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Perceval Gibbon - The Second Class Passenger

P >> Perceval Gibbon >> The Second Class Passenger




It was a debt he knew he could pay. He, Rufin, whose work was in the
Luxembourg, in galleries in America, in Russia, in the palaces of
kings, could assure the painter of Montmartre of fame. He went to
seek him on the evening of his return to the city.

The fat concierge preserved still her burst and overripe appearance,
and at the sight of him she was so moved that she rose from her chair
and stood upright to voice her lamentations.

"Monsieur, what can I say? He is gone! It was a nightmare. It is true
that he omitted to pay his rent--a defect of his temperament, without
doubt. But the proprietor does not make these distinctions. After
three weeks he would expel Michelangelo himself. The monsieur who was
driven out--he resisted. He employed blasphemies, maledictions; he
smote my poor husband on the nose and in the stomach--all to no
purpose, for he is gone. I was overcome with grief, but what could I
do?"

"At least you know whither he went?" suggested Rufin.

"But, M'sieur, how should I know? His furniture--it was not much--was
impounded for the rent, else one might have followed it. He took away
with him only one picture, and that by force of threats and
assaults."

"Oh yes, of course he would take that," agreed the artist.

"He retired down the street with it, walking backward in the middle
of the road and not ceasing to make outcries at us," said the
concierge. "He uttered menaces; he was dangerous. Could I leave my
poor husband to imperil myself by following such a one? I ask M'sieur
could I?"

"I suppose not," said Rufin, staring at her absently. He was
thinking, by an odd momentary turn of fancy, how well he could have
spared this gruesome woman for another look at the picture.

"Who are his friends?" he inquired.

But the concierge could tell him nothing useful.

"He had no friends in the house," she said. "Our poor honest people--
he treated them with contumely. I do not know his friends, M'sieur."

"Ah, well," said Rufin, "I shall come across him somehow."

He saluted her perfunctorily and was about to turn away, but the
avidity of her face reminded him that he had a standard to live up
to. He produced another five-franc piece and was pursued to the gate
by the stridency of her gratitude.

A man--even a man of notable attributes and shocking manners--is as
easily lost in Paris as anywhere; it is a city of many shadows. At
the end of some weeks, during which his work had suffered from his
new preoccupation, Rufin saw himself baffled. His man had vanished
effectually, carrying with him to his obscurity the great picture. It
was the memory of that consummate thing that held Rufin to his task
of finding the author; he pictured it to himself, housed in some
garret, making the mean place wonderful. He obtained the unofficial
aid of the police and of many other people whose business in life is
with the underworld. He even caused a guarded paragraph to appear in
certain papers, which spoke temperately of a genius in hiding, for
whom fame was ripe whenever he should choose to claim it. But Paris
at that moment was thrilled by a series of murders by apaches, and
the notice passed unremarked.

In the end, therefore, Rufin restored himself to his work, richer by
a memory, poorer by a failure. Not till then came the last accident
in the chain of accidents by which the matter had presented itself to
him.

Some detail of quite trivial business took him to see an official at
the Palais de Justice, In the great Salle des Pas Perdus there was,
as always, a crowd of folk, jostling, fidgeting, making a clamor of
mixed voices. He did not visit it often enough to know that the crowd
was larger than usual and strongly leavened with an element of
furtive shabby men and desperate calm women. He found his official
and disposed of his affair, and the official, who was willing enough
to be seen in the company of a man of Rufin's position, rose politely
to see him forth, and walked with him into the noisy hall.

"You are not often here, Monsieur Rufin?" he suggested. "And yet, as
you see, here is much matter for an artist. These faces, eh? All the
brigands of Paris are here to-day. In there"--and he pointed to one
of the many doors--"the trial is proceeding of those apaches."

"A great occasion, no doubt," said Rufin. He looked casually towards
the door which his companion indicated. "Of course I have read of the
matter in the newspapers, but----"

He ceased speaking abruptly. A movement in the crowd between him and
the door had let him see, for a space of seconds, a girl who leaned
against the wall, strained and pale, as though waiting in a patient
agony for news, for tidings of the fates that were being decided
within. From the moment his eyes rested on her he was sure; there was
no possibility of a mistake; it was the girl whose face, reproduced,
interpreted, and immortalized, looked forth from the canvas he had
seen in the Montmartre tenement.

"Two of them held the gendarme, while the third cut his throat with
his own sword. A grotesque touch, that--vous ne trouvez pas? tres
fort!"--the official was remarking when Rufin took him by the arm.

