, the great baritone of the Opéraicomique, was retained to sing Adam's famous Noël. The whole quartier seemed alive with the réveillon. It was a clear frosty night with a splendid moon just past the full and most exhilarating was the walk along the quays on the rive gauche, over the pont de la Concorde and across the Place thereof, and up the throng de Rue de la Madeleine to the massive Parthenique place of worship that always has such a pagan worldly look of smug and prosperous modernity. They struggled manfully and found standing in kneeling room among that fervent crowd, and heard the impressive service with mixed feelings as became true Britons of very advanced liberal and religious opinions, not with the unmixed contempt of the proper British orthodox, who were there in full force, one may be sure. But their susceptible hearts soon melted at the beautiful music, and in mere sensuous attendrissement, they were quickly in unison with all the rest. For as the clock struck twelve, out peeled the organ and up rose the finest voice in France. Minuit, chrétien, celleur solonnel, ou l'homme dieu descendi parmi nous. And a wave of religious emotion rolled over little Billy and submerged him, swept him off his little legs, swept him out of his little self, drowned him in a great seething surge of love, love of his kind, love of love, love of life, love of death, love of all that is and ever was and ever will be. A very large order indeed, even for little Billy. And it seemed to him that he stretched out his arms for love to one figure especially beloved, beyond all the rest, one figure erect on high with arms outstretched to him, in more than common fellowship of need, not the sorrowful figure crowned with thorns, for it was in the likeness of a woman, but never that of the virgin mother of our Lord. It was Trilby, Trilby, Trilby, a poor fallen sinner and waif, all but lost amid the scum of the most corrupt city on earth. Trilby weak and mortal like himself, and in woeful want of pardon, and in her gray, dove-like eyes he saw the shining of so great a love that he was abashed, for well he knew that all that love was his and would be his forever, come what would or could. So sang and rang and peeled and echoed the big deep metallic baritone bass above the organ, above the incense, above everything else in the world, till the very universe seemed to shake with the rolling thunder of that great message of love and forgiveness. Thus at least felt Little Billy, whose way it was to magnify and exaggerate all things under the subtle stimulus of sound, and the singing human voice had especially strange power to penetrate into his inmost depths, even the voice of man. And what voice, but the deepest and gravest and grandest there is, can give wordy utterance to such a message as that, the epitome, the abstract, the very essence of all collective humanity's wisdom at its best. Little Billy reached the Hotel Cornet that night in a very exalted frame of mind indeed, the loftiest, lowliest mood of all. Now see what sport we are of trivial, basic, noble earthly things. Sitting on the doorstep and smoking two cigars at once he found Ribor, one of his fellow lodgers, whose room was just under his own. Ribor was so tipsy that he could not ring, but he could still sing, and did so at the top of his voice. It was not the Noel of Adam that he sang. He had not spent his Reveillon in any church. With the help of a sleepy waiter, Little Billy got the bacchanalian into his room, and lit his candle for him, and disengaging himself from his mordlin embraces left him to wallow in solitude. As he lay awake in his bed, trying to recall the deep and high emotions of the evening, he heard the tipsy hog below, tumbling about his room, and still trying to sing his senseless ditty. Then the song ceased for a while, and soon there were other sounds, as on a chanel steamer, glue glue indeed. Then the fear rose in Little Billy's mind, lest the drunken beast should set fire to his bedroom curtains. All heavenly visions were chased away for the night. Our hero, half crazed with fear, disgust and irritation, lay wide awake, his nostrils on the watch for the smell of burning chints on muslin, and wondered how an educated man, for Ribor was a law student, could ever make such a filthy beast of himself as that. It was a scandal, a disgrace, it was not to be borne, there should be no forgiveness for such as Ribor, not even on Christmas Day. He would complain to Madame Paul the patron, he would have Ribor turned out into the street, he would leave the hotel himself the very next morning. At last he fell asleep, thinking of all he would do. Thus, ridiculously and ignominiously for Little Billy, ended the réveillon. Next morning he complained to Madame Paul, and though he did not give her warning, nor even insist on the expulsion of Ribor, who, as he heard with a hard heart, was bien malade ce matin, he expressed himself very severely on the conduct of that gentleman, and on the dangers from fire that might arise from a tipsy man being trusted alone in a small bedroom with chins' curtains and a lighted candle. If it hadn't been for himself, he told her, Ribor would have slept on the doorstep, and serve him right. He was really grand in his virtuous indignation, in spite of his imperfect fringe, and Madame Paul was deeply contrite for her peckent lodger and profuse in her apologies, and Little Billy began his twenty-first Christmas Day like a Pharisee, thanking his star that he was not as Ribor. End of Part Third Recording by Estelle Jobson Roe, Italy This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Estelle Jobson Trilby by Geoff de Maullet Part Fourth Part One Felicité passée qui ne peut revenir tout le monde de ma pensée que les gens ont perdu le souvenir. Midday had struck. The expected hamper had not turned up in the Place Saint-Anatole-des-Arts. All Madame Vina's kitchen battery was in readiness. Trilby and Madame Angèle Bois were in the studio, their sleeves turned up and ready to begin. At twelve, the Trois-English and the two fairs blanchisseurs sat down to lunch in a very anxious frame of mind and finished a pâté de foie gras and two bottles of burgundy between them. Such was their disquietude. The guests had been invited for six o'clock. Most elaborately, they laid the cloth on the table they had borrowed from the hotel de Seine and settled who was to sit next to whom, and then unsettled it and quarrelled over it. Trilby, as was her want in such matters, assuming an authority that did not rightly belong to her, and, of course, getting her own way in the end. And that, as the lay had remarked, was her confounded Trilminus. Two o'clock, three, four, but no hamper. Darkness had almost set in. It was simply maddening. They knelt on the divan with their elbows on the windowsill and watched the street lamps popping into life along the keys, and looked out through the gathering dusk for the van from the chemin de fer du Nord, and gloomily thought of the morgue, which they could still make out across the river. At length, the lay had and Trilby went off in a cab to the station, a long drive, and, lo, before they came back, the long-expected hamper arrived at six o'clock, and with Edurion, Vincent, Antony, Lorimé, Carnegie, Petrelic, Oconnase, Dodor, and Luzuzu, the last two in uniform, as usual. And suddenly the studio, which had been so silent, dark, and dull, with Taffy and little Billy sitting hopeless and despondent round the stove, became a scene of the noisiest, busiest, and cheerfulest animation, the three big lamps will it, and all the Chinese lanterns. The pieces of resistance and the pudding were whisked off by Trilby, Angèle, and Madame Vinard to other regions, the Porter's Lodge and Durian's Studio, which had been lent for the purpose, and everyone was pressed into the preparations for the banquet. There was plenty for idle hands to do, sausages to be fried for the turkey, stuffing made, and sauces, salads mixed, and punch, holly hung in festoons all round and about, a thousand things. Everybody was so clever and good-humoured that nobody got in anybody's way, not even Carnegie, who was in evening dress, to the lair's delight. So they made him do the scullions work, cleaning, rinsing, peeling, etc. The cooking of the dinner was almost better fun than the eating of it, and though there were so many cooks, not even the broth was spoiled, cock-a-leaky, from a receipt of the lairs. It was ten o'clock before they sat down to that most memorable repast. Luzuzu and Dordor, who had been the most useful and energetic of all its cooks, apparently quite forgot they would do at their respective barracks at that very moment. They had only been able to obtain La Permission de Dysart. If they remembered it, the certainty that next day's Luzuzu would be reduced to the ranks for the fifth time, and Dordor, confined to his barracks for a month, did not trouble them in the least. The waiting was as good as cooking. The handsome, quick, authoritative Madame Vinard was in a dozen places at once, and openly prompted, rebuked, and bully-ragged her husband into a proper smartness. Pretty little Madame Angel moved about as deftly and as quietly as a mouse, which, of course, did not prevent them both from genuinely joining in the general conversation whenever it wandered into French. Trilby, tall, graceful, and stately, and also swift of action, though more like Juno or Diana than Hibi, devoted herself more especially to her own particular favourites, Durian, Taffy, the Laird, little Belly, and Dordor and Zuzu, whom she loved, and Tutoade, en bonne camarade, as she served them with all there was of the choicest. The two little Vinards did their little best. They scrupulously respected the mincepies, and only broke two bottles of oil and one of Harvey's sauce, which made their mother furious. To console them, the Laird took one of them on each knee, and gave them of his share of plum pudding and many other unaccustomed good things, so bad for their little French tum-tums. The gentile carny he had never been at such a queer scene in his life. It opened his mind, and Dordor and Zuzu, between whom he sat, the Laird thought he would do him good to sit between a private soldier and a humble corporal, taught him more French than he had learned during the three months he had spent in Paris. It was a speciality of theirs. It was more colloquial than what is generally used in diplomatic circles, and stuck longer in the memory, but it hasn't interfered with his preferment in the church. He quite unbent. He was