Impressions and Comments | Page 2

as he passed, but without
stopping or speaking; she was drunk, no doubt, but not too obtrusively
incapable; he mercifully decided that she was of no immediate
professional concern to him. She soon made a more violent effort to
gain muscular control of herself, but merely staggered round her own
escaping centre of gravity and sank gently on to the pavement in a
sitting posture.
Every few moments people continued to pass within a few inches of
her--men, women, couples. Unlike the priest and the Levite in the
parable, they never turned away, but pursued their straight course with
callous rectitude. Not one seemed so much as to see her. In a minute or
two, stimulated perhaps by some sense of the impropriety of her
position, she rose to her feet again, without much difficulty, and
returned to cling to the wall.
A few minutes later I saw a decently-dressed young woman, evidently
of the working class, walk quietly, but without an instant's hesitation,
straight up to the figure against the wall. (It was what, in Moscow, the
first passer-by would have done.) I could hear her speaking gently and
kindly, though of what she said I could only catch, "Where do you
live?" No answers were audible, and perhaps none were given. But the
sweet Samaritan continued speaking gently. At last I heard her say,
"Come round the corner," and with only the gentle pressure of a hand
on the other's arm she guided her round the corner near which they
stood, away from the careless stream of passengers, to recover at
leisure. I saw no more.
Our modern civilisation, it is well known, long since transformed
"chivalry"; it was once an offer of help to distressed women; it is now
exclusively reserved for women who are not distressed and clearly able
to help themselves. We have to realise that it can scarcely even be said
that our growing urban life, however it fosters what has been called

"urbanity," has any equally fostering influence on instinctive mutual
helpfulness as an element of that urbanity. We do not even see the
helpless people who go to the wall or to the pavement. This is true of
men and women alike. But when instinctive helpfulness is manifested it
seems most likely to reveal itself in a woman. That is why I would like
to give to women all possible opportunities--rights and privileges
alike--for social service.
_July 27_.--A gentle rain was falling, and on this my first day in Paris
since the unveiling of the Verlaine monument in the Luxembourg
Gardens, immediately after I left Paris last year, I thought there could
be no better moment to visit the spot so peculiarly fit to be dedicated to
the poet who loved such spots--a "coin exquis" where the rain may fall
peacefully among the trees, on his image as once on his heart, and the
tender mists enfold him from the harsh world.
I scarcely think the sculptor quite happily inspired in his conception of
the face of the charming old man I knew of old in his haunts of the
Boulevard Saint-Michel. It is too strong a face, too disdainful, with too
much character. Verlaine was sympathetic, simple, childlike, humble;
when he put on an air of pride it was with a deliberate yet delightful
pose, a child's pose. There is an air of almost military rigidity about the
pride of this bust; I do not find Verlaine in that trait.
Verlaine's strength was not that of character; it was that of Nature. I
could imagine that the Silenus, whom we see with his satellites near by,
might be regarded in its expression, indeed in the whole conception of
the group--with its helpless languor and yet its divine dominance--as
the monument of that divine and helpless poet whom I still recall so
well, as with lame leg and stick he would drift genially along the
Boulevard a few yards away.
_July 31._--At the hotel in Dijon, the flourishing capital of Burgundy, I
was amused to note how curiously my room differed from what I once
regarded as the type of the French room in the hotels I used to frequent.
There is still a Teutonic touch in the Burgundian; he is meticulously
thorough. I had six electric lights in different positions, a telephone, hot
and cold water laid on into a huge basin, a foot-bath, and, finally, a

wastepaper-basket. For the rest, a severely simple room, no ornaments,
nothing to remind one of the brace of glass pistols and all the other ugly
and useless things which filled my room at the ancient hotel in Rouen
where I stayed two years ago. And the "lavabo," as it is here called, a
spacious room with an ostentatiously noisy rush of water which may be
heard