"That girl," he said. "You see her?--against the wall there. I cannot
talk with her in this crowd, and I must talk to her at once. Where is
there some quiet Place?"

"Eh?" The little babbling official had a moment of doubt. But he
reflected that one is not a great artist without being eccentric; and
his amiable brow cleared.

"She is certainly a type," he said, peering on tiptoe. "Wonderful!
You cast your eye upon all this crowd and at once, in a single
glance, you pluck forth the type--wonderful! As to a place, that is
easy. My office is at your service."

The girl lifted hunted and miserable eyes to the tall, grave man who
looked down upon her and raised his hat.

"I have something to say to you," he said. "Come with me."

A momentary frantic hope flamed in her thin countenance. It sank, and
she hesitated. Girls of her world are practiced in discounting such
requests. But Rufin's courteous and fastidious face was above
suspicion; without a word she followed him.

The office to which he led her was an arid, neat room, an economical
legal factory for making molehills into mountains. A desk and certain
chairs stood like chill islands about its floor; it had the forlorn
atmosphere of a waiting-room. The little official whose workshop it
was held open the door for them, followed them in, and closed it
again. "Do not be alarmed, my child," he said to the tragic girl.
"This gentleman is a great artist. You will be honored in serving
him."

Rufin stilled him with an upraised hand and fetched a chair for the
girl. She rested an arm on the back of it, but did not sit down. She
did not understand why she had been brought to this room, and stared
with hard, preoccupied eyes at the tall man with the mild, still
face.

"I recognized you by a picture I saw some months ago in a room in
Montmartre," said Rufin.

"It was a great picture, the work of a great man."

"Ah!" The girl let her breath go in a long sigh. "Monsieur knows him,
then? And knows that he is a great man? For he is--he is a great
man!"

She spoke with passion, with a living fervor of conviction, but her
eyes still appealed.

"You and I both know it quite certainly, Mademoiselle," replied
Rufin. "Everybody will know it very soon. It is a truth that cannot
be hidden. But where is the picture?!"

"I have it," she answered.

"Take care of it, then," said Rufin. "You have a great trust. And the
painter--have you got him, too?"

She stared at him, bewildered. "The painter? The painter of the
picture?"

"Of course," said Rufin. "Who else?"

"But----" she looked from him to the benign official, who had the air
of presiding at a ceremony. "Then you don't know? You haven't heard?"

Comprehension lit in her face; she uttered a wretched little laugh.

"Ah, v'la de la comedie!" she cried. "No, I haven't got him. They
have taken him from me. They have taken him, and in there"--her
forefinger shot out and pointed to the wall and beyond it--"in there,
in a room full of people who stare and listen, they are making him
into a murderer."

"Then--parbleu!" The little official was seized by comprehension as
by a fit. "Then there is an artist--the artist of whom you talk--who
is one of the apaches! It is unbelievable!"

At the word apaches the girl turned on him with teeth bared as though
in a snarl. But at the sound of Rufin's voice she subsided.

"What is his name--quickly?" he demanded.

"Giaconi," she answered.

Rufin looked his question at the little official, who turned to the
girl.

"Peter the Lucky?" he queried.

She nodded dejectedly.

The little official made a grimace. "It was he," he said, "who did
the throat-cutting. Tiens! this begins to be a drama."

The girl, with drooping head, made a faint moan of protest and
misery. Rufin signed the little man to be silent. The truth, if he
had but given it entertainment, had offered itself to him from the
first. All he had heard of the man, Papa Musard's slanderous-sounding
complaints of him, the fat concierge's reports of his violence, had
gathered towards this culmination. He had insisted upon thinking of
him as a full-blooded man of genius, riotously making little of
conventions, a creature abounding in life, tinctured a little,
perhaps, with the madness that may spice the mind of a visionary and
enrage his appetites. It was a figure ha had created to satisfy
himself.

"It was false art," he reflected. "That is me--false art!"

Still, whatever he had seen wrongly, there was still the picture.
Apache, murderer, and all the rest--the fellow had painted the
picture. No one verdict can account for both art and morals, and
there was reason to fear, it seemed, that the law which executed a
murderer would murder a painter at the same time--and such a painter!

"No," said Rufin, unconsciously speaking aloud--"no; they must not
kill him."

"Ah, M'sieur!" It was a cry from the girl, whose composure had
broken utterly at his words. "You are also an artist--you know!"