the first to volunteer a song, without being asked, when the pipes and cigars were lit, and after the usual toasts had been drunk, Her Majesty's Health, Tennyson, Thackeray, and Dickens, and John Leach. He sang with a very cracked and rather hiccupy voice. His only song, it seems, an English one, of which the burden he explained was French. And Zuzu and Dordor complimented him so profusely on his French accent, that he was with difficulty prevented from singing it all over again. Then everybody sang in rotation. The Laird, with a capital baritone, sang, Hey, little D, for the lowland's low, which was encored. Little Billy sang Little Billy. Vincent sang, Old Joe, kicking up behind and a four, and the yalla-galla kicking up behind Old Joe. A capital song with words of quite a masterly scansion. Antony sang, Lucille de Franboise, enthusiastic encore. Lorimer, inspired no doubt by the occasion, sang, The Hallelujah Chorus, and accompanied himself on the piano, but failed to obtain an encore. Durian sang, Plésir d'amour ne dure qu'un moment, Chagrin d'amour dure toute la vie. It was his favourite song, and is one of the beautiful songs of the world, and he sang it very well, and it became popular in the Cartier-Latin ever after. The Greek couldn't sing and very wisely didn't. Zuzu sang capital, a capital song, in praise of Levin Catzou. Taffy, in a voice like a high wind, and with a very good imitation of the Yorkshire Brogue, sang a Somersetcher-hunting-ditty ending, Of this year's song, Should I be asked the reason for it to show, I don't exactly know, I don't exactly know, But all my fancy dwells upon Nancy, and I sing Tally Ho. It is a quite super-excellent-ditty, and haunts my memory to this day, and one felt sure that Nancy was a dear and a sweet, wherever she lived and when. So Taffy was on called price, once for her sake, once for his own. And finally, to the surprise of all, the bold dragoon sang, in English, my sister dear, out of Mazzaniella, with such pathos, and in a voice so sweet and high and well-intuned, that his audience felt almost weepy in the midst of their jollification, and grew quite sentimental, as Englishmen abroad are apt to do when they are rather tipsy, and hear pretty music, and think of their dear sisters across the sea, or their friends, dear sisters. Madame Vinar interrupted her Christmas dinner on the model throne to listen, and wept and wiped her eyes quite openly, and remarked to Madame Bois, who stood modestly close by. Then Swingali and Gekko came, and the table had to be laid and decorated anew, for it was supper time. Supper was even jollier than dinner, which had taken off the keen edge of the appetites, so that everyone talked at once, the true taste of a successful supper, except when Antony told some of his experiences of Bohemia, for instance, how, after staying at home all day for a month to avoid his creditors, he became reckless one Sunday morning, and went to the Barn des Lignées, and jumped into a deep part, by mistake, and was saved from a watery grave by a bold swimmer, who turned out to be his bootmaker Satori, to whom he owed sixty francs, of all his dones the one he dreaded the most, and who didn't let him go in a hurry. Whereupon Swingali remarked that he also owed sixty francs to Satori, mais comme ch'une me baigne jamais, ch'une n'est rien à craindre. Whereupon there was such a laugh that Swingali felt he had scored off Antony at last, and had a prettier wit. He flattered himself that he'd got the laugh of Antony this time. And after supper, Swingali and Gekko made such lovely music that everybody was sobered and a thirst again, and the punch-bowl, wreathed with holly and mistletoe, was placed in the middle of the table, and clean glasses set all round it. Then Doddo and Azuzu stood up to dance with Trilby and Madame Angèle, and executed a series of can-can steps, which, though they were so inimitably drawn that they had each and all to be un-cored, were such that not one of them needed brought the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty. Then the lair danced a sword dance over two tea-squares, and broke them both. And Taffy, bearing his mighty arms to the admiring gaze of all, did dumbbell exercises, with little Billy for a dumbbell, and all but dropped him into the punch-bowl, and tried to cut a pewter ladle in two with Doddo's sabre, and sent it through the window, and this made him cross, so that he abused French sabres, and said they were made of worse pewter than even French ladles, and the lair'd sententiously opined that they managed these things better in England, and winked at little Billy. Then they played at cock-fighting, with their wrists tied across their shins, and a broomstick thrust in between. Thus manacled, you are placed opposite your antagonist, and try to upset him with your feet, and he you. It is a very good game. The cuirassier and the zoeve, playing at this, got so angry, and was so irresistibly funny a sight, that the shouts of laughter could be heard on the other side of the river, so that a sergent de Ville came in, and civilly requested them not to make so much noise. They were disturbing the whole quartier, he said, and there was quite a rassemblement outside. So they made him tipsy, and also another policeman, who came to look after his comrade, and yet another, and these guardians of the peace of Paris were trust, and made to play at cock-fighting, and were still funnier than the two soldiers, and laughed louder, and made more noise than anyone else, so that Madame Vina had to remonstrate with them till they got too tipsy to speak, and fell fast asleep, and were laid next to each other behind the stove. The founder, Sietler Rieder, disgusted the thought of such an orgy as I have been trying to describe, must remember that it happened in the fifties, when men, calling themselves gentlemen, and being called so, still wrenched off door-knockers, and came back drunk from the derby, and even drank too much after-dinner before joining the ladies, as is all duly chronicled, and set down in John Leitch's immortal pictures of life, and character out of punch. Then Monsieur and Madame Vinaire, and Trilby and Angel Bois, bade the company good night. Trilby being the last of them to leave, little Billy took her to this top of the staircase, and there he said to her, Trilby, I have asked you nineteen times, and you have refused. Trilby, once more, on Christmas night, for the twentieth time, will you marry me? If not, I leave Paris tomorrow morning, and never come back. I swear it on my word of honour. Trilby turned very pale, and leaned her back against the wall, and covered her face with her hands. Little Billy pulled them away. Answer me, Trilby. God forgive me. Yes, said Trilby, and she ran downstairs weeping. It was now very late. It soon became evident that little Billy was an extraordinarily high spirit, in an abnormal state of excitement. He challenged Svangali to spar, and made his nose bleed, and frightened him out of his sardonic wits. He performed wonderful and quite unsuspected feats of strength. He swore eternal friendship to Dodor and Zuzu, and filled their glasses again and again, and also, in his innocence, his own, and trunquered with them, many times running. They were the last to leave, except the three helpless policemen, and at about five or six in the morning, to his surprise, he found himself walking between Dodor and Zuzu by a late, windy moonlight, in the rue vieille des trois mauvais ladres, now on the one side of the frozen gutter, now on the other, now in the middle of it, stopping them now and then to tell them how jolly they were, and how dearly he loved them. Presently his hat flew away, and went rolling and skipping and bounding up the narrow street, and they discovered that as soon as they let each other go to run after it, they all three sat down. So Dodor and little Billy remained sitting, with their arms around each other's necks, and their feet in the gutter. While Zuzu went after the hat on all fours, and caught it, and brought it back in his mouth like a tipsy retriever, little Billy wept for sheer love and gratitude, and called him a cariotide, in English, and laughed loudly at his own wit, which was quite thrown away on Zuzu. No man ever had such dear, dear fringe, no man ever was so happy. After sitting for a while in love and amity, they managed to get up on their feet again, each helping the other, and in some never-to-be-remembered way, they reached the Hotel Cornet. There they sat little Billy on the doorstep and rang the bell, and seeing someone coming up the Place de l'Odéan, and fearing he might be a sergent de ville, they bid little Billy a most affectionate but hasty farewell, cursing him on both cheeks in French fashion, and contrived to get themselves round the corner and out of sight. Little Billy tried to sing Zuzu's drinking song. The stranger came up. Fortunately it was no sergent de ville, but Ribor, just back from a Christmas tree, and a little family danced at his aunt, Madame Colb, the Alsatian banker's wife in the rue de la Chaucée d'Antin. Next morning poor little Billy was dreadfully ill. He had passed a terrible night. His bed had heaved like the ocean with oceanic results. He had forgotten to put out his candle, but fortunately Ribor had blown it out for him, after putting him to bed and tucking him up like a real good Samaritan. And next morning when Madame Paul brought him a cup of Tisane de chien d'an, which does not happen to mean a hair of the dog that bit him, she was kind but very severe on the dangers and disgrace of intoxication, and talked to him like a mother. If it had not been for kind Monsieur Ribor, she told him the doorstep would have been his portion. And who could say he didn't deserve it? And then think of the danger of fire from a tipsy man all alone in a small bedroom with chins curtains and a lighted candle. Ribor was kind enough to blow out my candle, said little Billy humbly. Ah, dame, said Madame Paul, with much meaning. Au moins il a bon cœur, Monsieur Ribor. And the cruelest song of all was when the good-natured and incorrigibly festive Ribor came and sat by his bedside, and was kind and tenderly sympathetic and got him a pick-me-up from the chemists, unbeknown to Madame Paul. Gradieux, vous vous êtes cramant bien amusé hier soir, galbosse, hein? Je parie que c'était plus drôle que chez ma tante Colbe, all of which, of course, it is unnecessary to translate, except perhaps the word bus, which stands for nus, which stands for a jolly good spree. In all his innocent