YESTERDAY I found in a
cupboard an old, small, battered portmanteau which, by the initials on it, I
recognized as my own property. The lock appeared to have been forced. I dimly
remembered having forced it myself, with a poker, in my hot youth, after some
journey in which I had lost the key; and this act of violence was probably the
reason why the trunk had so long ago ceased to travel. I unstrapped it, not
without dust; it exhaled the faint scent of its long closure; it contained a
tweed suit of late-Victorian pattern, some bills, some letters, a collar-stud,
and -- something which, after I had wondered for a moment or two what on earth
it was, caused me suddenly to murmur, "Down below, the sea rustled to and
fro over the shingle."
Strange that these
words had, year after long year, been existing in some obscure cell at the back
of my brain! -- forgotten but all the while existing, like the trunk in that
cupboard. What released them, what threw open the cell door, was nothing but
the fragment of a fan; just the butt-end of an inexpensive fan. The sticks are
of white bone, clipped together with a semicircular ring that is not silver.
Ring and all, they have no market value; for a farthing is the least coin in
our currency. And yet, though I had so long forgotten them, for me they are not
worthless. They touch a chord. . . . Lest this confession raise false hopes in
you, I add that I did not know their owner.
I did once see her, and
in Normandy, and by moonlight, and her name was Angélique. She was graceful,
she was even beautiful. I was but nineteen years old. Yet even so I cannot say
that she impressed me favorably. I was seated at a table of a café on the
terrace of a casino. I sat facing the sea, with my back to the casino. The hour
was late, there were few people about. I heard the swing-door behind me flap
open, and was aware of a sharp snapping and crackling sound as a lady in white
passed quickly by me. I stared at her erect, thin back and her agitated elbows.
A short fat man passed in pursuit of her -- an elderly man in a black alpaca
jacket that billowed. I saw that she had left a trail of little white things on
the asphalt. I watched the efforts of the agonized short, fat man to overtake
her as she swept wraith-like away to the distant end of the terrace. What was
the matter? What had made her so spectacularly angry with him? The three or
four waiters of the café were exchanging cynical smiles and shrugs, as waiters
will. I tried to feel cynical, but was thrilled with excitement, with wonder
and curiosity. The woman out yonder had doubled on her tracks. She had not
slackened her furious speed, but the man waddlingly contrived to keep pace with
her now. With every moment they became more distinct, and the prospect that
they would presently pass by me, back into the casino, gave me that physical
tension which one feels on a wayside platform at the imminent passing of an
express. In the rushingly enlarged vision I had of them, the wrath on the
woman's face was even more saliently the main thing than I had supposed it
would be. That very hard Parisian face must have been as white as the powder
that coated it. "Écoute, Angélique," gasped the perspiring bourgeois,
"écoute, je te supplie --" The swing-door received them. I wanted to
follow, but had not paid for my bock. I beckoned my waiter. On his way to me he
stooped and picked up something which, with a smile and a shrug, he laid on my
table: "Il semble que Mademoiselle ne s'en servira plus." This was
the thing I now write of, and at sight of it I understood why there had been
that snapping and crackling, and what the white fragments on the ground were.
I hurried through the
rooms, hoping to see a continuation of that drama -- a scene of appeasement,
perhaps, or of fury still implacable. But the two oddly assorted players were
not performing there. My waiter had told me he had not seen either of them
before. I suppose they had arrived that day. But I was not destined to see
either of them again. They went away, I suppose, next morning, jointly or
singly; singly, I imagine.
They made, however, a
prolonged stay in my young memory, and would have done so even had I not had
that tangible memento of them. Who were they, those two of whom that one
strange glimpse had befallen me? What had all that tragic pother been about?
Mlle. Angélique I guessed to be thirty years old, her friend perhaps
fifty-five. Each of their faces was as clear to me as in the moment of actual
vision -- the man's fat, shiny, bewildered face; the taut white face of the
woman, the hard red line of her mouth, the eyes that were not flashing, but
positively dull, with rage. I presumed that the fan had been a present from
him, and a recent present -- bought perhaps that very day, after their arrival
in the town. But what, what had he done that she should break it between her
hands, scattering the splinters as who should sow dragon's-teeth? I could not
believe he had done anything much amiss. I imagined her grievance a trivial
one. But this did not make the case less engrossing. Again and again I would
take the fan-stump from my pocket, hoping to read the mystery it had been mixed
up in, so that I might reveal that mystery to the world. To the world, yes;
nothing less than that. I was determined to make a story of what I had seen --
a conte in the manner of great Guy de Maupassant. Now and again, in the course
of the past year or so, it had occurred to me that I might be a writer. But I
had not felt the impulse to sit down and write something. I did feel that
impulse now. It would indeed have been an irresistible impulse if I had known
just what to write.