In a hysteria of supplication she flung herself forward and was on
her knees at his feet. She lifted clasped hands and blinded eyes; she
was like a child saying its prayers but for the writhen torture of
her face, where wild hopes and lunatic terrors played alternately.

"M'sieur, you can save him! You have the grand air, M'sieur; there is
God in your face; you make men hear you! For mercy--for blessed
charity--ah, M'sieur, M'sieur, I will carry your sins for you; I will
go to hell in your place! You are great--one sees it; and he is
great, too! M'sieur, I am your chattel, your beast--only save him,
save him!"

It tore the barren atmosphere of the office to rags; it made the
place august and awful. Rufin bent to her and took her clasped hands
in one of his to raise her.

"I will do all that I can," he said earnestly. "All! I dare not do
less, my child."

She gulped and shivered; she had poured her soul and her force forth,
and she was weak and empty. She strained to find further expression,
but could not. Rufin supported her to the chair.

"We must see what is happening in this trial," he said to the little
official. "We have lost time as it is."

"I will guide you," replied the other happily. "It!-is a situation,
is it not? Ah, the crevasses, the abysses of life! Come, my friend."

From the Salle des Pas Perdus a murmur reached them. They entered it
to find the crowd sundered, leaving empty a broad alley.

"Qu'est ce qu'y a?" The little official was jumping on tiptoe to see
over the heads in front of him. "Is it possible that the case is
finished?"

A huissier came at his gesture and found means to get them through to
the front of the crowd, which waited with a hungry expectation.

"The case is certainly finished," murmured the little man.

A double door opened at the head of the alley of people, and half a
dozen men in uniform came out quickly. Others followed, and they came
down toward the entrance. In the midst of them, their shabby civilian
clothes contrasting abruptly with the uniforms of their guards,
slouched four men, handcuffed and bareheaded.

"It is they," whispered the official to Rufin, and half turned his
head to ask a question of the huissier behind them.

Three of them were lean young men, with hardy, debased, animal
countenances. They were referable at a glance to the dregs of
civilization. They had the stooped shoulders, the dragging gait, the
half-servile, half-threatening expression that hallmarks the apache.
It was to the fourth that Rufin turned with an overdue thrill of
excitement. A young man--not more than twenty-five--built like a bull
for force and wrath. His was that colossal physique that develops in
the South; his shoulders were mighty under his mean coat, and his
chained wrists were square and knotty. He held his head up with a
sort of truculence in its poise; it was the head, massive, sensuous-
lipped, slow-eyed, of a whimsical Nero. It was weariness, perhaps,
that give him his look of satiety, of appetites full fed and dormant,
of lusts grossly slaked. A murmur ran through the hall as he passed;
it was as though the wretched men and women who knew him uttered an
involuntary applause.

"There is Peter," said some one near Rufin. "Lucky Peter; Quel
homme!"

The Huissier was memorizing for the little official the closing scene
of the trial. Rufin heard words here and there in his narrative.
"Called the judges a set of old . . . Laughed aloud when they asked
him if . . . Yes, roared with laughter--roared." And then for the
final phrase: "Condamnes a la mort!"

"You hear?" inquired the little official, nudging him. "It is too
late. They are condemned to death, all of them. They have their
affair!"

Rufin shrugged and led the way back to the office. But it was empty;
the girl had gone.

"Tiens!" said the official. "No doubt she heard of the sentence and
knew that there was no more to be done."

"Or else," said Rufin thoughtfully, frowning at the floor--"or else
she reposes her trust in me."

"Ah, doubtless," agreed the little man. "But say, then! It has been
an experience, hein? Piquant, picturesque, moving, too. For I am not
like you; I do not see these dramas every day."

"And you fancy I do?" cried Rufin. "Man, I am terrified to find what
goes on in the world. And I thought I knew life!" With a gesture of
hopelessness and impotence he turned on his heel and went forth.

The business preserved its character of a series of accidents to the
end; accidents are the forced effects of truth. Rufin, having
organized supports of a kind not to be ignored in a republican state,
even by blind Justice herself, threw his case at the wise grey head
of the Minister of Justice--a wily politician who knew the uses of
advertisement. The apaches are distinctively a Parisian produce, and
if only Paris could be won over, intrigued by the romance and
strangeness of the genius that had flowered in the gutter, and given
to the world a star of art, all would be arranged and the guillotine
would have but three necks to subdue. France at large would only
shrug, for France is the husband of Paris and permits her her
caprices. It rested with Paris, then.