little life, little Billy had never dreamed of such humiliation as this, such ignominious depths of shame and misery and remorse. He did not care to live. He had but one longing, that trilby, dear trilby, kind trilby, would come and pillow his head on her beautiful white English bosom, and lay her soft, cool, tender hand on his aching brow, and there let him go to sleep, and sleeping die. He slept and slept, with no better rest for his aching brow than the pillow of his bed in the Hotel Corne, and failed to die this time, and when, after some forty-eight hours or so, he had quite slept off the fumes of that memorable Christmas debauch, he found that a sad thing had happened to him, and a strange. It was as though a tarnishing breath had swept over the reminiscent mirror of his mind, and left a little film behind it, so that no past thing he wished to see therein was reflected with quite the old pristine clearness, as though the keen, quick, razor-like edge of his power to reach and re-evoke the bygone charm and glamour and essence of things had been blunted and coarsened, as though the bloom of that special joy, the gift he unconsciously had of recalling past emotions and sensations and situations, and making them actual once more by a mere effort of the will, had been brushed away. And he never recovered the full use of that most precious faculty, the boon of youth and happy childhood, and which he had once possessed without knowing it in such singular and exceptional completeness. He was to lose other precious faculties of his over-rich and complex nature to be pruned and clipped and thinned, that his one supreme faculty of painting might have elbow-roomed to reach its fullest, or else you could never have seen the wood for the trees, or vice versa. Which is it? End of Part 1, Part 4, recording by Estelle Jobson, Rome, Italy. Part 2 of Part 4 of Trilby. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Barry Eads. Trilby by Georges Dumaurier. Part 4, Part 2. On New Year's Day, Taffy and the Laird were at their work in the studio. When there was a knock at the door, and Mansur Vinard, cap in hand, respectfully introduced a pair of visitors, an English lady and gentleman. The gentleman was a clergyman, small, thin, round shoulders, with a long neck, weak-eyed, and dryly polite. The lady was middle-aged, though still young-looking, very pretty with gray hair, very well-dressed, very small, full of nervous energy, with tiny hands and feet. It was Little Billy's mother, and the clergyman, the Reverend Thomas Baggett, was her brother-in-law. Their faces were full of trouble, so much so that the two painters did not even apologize for the carelessness of their attire, or for the odor of tobacco that filled the room. Little Billy's mother recognized the two painters at a glance, from the sketches and descriptions of which her son's letters were always full. They all sat down. After a moment's embarrassed silence, Mrs. Baggett exclaimed, addressing Taffy, Mr. Wayne, we are in terrible distress of mind. I don't know if my son has told you, but on Christmas Day he engaged himself to be married. To be married, exclaimed Taffy and the Laird, for whom this was news indeed. Yes, to be married to a Miss Trilby O'Farrell, who, from what he implies, is in quite a different position in life from himself. Do you know the lady, Mr. Wayne? Oh, yes, I know her very well indeed. We all know her. Is she English? She's an English subject, I believe. Is she a Protestant or a Roman Catholic? inquired the clergyman. A—a—upon my word, I really don't know. You know her very well indeed, and you don't know that, Mr. Wayne? exclaimed Mr. Baggett. Is she a lady, Mr. Wayne? asked Mrs. Baggett, somewhat impatiently, as if that were a much more important matter. By this time the Laird had managed to basically desert his friend. He got himself into his bedroom, and from thence, by another door, into the street and away. A lady? said Taffy. A—it so much depends upon what that word exactly means, you know. Things are so—a—so different here. Her father was a gentleman, I believe, a fellow of Trinity Cambridge, and a clergyman, if that means anything. He was unfortunate, and all that, a intemperate, I fear, and not successful in life. He has been dead six or seven years. And her mother? I really know very little about her mother, except that she was very handsome, I believe, and of inferior social rank to her husband. She's also dead. She died soon after him. What is the young lady, then? An English governess, or something of that sort? Oh, no, no, a— Nothing of that sort, said Taffy, and inwardly, you coward, you cad of a scotch-thief of a sneak of a Laird, to leave all this to me. What? Has she independent means of her own, then? A—not that I know of. I should even say, decidedly not. What is she, then? She's at least respectable, I hope. At present, she's a—a— A blunt basuse de fa. That is considered respectable here. Why? That's a washerwoman, isn't it? Well, rather better than that, perhaps. De fa, you know. Things are so different in Paris. I don't think you'd say she was very much like a washerwoman, to look at. Is she good-looking, then? Oh, yes, extremely so. You may well say that— Very beautiful indeed. About that, at least, there is no doubt whatever. And of unblemished character? Taffy, red and perspiring, as if he were going through his Indian club exercise, was silent, and his face expressed a miserable perplexity. But nothing could equally anxious misery of those two maternal eyes so wistfully fixed on his. After some seconds, of a most painful stillness, the lady said, Can't you—oh, can't you give me an answer, Mr. Wynn? Oh, Mrs. Baggett, you have placed me in a terrible position. I—I love your son, just as if he were my own brother. This engagement is a complete surprise to me. A most painful surprise. I had thought of many possible things, but never of that. I cannot—I really must not conceal from you that it would be an unfortunate marriage for your son, from a—a worldly point of view, you know, although both I and McAllister have a very deep and warm regard for poor Trilby O'Farrell. Indeed, a great admiration and affection and respect. She was once a model. A model, Mr. Wynn? What sort of a model? There are models and models, of course. Well, a model of every sort in every possible sense of the word. Head, hands, feet, everything. A model for the figure? Well, yes. Oh, my God, my God, my God! cried Mrs. Baggett. And she got up and walked up and down the studio in a most terrible state of agitation. Her brother-in-law following her and begging her to control herself. Her exclamations seemed to shock him, and she didn't seem to care. Oh, Mr. Wynn, Mr. Wynn, if you only knew what my son is to me, to all of us, always has been. He has been with us all his life till he came to this wicked, accursed city. My poor husband would never hear of his going to any school, for fear of all the harm he might learn there. My son was as innocent and pure-minded as any girl, Mr. Wynn. I could have trusted him anywhere, and that's why I gave way and allowed him to come here, of all places in the world, all alone. Oh, I should have come with him. Fool, fool, fool that I was. Oh, Mr. Wynn, he won't see either his mother or his uncle. I found a letter from him at the hotel, saying he'd left for Paris, and I don't even know where he's gone. Can't you, can't Mr. McAllister do anything to avert this miserable disaster? You don't know how he loves you both. You should see his letters to me and to his sister. They are always full of you. Indeed, Mrs. Baggett, you can count on McAllister and me for doing everything in our power, but it is of no use our trying to influence your son. I feel quite sure of that. It is to her we must make our appeal. Oh, Mr. Wynn, to a washerwoman, a figure model, and heaven knows what besides, and with such a chance as this. Mrs. Baggett, you don't know her. She may have been all that, but strange as it may seem to you, and seems to me for that matter. She's a—she's— Upon my word of honour I really think she's about the best woman I ever met, the most unselfish, the most—ah, she's a beautiful woman. I can well see that. She has a beautiful nature, Mrs. Baggett. You may believe me or not as you like, and it is to that I shall make my appeal as your son's friend. Who has his interests at heart? And let me tell you that deeply as I grieve for you in your present distress, my grief and concern for her are far greater. What? Grief for her if she marries my son? No, indeed. But if she refuses to marry him? She may not do so, of course, but my instinct tells me she will. Oh, Mr. Wynn, is that likely? I will do my best to make it so, with such an utter trust in her unselfish goodness of heart and her passionate affection for your son as, how do you know she has all this passionate affection for him? Oh, MacCowster and I have long guessed it, though we never thought this particular thing would come of it. I think perhaps that first of all you ought to see her yourself. You would get quite a new idea of what she really is. You would be surprised, I assure you. Mrs. Baggett shrugged her shoulders impatiently, and there was silence for a minute or two. And then, just as in a play, Trilby's milk-below was sounded at the door, and Trilby came into the little anti-chamber, and seen strangers, was about to turn back. She was dressed in a grissette, in her sundae gown and pretty white cap, for it was New Year's Day, and looking her very best. Taffy called out, Come in, Trilby, and Trilby came into the studio. As soon as she saw Mrs. Baggett's face, she stopped short, erect, her shoulders a little high, her mouth a little open, her eyes wide with fright, and pale to the lips. A pathetic, yet commanding, magnificent, and most distinguished apparition, in spite of her humble attire. The little lady got up and walked straight to her, and looked up into her face that seemed to tower so. Trilby breathed hard. At length, Mrs. Baggett said, in her high accents, You are Mrs. Trilby O'Farrell. Oh yes, yes, I am Trilby O'Farrell, and you are Mrs. Baggett. I can see that. A new tone had come into her large, deep, soft voice, so tragic, so touching, so strangely in accord with her whole aspect just then, so strangely in accord with the whole situation, that Taffy felt his cheeks and lips turn cold, and his big spine, thrill, and tickle all down his back. Oh yes, you are very, very beautiful. There's no doubt about that. You wish to marry my son? I've refused to marry him nineteen times, for