第61章

A quaint example of association occurs to me from the experience of a friend of mine, "rich enough to lend to the poor." Having met an American friend newly landed at Liverpool, and a hurried quarter of an hour being all that was available for lunch, "Come let us have a pork-pie and a bottle of Bass" he had suggested.

"Pork-pies!" said the American, with a delighted sense of discovering the country,--"why, you read about them in Dickens!" Who shall say but that this instinctive association was an involuntary severe, but not inapplicable, criticism? Anightingale suggests Keats; a pork-pie, Dickens.

Similarly with absinthe, grisettes, the Latin Quarter, and so on.

Why, you read about them in Murger, in Musset, in Balzac, and in Flaubert; and the fact of your having read about them is, I may add, their chief importance.

So rambled my after-dinner reflections as I sat that evening smoking and sipping, sipping and smoking, at the Cafe de la Paix.

Presently in my dream I became aware of English voices near me, one of which seemed familiar, and which I couldn't help overhearing.The voice of the husband said,--you can never mistake the voice of the husband,--'T was the voice of the husband, I heard him complain,--the voice of the husband said: "Dora, I forbid you! I will NOTallow my wife to be seen again in the Latin Quarter.I permitted you to go once, as a concession, to the Cafe d'Harcourt; but once is enough.You will please respect my wishes!""But," pleaded the dear little woman, whom I had an immediate impulse, Perseus- like, to snatch from the jaws of her monster, and turning to the other lady of the party of four,--"but Mrs.

---- has never been, and she cannot well go without a chaperone.

Surely it cannot matter for once.It isn't as if I were there constantly.""No!" said the husband, with the absurd pomposity of his tribe.

"I'm very sorry.Mrs.---- will, of course, act as she pleases;but I cannot allow you to do it, Dora."

At last the little wife showed some spirit.

"Don't talk to me like that, Will," she said."I shall go if I please.Surely I am my own property.""Not at all!" at once flashed out the husband, wounded in that most vital part of him, his sense of property."There you mistake.You are my property, MY chattel; you promised obedience to me; I bought you, and you do my bidding!""Great heavens!" I ejaculated, and, springing up, found myself face to face with a well-known painter whom you would have thought the most Bohemian fellow in London.And Bohemian he is;but Bohemians are seldom Bohemians for any one save themselves.

They are terrible sticklers for convention and even etiquette in other people.

We recognised each other with a laugh, and presently were at it, hammer and tongs.I may say that we were all fairly intimate friends, and thus had the advantage of entire liberty of speech.

I looked daggers at the husband; he looked daggers at me, and occasionally looking at his wife, gave her a glance which was like the opening of Bluebeard's closet.You could see the poor murdered bodies dangling within the shadowy cupboard of his eye.

Of course we got no further.Additional opposition but further enraged him.He recapitulated what he would no doubt call his arguments,--they sounded more like threats,--and as he spoke Isaw dragons fighting for their dams in the primeval ooze, and heard savage trumpetings of masculine monsters without a name.

I told him so.

"You are," I said,--"and you will forgive my directness of expression,--you are the Primeval Male! You are the direct descendant of those Romans who carried off the Sabine women.

Nay! you have a much longer genealogy.You come of those hairy anthropoid males who hunted their mates through the tangle of primeval forests, and who finally obtained their consent--shall we say?--by clubbing them on the head with a stone axe.You talk a great deal of nonsense about the New Woman, but you, Sir, are THE OLD MALE; and," I continued, "I have only to obtain your wife's consent to take her under my protection this instant."Curiously enough, "The Old Male," as he is now affectionately called, became from this moment quite a bosom friend.Nothing would satisfy us but that we should all lodge at the same pension together, and there many a day we fought our battles over again.

But that poor little wife never, to my knowledge, went to the Cafe d'Harcourt again.