But, as though they insisted upon a martyr, the apaches themselves
intervened with a brisk series of murders and outrages, the last of
which they effected on the very fringe of the show-Paris. It was not
a sergent de ville this time, but a shopkeeper, and the city frothed
at the mouth and shrieked for revenge.

"After that," said the Minister, "there is nothing to do. See for
yourself--here are the papers! We shall be fortunate if four
executions suffice."

Rufin was seated facing him across a great desk littered with
documents.

"Why not try if three will serve?" he suggested.

The minister smiled and shook his head. He looked at Rufin half
humorously.

"These Parisians," he said, "have the guillotine habit. If they take
to crying for more, what old man can be sure of dying in his bed? My
grandfather was an old man, and his head fell in the Revolution."

"But this," said Rufin, rustling the newspapers before him--"this is
clamor. It is panic. It is not serious."

"That is why I am afraid of it," replied the Minister. "I am always
afraid of a frightened Frenchman. But, sans blague, my friend, I
cannot do what you wish."

Rufin put the piled newspapers from him and leaned forward to plead.

It was useless. The old man opposite him had a manner as deft and
unassuming as his own; it masked a cynical inflexibility of purpose
proof against any appeal.

"I cannot do it," was his single answer.

Rufin sighed. "Then it remains to see the President," he suggested.

"There is that," smiled the Minister. "See him by all means. If you
are interested in gardening, you will find him charming. Otherwise,
perhaps--but an honest man, I assure you."

"At least," said Rufin, "if everything fails, if the great painter is
to be sacrificed to the newspapers and your epigrams--at least you
will allow me to visit him before--before the----"

"But certainly!" the Minister bowed. "I am eager to serve you,
Monsieur Rufin. When the date is fixed I will write you a permission.
You three shall have an interview; it should be a memorable one."

"We three?" Rufin waited for an explanation.

"Exactly. You two great artists, Monsieur Rufin and Monsieur Giaconi,
and also the murderer, Peter the Lucky."

The old man smiled charmingly; he had brought the negotiations to a
point with a mot.

"Adieu, cher maitre," he said, rising to shake his visitor's hand
across the wide desk.

Rufin seemed to have trodden into a groove of unsuccess. All his
efforts were futile; he saw himself wasting time and energy while
fate wasted none. The picture came to hang in his studio till the
Luxembourg should demand it; daily its tragic wisdom and tenacious
femininity goaded him to new endeavors, and daily he knew that he
spent himself in vain.

He did not even realize how much of himself he had expended till that
raw morning before the dawn when he drove across Paris in a damp and
mournful cab, with the silent girl at his side, to a little square
like a well shut in by high houses whose every window was lighted.
There was already a crowd waiting massed under the care of mounted
soldiers, and the cab slowed to a walk to pass through them. From the
window at his side he saw, with unconscious appreciation, the picture
it made, an arrangement of somber masses with yellow windows shining,
and in the middle the gaunt uprights, the severe simplicity of the
guillotine.

Faces looked in at him, strange and sudden, lit abruptly by the
carriage-lamps. Somebody--doubtless a student--peered and recognized
him. "Good morning, maitre," he said, and was gone. Maitre--master!
Men did him honor in so naming him, gave him rank, deferred to him.
But he acknowledged life for his master, himself for its pupil and
servant.

The girl had not spoken since they started; she remained sitting
still in her place when the cab halted at a door, and it needed his
hand on her arm to rouse her to dismount. She followed him obediently
between more men in uniform, and they found themselves in a corridor,
where an officer, obviously waiting there for the purpose, greeted
Rufin with marked deference.

"There is no need," he said, as Rufin groped in his pockets for the
permit with which he had been provided. "I have been warned to expect
Monsieur Rufin and the lady, and I congratulate myself on the honor
of receiving them."

"He knows we are coming?" asked Rufin.

"Yes, he knows," replied the other. "At this moment his toilet is
being made." He sank his voice so that the mute, abstracted girl
should not overhear. "The hair above the neck, you know--they always
shave that off. It might be better that mademoiselle should not see."

"Possibly," agreed Rufin, looking absently at his comely,
insignificant face, which the lamps illuminated mercilessly.

The girl stood with her hands loosely joined before her, and her thin
face vacant, staring, as though in a mood of deep thought, along the
bare passage. Suddenly she addressed the officer.