his own sake. He will tell you so himself. I am not the right person for him to marry. I know that. On Christmas night, he asked me for the twentieth time. He swore he would leave Paris next day forever if I refused him. I hadn't the courage. I was weak, you see. It was a dreadful mistake. Are you so fond of him? Fond of him? Aren't you? I'm his mother, my good girl. To this, Trilby seemed to have nothing to say. You have just said yourself you are not a fit wife for him. If you are so fond of him, will you ruin him by marrying him, drag him down, prevent him from getting on in life, separate him from his sister, his family, his friends? Trilby turned her miserable eyes to Taffy's miserable face, and said, will it really be all that, Taffy? Oh, Trilby, things have got all wrong and can't be righted. I'm afraid it might be so. Dear Trilby, I can't tell you what I feel, but I can't tell you lies, you know. Oh, no, Taffy, you don't tell all lies. Then Trilby began to tremble very much, and Taffy tried to make her sit down, but she wouldn't. Mrs. Baggett looked up into her face, herself breathless with keen suspense and cruel anxiety, almost imploring. Trilby looked down at Mrs. Baggett very kindly, put out her shaking hand, and said, Good-bye, Mrs. Baggett. I will not marry your son, I promise you. I will never see him again. Mrs. Baggett caught and clasped her hand and tried to kiss it, and said, Don't go yet, my dear good girl. I want to talk to you. I want to tell you how deeply I— Good-bye, Mrs. Baggett, said Trilby once more, and, disengaging her hand, she walked swiftly out of the room. Mrs. Baggett seemed stupefied, and only half content with her quick triumph. She will not marry your son, Mrs. Baggett. I only wish to God she'd marry me. Oh, Mr. Wynn, said Mrs. Baggett, and burst into tears. Ah, exclaimed the clergyman, with a feebly satirical smile and a little cough and sniff that were not sympathetic. Now, if that could be arranged, and I've no doubt there wouldn't be much opposition on the part of the lady, here he made a little complimentary bow. It would be a very desirable thing all round. It's tremendously good of you, I'm sure, to interest yourself in my humble affairs, said Taffy. Look here, sir. I'm not a great genius like your nephew, and it doesn't much matter to any one but myself what I make of my life. But I can assure you that if Trilby's heart were set on me, as it is on him, I would gladly cast in my lot with hers for life. She's one in a thousand. She's the one sinner that repenteth, you know. Ah, yes, to be sure, to be sure. I know all about that. Still, facts are facts, and the world is the world, and we've got to live in it, said Mr. Baggett, who satirical smile had died away under the gleam of Taffy's caloric blue eye. Then said the good Taffy frowning down on the parson, who looked mean and foolish as people can sometimes do, even with right on their side. And now, Mr. Baggett, I can't tell you how very keenly I have suffered during this most painful interview, on account of my very deep regard for Trilby O'Farrell. I congratulate you and your sister-in-law on its complete success. I also feel very deeply for your nephew. I'm not sure that he has not lost more than he will gain by a—by the—a—the success of this. A—this interview, in short. Taffy's eloquence was extinguished, and his quick temper was getting the better of him. Then Mrs. Baggett, drying her eyes, came and took his hand in a very charming and simple manner, and said, Mr. Wynne, I think I know what you are feeling just now. You must try and make some allowance for us. You will, I am sure, when we are gone, and you have had time to think a little. As for that noble and beautiful girl, I only wish that she were such that my son could marry her. In her past life, I mean. It is not her humble rank that would frighten me. Pray, believe that I am quite sincere in this, and don't think too hardly of your friend's mother. Think of all I shall have to go through with my poor son, who is deeply in love, and no wonder, and who has won the love of such a woman as that, and who cannot see at present how fatal to him such a marriage would be. I can see all the charm and believe in all the goodness in spite of all, and, oh, how beautiful she is, and what a voice! All that counts for so much, doesn't it? I cannot tell you how I grieve for her. I can make no amends. Who could, for such a thing? There are no amends, and I shall not even try. I will only write and tell her all I think and feel. You will forgive us, won't you? And in the quick impulsive warmth and grace and sincerity of her manner as she said all this, Mrs. Baggett was so absurdly like little Billy that it touched Big Taffy's heart. And he would have forgiven anything, and there was nothing to forgive. Oh, Mrs. Baggett, there's no question of forgiveness. Good heavens! It is also unfortunate, you know. Nobody's to blame that I can see. Goodbye, Mrs. Baggett. Goodbye, sir. And so sane he saw them down to their remiss, in which sat a singularly pretty young lady of seventeen or so, pale and anxious, and so like little Billy that it was quite funny, and it touched Big Taffy's heart again. When Trilby went out into the courtyard, in the place Saint Anna told Dizah, she saw Miss Baggett looking out of the carriage window, and in the young lady's face as she caught her eye an expression of sweet surprise and sympathetic admiration, with lifted eyebrows and parted lips, just such a look as she had often got from little Billy. She knew her for his sister at once. It was a sharp pang. She turned away, saying to herself, Oh no, I will not separate him from his sister, his family, his friends. That would never do. That settled, anyhow. Feeling a little dazed and wishing to think, she turned up the roubae de mauvelaba, which was always deserted at this hour. It was empty, but for a solitary figure sitting on a post, with its legs dangling, its hands in its trousers pockets, an inverted pipe in its mouth, a tattered straw hat on the back of its head, and a long gray coat down to its heels. It was the Laird. As soon as he saw her, he jumped off his post and came to her, saying, Oh Trilby, what's it all about? I couldn't stand it. I ran away. Little Billy's mother there. Yes, Sandy dear, I've just seen her. Well, what's up? I promised her never to see little Billy any more. I was foolish enough to promise to marry him. I refused many times these last three months, and then he said he'd leave Paris and never come back. And so, like a fool, I gave way. I've offered to live with him and take care of him and be his servant, to be everything he wished but his wife. But he wouldn't hear of it. Dear, dear little Billy, he's an angel. And I'll take precious good care, no harm shall ever come to him through me. I shall leave this hateful place and go and live in the country. I suppose I must manage to get through life somehow. Days are so long, aren't they? And there's such a lot of them. I know of some poor people who were once very fond of me, and I could live with them and help them and keep myself. The difficulty is about, you know. I thought it all out before it came to this. I was well prepared, you see. She smiled in a forlorn sort of way, with her upper lip drawn tight against her teeth, as if someone were pulling her back by the lobes of her ears. Oh, but, Trilby, what shall we do without you? Taffy and I, you know? You've become one of us. Now, how good and kind of you to say that? exclaimed poor Trilby, her eyes filling. Why, that's just all I lived for till all this happened. But it can't be any more now, can it? Everything has changed for me. The very sky seems different. Ah, Durian's little song. Pasir de mot, sa grande mot. It's all quite true, isn't it? I shall start immediately, and take Jeannot with me, I think. But where do you think of going? Ah, I may tell you that, sandy dear. Not for a long time. Think of all the trouble there'd be. Well, there's no time to be lost. I must take the bull by the horns. She tried to laugh, and took him by his big side whiskers, and kissed him on the eyes and mouth, and her tears fell on his face. Then, feeling unable to speak, she nodded farewell, and walked quickly up the narrow winding street. When she came to the first bend, she turned round and waved her hand, and kissed it two or three times, and then disappeared. The laird stared for several minutes up the empty thoroughfare. Wretched, full of sorrow and compassion, then he filled himself another pipe and lit it, and hitched himself on to another post, and sat there dangling his legs and kicking his heels, and waited for the baggots' cab to depart, that he might go up and face the righteous wrath of Taffy like a man, and bear up against his bitter reproaches for cowardice and desertion before the foe. Next morning Taffy received two letters. One, a very long one, was from Mrs. Baggett. He read it twice over, and was forced to acknowledge that it was a very good letter, the letter of a clever, warm-hearted woman, but a woman also whose son was to her as the very apple of her eye. One felt she was ready to flay her dearest friend alive in order to make little Billy a pair of gloves out of the skin if he wanted a pair. But one also felt she would be genuinely sorry for the friend. Taffy's own mother had been a little like that, and he missed her every day of his life. Full justice was done by Mrs. Baggett to all Trilby's qualities of head and heart and person, but at the same time she pointed out, with all the cunning and ingenuously casuistic logic of her sex, when it takes no special pleading, even when it has right on its side, what the consequences of such a marriage must inevitably be in a few years, even sooner, the quick disenchantment, the lifelong regret on both sides. He could not have found a word to contravert her arguments, save perhaps in his own private belief that Trilby and little Billy were both exceptional people, and how could he hope to know little Billy's nature better than the boy's own mother? And if he had been the boy's elder brother in blood, as he already was in heart and affection, would he, should he, could he, have given his fraternal sanction to such a match? Both as his friend and his brother he felt it was out of the question. End of Part 2, Part 4 of Part 4 of Trilby. This is LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by J. C. Guan. Trilby by George Dumarier. Part 4, Part 3. The other letter was from Trilby, in her bold, careless handwriting that sprawled all over the page