<h2>CHAPTER XXXVI</h2>
<br/>
<div class="first">THE last days of August in Paris! A deadly
oppression of heat; a brooding inertia that lay upon the city like
a cloak!</div>
<p>In the little <i>appartement</i> every window stood gaping,
thirsting for a draught of air; but no stir lightened the haze that
weighed upon the atmosphere, no faintest hint of breeze ruffled the
plantation shrubs, dark in their fulness of summer foliage.
Stillness lay upon Montmartre—upon the rue
Müller—most heavily of all, upon the home of Max.</p>
<p>It was an obvious, weighty stillness unconnected with repose. It
seemed as though the spirit of the place were fled, and that in its
stead the vacant quiet of death reigned. In the <i>salon</i> the
empty hearth hurt the observer with its poignant suggestion of past
comradeship, dead fires, long hours when the spring gales had
whistled through the plantation and stories had been told and
dreams woven to the spurt of blue and copper flames. The place had
an aspect of desertion; no book lay thrown, face downward, upon
chair or table; no flowers glowed against the white walls, though
flowers were to be had for the asking in a land that teemed with
summer fruitfulness.</p>
<p>This was the <i>salon</i>; but in the studio the note of loss
was still more sharply struck. Not because the easel, drawn into
the full light, offered to the gaze a crude, unfinished study, nor
yet because a laden palette was cast upon the floor to consort with
tubes and brushes, but because the presiding genius of the place
Max—Max the debonair, Max the adventurous—was seated on
a chair before his canvas, a prey to black despair.</p>
<p>Max was thinner. The great heat of August—or some more
potent cause—had smoothed the curves from his youthful face,
drawn the curled lips into an unfamiliar hardness and painted
purple shadows beneath the eyes. Max had fought a long fight in the
three months that had dwindled since the morning of Blake's going,
and a long moral fight has full as many scars to leave behind as a
battle of physical issues. The saddest human experience is to view
alone the scenes one has viewed through other eyes—to walk
solitary where one has walked in company—to have its
particular barbed shaft aimed at one from every stick and stone
that mark familiar ways. All this Max had known, wrapping himself
in his pride, keeping long silence, fighting his absurd, brave
fight.</p>
<p>'The first days will be the worst!' he had assured himself,
walking back from Notre Dame in the searching sun, heedless of who
might notice his red eyes. 'The first days will be the worst!' And
this formula he had repeated in the morning, standing uninspired
and wretched before a blank canvas. Then had come Blake's first
message—a note written from Sweden without care or comfort,
importing nothing, indicating nothing beyond the place at which the
writer might be found, and tears—torrents of tears—had
testified to the fierce anticipation, the crushing disappointment
for which it was responsible.</p>
<p>He had sent no answer to the cold communication—no answer
had been desired, and calling himself by every name contempt could
coin, he had pushed forward along the lonely road, companioned by
his work. But he himself had once said: 'One must come naked and
whole to art, as one must come naked and whole to nature,' and he
had spoken a truth. Art is no anodyne for a soul wounded in other
fields, and Art closed arms to him when most he wooed her. He threw
himself into work with pitiable vehemence in those first black
weeks. By day, he haunted the galleries and attended classes like
any art student; by night, he ranged the streets and
<i>cafés</i>, seeking inspiration, returning to his lonely
room to lie wakeful, fighting his ghosts, or else to sob himself to
sleep.</p>
<p>His theory of life had been amply proved. Blake had prated of
the soul, but it had been the body he had desired! Again and again
that thought had struck home, a savage spur goading him in daytime
to a wild plying of his brushes, gripping him in the lonely
darkness of the night-time until his sobs were suspended by their
very poignancy and the scalding tears dried before they could
fall.</p>
<p>He saw darkly, he saw untruly, but the world is according to the
beholder's vision, and in those sultry days, when summer waxed and
Paris emptied, opening its gates to the foreigner, all the colors
had receded from existence and he had tasted the lees of life.</p>
<p>And now to-day it seemed that the climax had been reached.
Seated idly before his canvas, the whole procession of his Paris
life unwound before him—from the first tumultuous hour, when
he had entered the Hôtel Railleux on fire for freedom, to
this moment when, with dull resentful eyes, he confronted the sum
of his labors—an unfinished, sorry study devoid of
inspiration.</p>
<p>He stared at the flat canvas—the rough outline of his
picture—the reckless splashing on of color; and, abruptly, as
if a hand had touched him, he sprang to his feet, making havoc
among the paint tubes that strewed the floor, and turned summarily
to the open window.</p>
<p>It was after eight o'clock, but the hazy, unreal daylight of a
summer evening made all things visible. He scanned the plantation,
viewing it as if in some travesty of morning; he looked down upon
the city, sleeping uneasily in preparation for the inevitable night
of pleasure, and a sudden loathing of Paris shook him. It seemed as
if some gauzy illusive garment had been lifted from a fair body and
that his eyes, made free of the white limbs, had discerned a
corpse.</p>
<p>By a natural flight of ideas, the loathing of the city turned to
loathing of himself—to an unsatiable desire for
self-forgetfulness, for self-effacement. Solitude was no longer
tenable, the walls of the <i>appartement</i> seemed to close in
about him, stifling—suffocating him. With a feverish
movement, he turned from the window, picked up his hat and fled the
room.</p>
<p>On the landing he paused for a moment before the door of M.
Cartel. He had paid many visits to M. Cartel under stress of
circumstances similar to this, and invariably M. Cartel—and,
moving in his shadow, the demure Jacqueline—had proffered a
generous hospitality—talking to him of work, of politics, of
Paris, but with a Frenchman's inimitable tact.</p>
<p>For all this unobtrusive attention he had been silently
grateful, but to-night he stood by the door hesitating; for long he
hesitated, honestly fighting with his mood, but at last the
desperation of the mood prevailed. Who could talk of work, when
work was as an evil smell in the nostrils? Who could talk of
politics, when the overthrow of nations would not stimulate the
mind? He turned on his heel with a little exclamation, hopeless as
it was cynical, and ran down the stairs with the gait of one whose
destination concerns neither the world nor himself.</p>
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