"How long shall I be with him," she inquired, in tones of an almost
arrogant composure, "before they cut his head off?"

The words, in their matter-of-fact directness, no less than the tone,
seemed to startle the officer.

"Ah, Mademoiselle!" he protested, as though at an indelicacy or an
accusation.

"How long?" repeated the girl.

"Kindly tell mademoiselle what she wishes to know," directed Rufin.

The officer hesitated. "It does not rest with me," he said
uncomfortably. "You see, there is a regular course in these matters,
a routine. I hope mademoiselle will have not less than ten minutes."

The girl looked at Rufin and made a face. It was as though she had
been overcharged in a shop; she invited him, it seemed, to take note
of a trivial imposture. Her manner and gesture had the repressed
power of under-expression. He nodded to her in entire comprehension.

"But," began the officer excitedly, "how can I----" Rufin turned on
him gravely, a somber, august figure of reproof.

"Sir," he said, "you are in the presence of a tragedy. I beg you to
be silent."

The officer made a hopeless gesture; the shadow of it fled
grotesquely up the walls.

A few moments later the summons came that took them along the passage
to an open door, giving on to a room brilliant with lights and
containing a number of people. At the farther end of it a table
against the wall had been converted into a sort of altar, with wan
candles alight upon it, and there was a robed priest among the
uniformed men. Those by the door parted to make way for them. Rufin
saw them salute him, and removed his hat.

Somebody was speaking. "Regret we cannot leave you alone, but----"

"It does not matter," said Rufin. The room was raw and aching with
light; the big electrics were pitiless. In the middle of it a man sat
on a chair and raised expectant eyes at his arrival. It was Giaconi,
the painter, the murderer. There was some disorder of his dress which
Rufin noted automatically, but it was not for some minutes that he
perceived its cause--the collar of his coat had been shorn away. The
man sat under all those fascinated eyes impatiently; his tired and
whimsical face was tense and drawn; he was plainly putting a strong
constraint upon himself. The great shoulders, the huge arms, all the
compressed strength of the body, made the effect of some strong
animal fettered and compelled to tameness.

"Rufin?" he said hesitatingly.

The painter nodded. "Yes, it is Rufin."

The girl glided past him toward the seated man. "And I, Pietro," she
said.

He made a gesture with his hand as though to move her aside, for she
stood between him and Rufin.

"Ah," she cried, "do you not need me at all--even now?"

"Oh, what is it?" said the condemned man, with a quick irritation.
"Is this a time! There is not a moment to spare. I must speak to
Rufin--I must. Yes, kneel down; that's right!"

She had sunk at his knee and laid her brown head upon it. As though
to acknowledge the caress of a dog, he let one hand fall on her bowed
shoulders. His eyes traveled across her to Rufin.

"They told me you would come. Say--is it because of my picture?"

"Yes," said Rufin. "I have done all that I could to save you because
of that. But----"

"I know," said the other. "They have told me. You like it, then--my
poor 'Mona Lisa' of Montmartre?"

Rufin stepped closer. It was not easy to utter all he desired to say
under the eyes of those uniformed men, with the sad, attentive priest
in the background.

"Monsieur," he said, "your picture is in my studio. Nothing shall
ever hang in its place, for nothing will be worthy."

The seated man heard him hungrily. For the moment he seemed to have
forgotten where he was and what was to happen to him ere he drew many
more breaths.

"I knew," he said, "I knew. I can paint. So can you, Monsieur--
sometimes. We two---we know!"

He frowned heavily as realization returned to him. "And now I never
shall," he said. "I never shall! Ah, it is horrible! A man is two
people, and both die like a single soul. You know, for you are an
artist."

"I--I have done my best," said Rufin despairingly. "If I could go
instead and leave you to paint--oh, believe me, I would go now
gladly, proudly, for I should have given the world pictures--great
pictures."

A spasm of emotion filled his eyes with tears, and some one touched
his arm and drew him aside. He strove with himself fiercely and
looked up again to see that three men had entered the room and were
going toward the prisoner. The priest had come forward and was
raising the kneeling girl.

"A moment," cried the prisoner, as the three laid hands upon him.
"Just a moment." They took no notice. "Monsieur Rufin," he cried, "it
is my hand I offer you--only that."

Somebody near Rufin spoke a brief order and the three were still. He
saw Giaconi's intent face across their shoulders, his open hand
reaching forward between them. He clasped it silently.

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