and her occasionally imperfect spelling. It ran thus. My dear, dear Taffy, this is to say goodbye. I'm going away to put an end to all this misery, for which nobody's to blame but myself. The very moment after I'd said yes to little Billy, I knew perfectly well what a stupid fall I was, and I'd been ashamed of myself ever since. I had a miserable week, I can tell you. I knew how it would all turn out. I am dreadfully unhappy, but not half so unhappy as if I married him, and he were ever too regretted and be ashamed of me. And of course he would, really, even if he didn't show it, good and kind as he is, an angel. Besides, of course, I could never be a lady. How could I? Though I ought to have been one, I suppose, but everything seems to have gone wrong with me, though I never found it out before, and it can't be righted. Poor Papa, I am going away with Shanu. I've been neglecting him shamefully. I mean to make up for it all now. You mustn't try and find out where I'm going. I know you won't if I beg you, nor anyone else. It would make everything so much harder for me. Angel knows. She has promised me not to tell. I should like to have a line from you very much. If you send it to her, she will send it on to me. Dear Taffy, next to little Billy, I love you and the Laird's better than anyone else in the whole world. I've never known real happiness till I met you. You have changed me into another person, you and Sandy and little Billy. Oh, it has been a jolly time, though it didn't last long. It will have to do for me for life. So good-bye. I shall never, never forget, and remain with dearest love your ever-faithful and most affectionate friend. Trilby of Feral. PS, when it has all blown over and settled again, if it ever does, I shall come back to Paris perhaps and see you again some day. The good Taffy pondered deeply over this letter, read it half a dozen times at least, and then he kissed it, and put its back into its envelope and locked it up. He knew what very deep anguish and relayed a somewhat trivial expression of her sorrow. He guessed how Trilby, so childishly impulsive and demonstrative, in the ordinary intercourse of friendship, would be more reticent than most women in such a case as this. He wrote to her warmly, affectionately, at great length, and sent the letter as she had told him. The Laird also wrote a long letter full of tenderly worded friendship and sincere regard. Both expressed their hope and belief that they would soon see her again, when the first bitterness of her grief would be over, and that the old pleasant relations would be renewed. And then, feeling wretched, they went and silently lunched together at the Café de l'Odeon, where the omelettes were good and the wine was in its blue. Late that evening they sat together in the studio, reading. They found they could not talk to each other very readily without Little Belly to listen. Three's company sometimes and two's none. Suddenly there was a tremendous getting up in the dark stairs outside in a violent hurry, and Little Belly burst into the room like a small whirlwind, haggard, out of breath, almost speechless at first with excitement. Trollby, where is she? What's become of her? She's run away. Oh, she's written me such a letter. We were to have been married at the Embassy. My mother, she's been meddling, and that cursed old ass, that beast, my uncle, they've been here. I know all about it. Why didn't you stick up for her? I did, as well as I could. Sandy couldn't stand it and cut. You stuck up for her. You. Why, you agreed with my mother that she oughtn't to marry me. You, you false friend. You. Why, she's an angel far too good for the likes of me. You know she is. As for her social position and all that, with degrading rot. Her father was as much a gentleman as mine. Besides, what the devil do I care for her father? It's her I want. Her. Her. Her, I tell you. I can't live without her. I must have her back. I must have her back. Do you hear? We were to have lived together at Barbizon all our lives, and I was to have painted stunning pictures like those other fellows there. Who cares for their social position, I should like to know? Or that of their wives. Damn, social position? We've often said so. Over and over again. An artist's life should be away from the world, above all that meanness and paltriness. All in his work. Social position, indeed. Over and over again we've said what fitted, be still, wrought it all was. A thing to make one sick and shut oneself away from the world. Why say one thing and act another? Love comes before all. Love levels all. Love and art and beauty. Before such beauty as strawberry's rank doesn't exist. Such rank is mine too. Good God. I'll never paint another stroke till I've got her back. Never, never, never I tell you. I can't. I won't. And so the poor boy went on, cheering and raving about in his rampage, knocking over chairs and easels, stammering and shrieking, mad with excitement. They tried to reason with him, to make him listen, to point out that it was not her social position alone that unfitted her to be his wife and the mother of his children, etc. It was no good. He grew more and more uncontrollable, became almost unintelligible. He stammered, so. A pitchable sight and pitchable to hear. Oh, oh, good heavens! Are you so precious immaculate, you two, that you should throw stones at poor Chulbee? What a shame! What a hideous shame it is that there should be one law for the woman and another for the man. Poor weak women. Poor soft-affectionate things that beasts of men are always running after, and pestering, and ruining, and trampling underfoot. Oh, it makes me sick! It makes me sick! And finally he gasped and screamed, and fell down in a fit on the floor. The doctor was in for. Taffy went in a cab to the Hotel de Lille et d'Albion to fetch his mother and poor little Billy, quite unconscious, was undressed by Sandy and Madame Vinard, and put into the layered bed. The doctor came, and not long after, Mrs. Bago and her daughter. It was a serious case. Another doctor was called in. Beds were got and made up in the studio for the two grief-stricken ladies, and thus closed the eve of what was to have been poor little Billy's wedding day, it seems. Little Billy's attack appears to have been a kind of epileptic seizure. It ended in brain fever and other complications, a long and tedious illness. It was many weeks before he was out of danger, and his convalescence was long and tedious, too. His nature seemed changed. He lay languid and listless, never even mentioned Trophy, except once to ask if she had come back, and if anyone knew where she was, and if she had been written to. She had not, it appears. Mrs. Bago had thought it was better not, and Taffy and the layered agreed with her that no good could come of writing. Mrs. Bago felt bitterly against the woman who had been the cause of all this trouble, and bitterly against herself for her injustice. It was an unhappy time for everybody. There was more unhappiness still to come. One day in February, Madame Angel Bois called on Taffy and the layered in the temporary studio where they worked. She was in terrible tribulation. Trilby's little brother had died of scarlet fever and was buried, and Trilby had left her hiding place the day after the funeral and had never come back, and this was a week ago. She and Chanel had been living at a village called Fibré in La Sarte lodging with some poor people she knew. She washing and working with her needle till her brother fell ill. She had never left his bedside for a moment, night or day, and when he died her grief was so terrible that people thought she would go out of her mind, and the day after he was buried she was not to be found anywhere. She had disappeared, taking nothing with her, not even her clothes. Simply vanished and left no sign, no message of any kind. All the ponds had been searched, all the wells, and the small stream that flows through Vibré and the old forest. Taffy went to Vibré, cross-examined everybody he could, communicated with the Paris police, but with no result, and every afternoon with a beating heart he went to the morgue. The news was of course kept from little Billy. There was no difficulty about this. He never asked a question, hardly ever spoke. When he first got up and was carried into the studio he asked for his picture. The picture goes to the well, and looked at it for a while, and then shrugged his shoulders and laughed. A miserable sort of laugh, painful to hear and see. The laugh of a cold old man who laughs soon as not to cry. Then he looked at his mother and sister, and saw the sad havoc that grief and anxiety had wrought in them. It seemed to him, as in a bad dream, that he had been mad for many years, a cause of endless sickening terror and distress, and that his poor weak wandering wits had come back at last, bringing in their train cruel remorse and the remembrance of all the patient love and kindness that had been lavished on him for many, many years. His sweet sister, his dear long-suffering mother, what had really happened to make them look like this? And taking them both in his feeble arms, he fell a weeping quite disparately and for a long time. And when his weeping fit was over, when he had quite wept himself out, he fell asleep. And when he awoke he was conscious that another sad thing had happened to him, and that for some mysterious cause his power of loving had not come back with his wandering wits, had been left behind, and it seemed to him that it was gone forever and ever, would never come back again, not even his love for his mother and sister, not even his love for Trellby, where all that had once been was a void, a gap, a blankness. Truly, if Trellby had suffered much, she had also been the innocent cause of terrible suffering. Poor Mrs. Bagu, in her heart, could not forgive her. I feel this is getting to be quite a sad story, and that it is high time to cut this part of it short. As the warmer weather came and Little Billy got stronger, the studio became more lively. The ladies' beds were removed to another studio on the next landing, which was vacant, and the friends came to see Little Billy and made life more easy for him and his mother and sister. As for Taffy and the Laird, they had already long been to Mrs. Bagu as a pair of crutches, without whose invaluable help she could never have held herself upright to pick her way in all this maze of trouble. Then Mr. Carroll came every day to chat with his favorite pupil and gladdened Mrs. Bagu's heart, and also durien, Carnegie, Petroly