Grey Roses | Page 2

so inured to seeing honest Effort turn
empty-handed from her door.
Ten little years ago--but no. I must begin further back. I must tell you
something about Nina's father.

III.
He was an Englishman who lived for the greater part of his life in Paris.
I would say he was a painter, if he had not been equally a sculptor, a
musician, an architect, a writer of verse, and a university coach. A doer
of so many things is inevitably suspect; you will imagine that he must
have bungled them all. On the contrary, whatever he did, he did with a
considerable degree of accomplishment. The landscapes he painted
were very fresh and pleasing, delicately coloured, with lots of air in
them, and a dreamy, suggestive sentiment. His brother sculptors
declared that his statuettes were modelled with exceeding dash and
directness; they were certainly fanciful and amusing. I remember one
that I used to like immensely--Titania driving to a tryst with Bottom,
her chariot a lily, daisies for wheels, and for steeds a pair of mettlesome
field-mice. I doubt if he ever got a commission for a complete house;
but the staircases he designed, the fire-places, and other bits of
buildings, everybody thought original and graceful. The tunes he wrote
were lively and catching, the words never stupid, sometimes even
strikingly happy, epigrammatic; and he sang them delightfully, in a
robust, hearty baritone. He coached the youth of France, for their
examinations, in Latin and Greek, in history, mathematics, general
literature--in goodness knows what not; and his pupils failed so rarely
that, when one did, the circumstance became a nine days' wonder. The
world beyond the Students' Quarter had never heard of him, but there
he was a celebrity and a favourite; and, strangely enough for a man
with so many strings to his bow, he contrived to pick up a sufficient
living.
He was a splendid creature to look at, tall, stalwart, full-blooded, with a
ruddy open-air complexion; a fine bold brow and nose; brown eyes,
humorous, intelligent, kindly, that always brightened flatteringly when
they met you; and a vast quantity of bluish-grey hair and beard. In his
dress he affected (very wisely, for they became him excellently) velvet
jackets, flannel shirts, loosely-knotted ties, and wide-brimmed soft felt
hats. Marching down the Boulevard St. Michel, his broad shoulders
well thrown back, his head erect, chin high in air, his whole person
radiating health, power, contentment, and the pride of them: he was a

sight worth seeing, spirited, picturesque, prepossessing. You could not
have passed him without noticing him--without wondering who he was,
confident he was somebody--without admiring him, and feeling that
there went a man it would be interesting to know.
He was, indeed, charming to know; he was the hero, the idol, of a little
sect of worshippers, young fellows who loved nothing better than to sit
at his feet. On the Rive Gauche, to be sure, we are, for the most part,
birds of passage; a student arrives, tarries a little, then departs. So, with
the exits and entrances of seniors and nouveaux, the personnel of old
Childe's following varied from season to season; but numerically it
remained pretty much the same. He had a studio, with a few
living-rooms attached, somewhere up in the fastnesses of Montparnasse,
though it was seldom thither that one went to seek him. He received at
his café, the Café Bleu--the Café Bleu which has since blown into the
monster café of the Quarter, the noisiest, the rowdiest, the most
flamboyant. But I am writing (alas) of twelve, thirteen, fifteen years
ago; in those days the Café Bleu consisted of a single oblong
room--with a sanded floor, a dozen tables, and two waiters, Eugène and
Hippolyte--where Madame Chanve, the patronne, in lofty insulation
behind her counter, reigned, if you please, but where Childe, her
principal client, governed. The bottom of the shop, at any rate, was
reserved exclusively to his use. There he dined, wrote his letters,
dispensed his hospitalities; he had his own piano there, if you can
believe me, his foils and boxing-gloves; from the absinthe hour till
bed-time there was his habitat, his den. And woe to the passing stranger
who, mistaking the Café Bleu for an ordinary house of call, ventured,
during that consecrated period, to drop in. Nothing would be said,
nothing done; we would not even trouble to stare at the intruder. Yet he
would seldom stop to finish his consommation, or he would bolt it. He
would feel something in the air; he would know he was out of place.
He would fidget a little, frown a little, and get up meekly, and slink into
the street. Human magnetism is such a subtle force. And Madame
Chanve didn't mind in the least; she preferred a bird