Coconos, Vincent, Anthony, Lovrimer, Dodor, and Zuzu. Mrs. Bagu thought the last two irresistible, when she had once been satisfied that they were gentlemen in spite of appearances. And indeed they showed themselves to great advantage, and though they were so much the opposite to Little Billy and everything, she felt almost maternal towards them, and gave them innocent, good, motherly advice which they swallowed with attendrissement, not even stealing a look at each other. And they held Mrs. Bagu's wall, and listened to Mrs. Bagu's sacred music with upturned pious eyes and merely a mouse that butter wouldn't melt in. It is good to be a soldier and a detrimental. You touched the hearts of women, and charmed them old and young, high or low, excepting perhaps a few worldly mothers of marriageable daughters. They take the sticking of your tongue in the cheek for the wearing of your heart on the sleeve. Indeed good women all over the world, and ever since it began, have loved to be bamboozled by these genial, roistering daredevil's who haven't got a penny to bless themselves with, which is so touching, and are supposed to carry their lives in their hands even in piping times of peace. Nay, even a few rare bad women sometimes, such women as the best and wisest of us, are often ready to sell our souls for. A lightsome eye, a soldier's mean, a feather of the blue, a doublet of the Lincoln Green, no more of me you knew, my love, no more of me you knew, as if that wasn't enough and to spare. Little Billy could hardly realize that these two polite and gentle and sympathetic sons of Mars were the lively grigs who had made themselves so pleasant all round. And in such a singular manner, on the top of that sin-cloud omnibus, and he admired how they had added hypocrisy to their other crimes. Sven Galli had gone back to Germany, it seemed with his pockets full of Napoleon's and Big Havana's cigars, and wrapped in an immense fur-lined coat, which he meant to wear all through the summer. But little Gekko often came with his violin and made lovely music, and that seemed to do little Billy more good than anything else. It made him realize, in his brain, all the love he could no longer feel in his heart. The sweet melodic phrase rendered by a master was as wholesome refreshing balm to him while it lasted, as mana in the wilderness. It was the one good thing within his reach, never to be taken from him as long as his eardrums remained, and he could hear a master play. Poor Gekko treated the two English ladies the balm-o, as if they had been goddesses, even when they accompanied him on the piano. He begged their pardon for every wrong note they struck, and adopted their tempi, that is the proper technical term, I believe, and turned scherzos and alegretros into funeral dirges to please them, and degrade with them, for a little traitor, that it all sounded much better like that. O Beethoven, O Mozart, did you turn in your graves? Then one fine afternoon little Billy was taken for drives to the Bois de Boulogne with his mother and sister in an open fly and generally taffy as a fourth. To Parsi, Hauteuil, Boulogne, Sainte-Lôte, Meudon, there are many charming places within an easy drive of Paris. And sometimes taffy or the laird would escort Misses and Miss Bagot to the Luxembourg Gallery, de l'ouvre, de Palais Royal, to the Comédie Française, once or twice, and on Sundays now and then, to the English Chapel in the Rue de Marbeuf. It was all very pleasant, and Misses Bagot looks back on the days of her brother's convalescence as among the happiest in her life. And they would all five dine together in the studio, with Madame Vinard to wait, and her mother, accordant bleu, for cook. And the whole aspect of the place was changed and made fragrant, sweet, and charming by all this new feminine invasion and occupation. And what is sweeter to watch than the dawn and growth of love's young dream when strength and beauty meet together by the couch of a beloved invalid? Of course, the sympathetic reader will foresee how readily the stalwart taffy fell a victim to the charms of his friend's sweet sister, and how she grew to return his more than brotherly regard. And how, one lovely evening, just as March was going out like a lamp, to make room for the first of April, little belly joined their hands together, and gave them his brotherly blessing. As a matter of fact, however, nothing of this kind happened. Nothing ever happens, but the unforeseen. Then, at lunch, one day, it was a fine sunny showery day in April, by the by, and the big studio window was open at the top and let in a pleasant breeze from the northwest. Just as when our little story began, a railway omnibus drew up at the Port Cocher in the Place Saint-Anatole-des-Arts, and carried away to the station of the Chema de Père du Nord. Little belly and his mother and sister, and all their belongings, the famous picture had gone before, and taffy, and the layered road with them, their faces very long, to see the last of the dear people, and of the train that was to bear them away from Paris. And little belly, with his quick prehensile, aesthetic eye, took many a long and wistful parting gaze at many a French thing he loved, from the gray towers of Notre-Dame downward. Heaven only knew when he might see them again. So he tried to get their aspect well by heart, that he might have the better store of beloved shape and color memories to chew the cud of, when his lost powers of loving and remembering clearly should come back, and he lay awake at night and listened to the wash of the Atlantic along the beautiful red sandstone coast at home. He had a faint hope that he should feel sorry at parting with taffy and the layered. But when the time came, for saying goodbye, he couldn't feel sorry in the least, for all he tried and strained so hard. So he thanked them so earnestly and profusely for all their kindness and patience and sympathy, as did also his mother and sister, that their hearts were too full to speak, and their manner was quite gruff. It was a way they had when they were deeply moved and didn't want to show it. And as he gazed out of the carriage window at their two forlorn figures looking after him when the train steamed out of the station, his sorrow at not feeling sorry made him look so haggard and so woe-begun that they could scarcely bear the sight of him departing without them, and almost felt as if they must follow by the next train and go and cheer him up in Devonshire and themselves too. They did not yield to this amiable weakness. Sororfully, arm in arm, with trailing umbrellas, they recrossed the river and found their way to the café de l'Odeon, where they ate many omelettes in silence, and dejectedly drank of the best they could get, and were very sad indeed. Nearly five years have elapsed since we built farewell and au revoir to Taffy and the Laird at the Paris station of the chemin de Père du Nord, and wished little Billy and his mother and sister godspeed on their way to Devonshire, where the poor sufferer was to rest and lie fallow for a few months, and recruit his lost strength and energy, that he might follow up his first and well-deserved success, which perhaps contributed just a little to his recovery. Many of my readers well remember his splendid debut at the Royal Academy in Trafalgar Square, with that now so famous canvas, the picture goes to the well, and how it was sold three times over on the morning of the private view, the third time for a thousand pounds, just five times what he got it for himself. And that was thought a large sum in those days for a beginner's picture two feet by four. I am well aware that such a vulgar test is no criterion whatever for a picture's real merit, but this picture is well known to all the world by this time, and sold only last year at Christie's, more than 36 years after it was painted, for three thousand pounds. Thirty-six years, that goes a long way to redeem even three thousand pounds of all their cumulative vulgarity. The picture is now in the National Gallery, with that other canvas by the same hand, the Moundile. There they hang together for all who care to see them, his first and his last, the blossom and the fruit. He had not long to live himself, and it was his good fortune so rare among those whose work is probably destined to live forever, that he succeeded at his first go off. And his success was of the best and most flattering kind. It began high up, where it should, among the masters of his own craft. But his fame filtered quickly down to those immediately beneath, and through these two wider circles, and there was quite enough of opposition and vilification and coarse abuse of him to clear it of any suspicion of cheapness or evanescence. What better antiseptic can there be than the Philistines' deep hate? What sweeter, fresher, wholesome music than the sound of his voice when he doth so furiously rage? Yes, that is good production, as Zvengari would have said, c'est un cri du coeur. And then, what popular acclaim brings the great dealers and the big checks, up rises the printed howl of the duffer, the disappointed one, the wounded thing with an angry cry, the prosperous and happy bagman that should have been, who has given up all for his art and finds he can't paint and make himself a name, after all, and never will, so false to writing about those who can. And what writing? To write and hissing this praise of our more successful fellow craftsman, and of those who admire him, that is not a clean or pretty trade. It seems, alas, an easy one, and it gives pleasure to so many. It does not even want good grammar, but it pays, well enough even, to start and run the magazine with, instead of scholarship, and taste, and talent, humor, sense, wit, and wisdom. It is something like the purveying of pornographic pictures, some of us look at them and laugh, and even buy. To be a purchaser is bad enough, but to be a purveyor thereof, ah, a poor devil of a cracked soprano. Are there such people still? Who has been turned out of the Pope's choir because he can't sing in tune, after all? Think of him yelling and squeaking his treble rage at Stanley, Sim's Reeves, La Blanche. Poor, lost, beardless nondescript. Why not fly to other climes, where at least the mikes hide from us, thy woeful crack, and keep thy miserable secret to thyself? Are there no harm still left in stumble, for the likes of thee to sweep and clean no women's beds to make, and slops to empty, and doors and windows to bar, and tails to carry, and the pashas' confidence and favor and protection to win? Even that is a better trade, than pandering for hire to the bassest instinct of all. The dirty pleasure we feel, some of us, in seeing mud-and-dead cats and rotten eggs flung at those we cannot, but admire, and secretly envy. All of which eloquence means that little belly was pitched into right and left, as well as overpraised. And it all rolled off him like water of a duck's back, both praise and blame. It was a happy summer for Mrs. Bagot, a sweet compensation for all the anguish of the winter that had gone before, with her two beloved children together under her wing, and all the world, for her, rinking with praise of her boy. The apple of her eye so providentially rescued from the very jaws of death, and from other dangers almost as terrible to her fiercely jealous maternal heart. And his affection for her seemed to grow with his returning health. But alas! he was never again to be quite the same light-hearted, innocent, expansive lad he had been before that fatal year spent in Paris. One chapter of his life was closed, never to be reopened, never to be spoken of again by him to her, by her to him. She could neither forgive nor forget. She could but be silent. Otherwise, he was pleasant and sweet to live with, and everything was done to make his life at home as sweet and pleasant, as a loving mother could, as could a most charming sister, and others sisters who were charming too, and much disposed to worship at the shrine of this young celebrity, who woke up one morning in their little village to find himself famous, and bore his blushing honors so meekly. And among them the vicar's daughter, his sister's friend, and co-teacher at the Sunday school, a simple, pure, and pious maiden of gentle birth. Everything he once thought a young lady should be, and her name it was Alice, and she was sweet, and her hair was brown, as brown. And if he no longer found the simple country pleasures, the junkettings and picnics, the garden parties and the innocent little musical evenings, quite so exciting as of old, he never showed it. Indeed, there was much that he did not show, and that his mother and sister tried in vain to guess. Many things. And among them, one thing that constantly preoccupied and distressed him, the numbness of his affections. He could be as easily demonstrative to his mother and sister, as though nothing had ever happened to him, from the mere force of a sweet old habit, even more so out of sheer gratitude and compunction. But alas, he felt that in his heart he could no longer care for them, in the least, nor for Taffy, nor the layered, nor for himself, not even for Trelby, of whom he constantly thought, but without emotion, and of whose strange disappearance he had been told, and the story had been confirmed, in all its details, by Angel Boise, to whom he had written. It was as though some part of his brain, where his affections were seated, had been paralyzed, while all the rest of it was as keen and as active as ever. He felt like some poor life bird, or beast, or reptile, a part of whose cerebrum, or cerebellum, or whatever it is, had been dug out by the vivis sector for experimental purposes, and the strongest emotional feeling he seemed capable of was his anxiety and alarm about this curious symptom, and his concern as to whether he ought to mention it or not. He did not do so, for fear of causing distress, hoping that it would pass away in time, and redoubled his caresses to his mother and sister, and clunked to them more than ever, and became more considerate of others in thought and manner, word and deed, that he had ever been before, as though by constantly assuming the virtue he had no longer, he would gradually coax it back again. There was no trouble he would not take to give pleasure to the humblest. Also, his vanity about himself had become as nothing, and he missed it almost as much as his affection. Yet he told himself over and over again that he was a great artist, and that he would spare no pains to make himself a greater, but that was no merit of his own. Two plus two equals four. Also two times two equals four. That peculiarity was no reason why four should be conceited, for what was four, but the result, either way. Well, he was like four, just an inevitable result of circumstances over which he had no control, a mere product or sum, and though he meant to make himself as big as a four as he could, to cultivate his peculiar fourness, he could no longer feel the old conceit and self complacency, and they had been a joy. And it was hard to do without them. At the bottom of it all was a vague, disquieting unhappiness, a constant fidget, and it seemed to him, and much to his distress, that such mild unhappiness would be the greatest he could ever feel henceforward, but that, such as it was, it would never leave him, and that his moral existence would be for evermore one long, gray, gloomy blank, the glimmer of twilight, never glad, confident mourning again. So much for little Billy's convalescence. Then one day in the late autumn, he spread his wings and flew away to London, which was very ready, with open arms, to welcome William Baggett, the already famous painter. Ilias, little Billy. And of part four, recording by JC Guan, Montreal, July 2010. Part one of part fifth of Trilby. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Nadine Cardboulet. Trilby by Georges Dumourier. Part fifth, part one. Little Billy, an interlude. Then the mortal coldness of the soul, like death itself, comes down. It cannot feel for others' woes. It dare not dream its own, that heavy chill has frozen over the fountain of our tears, and, though the high may sparkle yet, tease where the ice appears. The wit may flash from fluent lips, and mirth distract the breast. Through midnight hours that yield no more their former hope of rest, tease but as ivy leaves around a room-turret wreath, all green and widely fresh without, but worn and gray beneath. When Taffy and the Laird went back to the studio in the place Saint-Renatole-Désart, and resumed their ordinary life there, it was with a sense of desolation and dull bereavement beyond anything they could have imagined, and this did not seem to lessen as the time wore on. They realized for the first time how keen and penetrating and unintermittent had been the charm of those two central figures, Trilby and Little Billy, and how hard it was to live without them, after such intimacy as had been theirs. Oh, it has been a jolly time, though it didn't last long. So Trilby had written in her farewell letter to Taffy, and these words were true for Taffy and the Laird as well as for her. And that is the worst of those dear people who have charm. They are so terrible to do without, when once you have got accustomed to them in all their ways. And when, besides being charming, they are simple, clever, affectionate, constant and sincere, like Trilby and Little Billy, then the lamentable whole their disappearance makes is not to be filled up, and when they are full of genius, like Little Billy, and like Trilby, funny without being vulgar. For so she always seemed to the Laird and Taffy, even in French, in spite of her gallic odesities of thought, speech, and gesture. All seemed to have suffered change. The very boxing and fencing were gone through perfunctory, for mere health's sake, and a thin layer of adipose deposit began to soften the outlines of the heels and heels on Taffy's mighty forearm. Dodor and Azuzu no longer came so often, now that the charming Little Billy and his charming mother and still more charming sister had gone away, nor Carnagy, nor Antony, nor Lorima, nor Vincent, nor the Greek. Jacob never came at all. Even Swengelib was missed, little as he had been liked. It is a dismal and sulky-looking piece of furniture, a grand piano that nobody ever plays, with all its sound and its souvenirs locked up inside, a kind of mausoleum, a lopsided coffin, trestles and all, so it went back to London by the little quickness, just as it had come. Thus Taffy and the Laird grew quite sad and moppy, and lunged at the café de l'Odeon every day, till the goodness of the omelettes polled, and the redness of the wine they had got on their nerves and into their heads and faces, and made them sleepy till dinner time. And then, waking up, they dressed respectively, and dined expensively, like gentlemen, in the Palais Royal, or the Passage Choisole, or the Passage des Panoramas, for three francs, three francs, fifty, even five francs ahead, and half a franc to the waiter, and went to the theatre almost every night on that side of the water, and more often than not they took a cab home, each spoke in a panatellas, which cost twenty-five centime, five sou, two shillings and toppents. Then they feebly drifted into quiet distance society, like Lorimer and Carnagy, with dress coats and white ties on, and their hair parted in the middle and down the back of the head, and brood over the ears in a bunch at each side, as was the English fashion in those days, and subscribed to Galignanese Messenger, and had themselves proposed and seconded for the Cercle Anglais in the Rue Saint-Ni-Touche, a circle of British Philistines of the very deepest die, and went to hear divine service on Sunday mornings in Rue Marbeuf. Indeed, by the end of the summer, they had sunk into such depth of demoralisation, that they felt they must really have a change, and decided on giving up the studio in the place Saint-Anatole-des-Arts, and leaving Paris for good, and going to settle for the winter in Dusseldorf, which is a very pleasant place for English painters who do not wish to overwork themselves, as the Laird were all new, having spent a year there. It ended in Taffy's going to Antwerp for the Hermès, to paint the Flemish drunkard of our time just as he really is, and the Laird's going to Spain, so that he might study torredors from the life. I may as well state here that the Laird's torredor pictures, which had had quite a vogue in Scotland as long as he had been content to paint Diem in the place Saint-Anatole-des-Arts, quite cease to please, or sell, after he had been to Seville and Madrid. So he took to painting Roman Cardinals a near-politian pithirari from the depth of his consciousness, and was so successful that he made up his mind he would never spoil his market by going to Italy. So he went and painted his cardinals and his pithirari in Algiers, and Taffy joined him there, and painted Algerian Jews, just as they really are, and didn't sell them, and then they spent a year in Munich, and then a year in Dusseldorf, and a winter in Cairo, and so on. And all this time Taffy, who took everything au grand sérieux, especially the claims and obligations of friendship, corresponded regularly with little Billy, who wrote him long and amusing letters back again, and had plenty to say about his life in London, which was a series of triumphs, artistic and social, and you would have thought from his letters, modest though they were, that no happier young man, or more elate, was to be found anywhere in the world. It was a good time in England, just then, for young artists of promise, a time of evolution, revolution, change and development, of the founding of new schools and the crumbling away of old ones, a keen struggle for existence, a surviving of the fit, a preparation, let us hope, for the ultimate survival of the fittest, and among the many glories of this particular period, two names stand out very conspicuously, for the immediate end, so far, lasting fame their bearers achieved, and the wide influence they exerted and continue to exert still. The world will not easily forget Frederick Walker and William Bagot, those two singularly gifted boys, whom it soon became the fashion to bracket together, to compare and to contrast, as one compares and contrasts Thaigre and Dickens, Carlyle and Macaulay, Tennyson and Browning, a futile though pleasant practice, of which the temptations seem irresistible. Yet why compare the Lily and the Rose? These two young masters had the genius and the luck to be the progenitors of much of the best artwork that has been done in England during the last thirty years, in oils, in watercolour, in black and white. They were both essentially English and of their own time, both absolutely original, receiving their impressions straight from nature itself, uninfluenced by any school, ancient or modern, they founded schools instead of following any, and each was a law unto himself, and a law giver unto many others. Both were equally great in whatever they attempted, landscape, figures, birds, beasts or fishes. Who does not remember the Fishmongers shop by F. Walker, or W. Bagot's little pipe-old piglings, and their venerable black mother, and their immense fat wallowing pink-paper? An ineffable charm of poetry and refinement, of pathos and sympathy, and delicate humor combined, an incomparable ease and grace and felicity of workmanship, belonged to each. And yet in their work, are they not as wide apart as the poles? Each completing himself, and yet a compliment to the other. And, oddly enough, they were both singularly alike in aspect, both small and slight, though beautifully made, with tiny hands and feet, always red as the lilies of the field, for all they toiled and spun so auduously. Both had regularly feted faces of a normal cast and most winning character. Both had the best and simplest manners in the world, and no way of getting themselves much and quickly and permanently liked. Que la terreur leur soit légère. And who can say that the fame of one is greater than the others? Their pinnacles are twin, I venture to believe, of just an equal height and width and thickness, like their bodies in this life. But unlike their frail bodies in one respect, no taller pinnacles are to be seen, me thinks, in all the garden of the deathless dead painters of our time, and none more built to last. But it is not with the art of little Billy, nor with his fame as a painter, that we are chiefly concerned in this unpretending little tale, except insofar as they have some bearing on his character and his fate. I should like to know the detailed history of the Englishman's first love and how he lost his innocence. Ask him. Ask him yourself. Thus Paplard and Bouchardy, on the morning of little Billy's first appearance at Carrel's studio, in the Rue des Potirons à Michel. And that is the question the present scribe is doing his little best to answer. A good-looking, famous, well-bred and well-dressed youth finds that London society opens its door very readily. He hasn't long to knock. And it would be difficult to find a youth more fortunately situated, handsomer, more famous, better dressed, or better bred, more seemingly happy and successful, with more attractive qualities and more condonable folks than little Billy, as Taffy and the Laird found him when they came to London after their four or five years in foreign parts, their van der Jaa. He had a fine studio and a handsome suite of rooms in Fitzroy Square. Beautiful specimens of his unfinished work and less studies hung on his studio walls. Everything else was as nice as it could be. The furniture, the biebleau, and brick-up rack, the artistic foreign and eastern knickknacks, and draperies and hangings, and curtains, and rugs, the semi-grand piano by Collar and Collar. That immortal canvas, the Moondyle, just begun and already commissioned by Moses Lyon, the famous picture dealer, lay on his easel. No man worked harder and with teeth more clenched than little Billy when he was at work. None rested or played more discreetly when it was time to rest or play. The glass on his mantelpiece was full of cards of invitation, reminders, pretty move and pink and lilac-centered notes, nor were coronets wanting on many of these hospitable little missives. He had quite overcome his fancy diversion for bloated dukes and lords and the rest. We all do sooner or later, if things go well with us, especially for their wives and sisters and daughters and female cousins, even their mothers and aunts. In point of fact and in spite of his tender years he was in some danger, for his art, of developing into that type so adored by sympathetic women who haven't got much to do. The friend, the tame cat, the platonic lover, with many loves, the squire of dames, the trusty one, of whom husbands and brothers have no fear, the delicate, harmless, dilettant of arrows, the dainty shepherd who dwells dans le pays du tendre, and stops there. The woman flatters and the man confides, and there is no danger whatever, I'm told, and I'm glad. One man loves his fiddle, or alas, his neighbors sometimes, for all the melodies he can wake from it. It is but a selfish love. Another, who is no fiddle, may love a fiddle too, for its symmetry, its neatness, its color, its delicate grainings, the lovely lines and curves of its back and front, for its own sake, so to speak. He may have a whole gallery full of fiddles to love in this innocent way, a harem, and yet not know a single note of music, or even care to hear one. He will dust them, and stroke them, and take them down, and try to put them in tune, pizzicato, and put them back again, and call them ever such sweet little pet exotic names. And breathe his little troubles into them, and they will give back inaudible little murmurs in sympathetic response, like a damp Aeolian harp. But he will never draw a bow across the strings, nor wake a single chord, or discord. And who shall say he is not wise in his generation? It is but an old-fashioned Philistine notion that fiddles were only made to be played on. The fiddles themselves are beginning to resent it, and rightly, I would. In this harmless fashion little Billy was friends with more than one fine lady, the Parlement. Indeed, he had been reproached by his more bohemian brothers of the brush for being something of a tough hunter, most unjustly. But nothing gives such keen offense to our unsuccessful brother, Bohemian au bourgeois, as our sudden intimacy with the so-called great, the little lords and ladies of this little world. Not even our fame and success, and all the giant pride they bring us, are so hard to condone, so embittering, so humiliating, to the generous fraternal heart. Alas, poor humanity, that the mere countenance of our bedders, if they are our bedders, should be thought so priceless a boon, so consummate an achievement, so crowning a glory as all that. A dirty bit of orange peel, the stump of a cigar, one strut on by a princely hill, how beautiful they are. Little Billy was no tough hunter. He was the tough hunted, or had been. No one of his kind was ever more persistently, resolutely, hospitably harried than this young hare with many friends, by people of rank and fashion. And at first he thought they most charming, as they so often are, these graceful, gracious, gay, good-natured stoics and barbarians, whose manners are as easy and simple as their morals. But how much better? And who, at least, have this charm, that they can wallow in untold cold, when they happen to possess it, without ever seeming to stink of the same? Yes, they bear wealth gracefully, and the want of it more gracefully still. And these are pretty accomplishments that have yet to be learned by our new aristocracy of the shop and counting house, too gentle, which is everywhere helping its irresistible way to the top and front of everything, both here and abroad. Then he discovered that, much as you might be with them, you could never be of them, unless per chance you managed to hook on by marrying one of their ugly ducklings, their failures, their remnants. And even then, life is in all beer and skittles for a rank outsider, I'm told. Then he discovered that he didn't want to be of them in the least, especially at such a cost as that, and that to be very much with them was apt to pull, like everything else. Also, he found that they were very mixed, good, bad, and indifferent, and not always very dainty or select in their predilections, since they took unto their bosoms such queer outsiders, just for the sake of being amused a little while, that their capricious favor cease to be an honor and a glory, if it ever was, and then their fickleness. Indeed, he found, or thought he found, that they could be just as clever, as liberal, as polite or refined, as narrow, insolent, swaggering, coarse, and vulgar, as handsome, as ugly, as graceful, as ungainly, as modest or conceited, as any other upper class of the community, and indeed some lower ones. Beautiful young women who had been taught how to paint pretty little landscapes, with an ivy-mantled rune in the middle distance, talked technically of painting to him the paire à paire, as though they were quite on the same artistic level, and didn't mind admitting it in spite of the social gulf between. Hideous old Frambs, usher sorbys, yet with unduly bared necks and shoulders that made him sick, patronized him and gave him good advice, and told him to emulate Mr. Buckner, both in his genius and his manners, since Mr. Buckner was the only gentleman who ever painted for hire, and they promised him, in time, an equal success.