I felt I might know at
any moment, and had but to give my mind to it. Maupassant was an impeccable
artist, yet I think the secret of the hold he had on the young men of my day
was not that we discerned his cunning, but that we delighted in the simplicity
which his cunning achieved. I had read a great number of his short stories, but
none that had made me feel as though I, if I were a writer, mightn't have
written it myself. Maupassant had an European reputation. It was pleasing, it
was soothing and gratifying, to feel that one could at any time win an equal
fame if one chose to set pen to paper. And now, suddenly, the spring had been
touched in me, the time was come. I was grateful for the fluke by which I had
witnessed on the terrace that evocative scene. I looked forward to reading the
MS. of "The Fan" -- to-morrow, at latest. I was not wildly ambitious.
I was not inordinately vain. I knew I couldn't ever, with the best will in the
world, write like George Meredith. Those wondrous works of his, seething with
wit, with poetry and philosophy and what not, never had beguiled me with the
sense that I might do something similar. I had full consciousness of not being
a philosopher, of not being a poet, and of not being a wit. Well, Maupassant
was none of these things. He was just an observer, like me. Of course he was a
good deal older than I, and had observed a good deal more. But it seemed to me
that he was not my superior in knowledge of life. I knew all about life through
him.
Dimly, the initial
paragraph of my tale floated in my mind. I -- not exactly I myself, but rather
that impersonal je familiar to me through Maupassant -- was to be sitting at that
table, with a bock before me, just as I had sat. Four or five sentences would
give the whole scene. One of these I had quite definitely composed. You have
already heard it. "Down below, the sea rustled to and fro over the
shingle."
These words, which
pleased me much, were to do double duty. They were to recur. They were to be,
by a fine stroke, the very last words of my tale, their tranquillity striking a
sharp ironic contrast with the stress of what had just been narrated. I had,
you see, advanced farther in the form of my tale than in the matter. But even
the form was as yet vague. What, exactly, was to happen after Mlle. Angélique
and M. Joumand (as I provisionally called him) had rushed back past me into the
casino? It was clear that I must hear the whole inner history from the lips of
one or the other of them. Which? Should M. Joumand stagger out on to the
terrace, sit down heavily at the table next to mine, bury his head in his
hands, and presently, in broken words, blurt out to me all that might be of
interest? "'And I tell you I gave up everything for her -- everything!' He
stared at me with his old hopeless eyes. 'She is more than the fiend I have
described to you. Yet I swear to you, monsieur, that if I had anything left to
give, it should be hers.'
"Down below, the
sea rustled to and fro over the shingle."
Or should the lady
herself be my informant? For a while, I rather leaned to this alternative. It
was more exciting, it seemed to make the writer more signally a man of the
world. On the other hand, it was less simple to manage. Wronged persons might
be ever so communicative, but I surmised that persons in the wrong were
reticent. Mlle. Angélique, therefore, would have to be modified by me in
appearance and behavior, toned down, touched up; and poor M. Joumand must look
like a man of whom one could believe anything. . . . "She ceased speaking.
She gazed down at the fragments of her fan, and then, as though finding in them
an image of her own life, whispered, 'To think what I once was, monsieur! --
what, but for him, I might be, even now!' She buried her face in her hands,
then stared out into the night. Suddenly she uttered a short, harsh laugh.
"Down below, the
sea rustled to and fro over the shingle."
I decided that I must
choose the first of these two ways. It was the less chivalrous as well as the
less lurid way, but clearly it was the more artistic as well as the easier. The
"chose vue," the "tranche de la vie" -- this was the thing
to aim at. Honesty was the best policy. I must be nothing if not merciless.
Maupassant was nothing if not merciless. He would not have spared Mlle. Angélique.
Besides, why should I libel M. Joumand? Poor -- no, not poor M. Joumand! I
warned myself against pitying him. One touch of "sentimentality," and
I should be lost. M. Joumand was ridiculous. I must keep him so. But -- what
was his position in life? I toyed with the possibility that he kept a fan- shop
-- that the business had once been a prosperous one, but had gone down, down,
because of his infatuation for this woman to whom he was always giving fans --
which she always smashed. . . . "'Ah, monsieur, cruel and ungrateful to me
though she is, I swear to you that if I had anything left to give, it should be
hers; but' -- he stared at me with his old, hopeless eyes -- 'the fan she broke
to-night was the last -- the last, monsieur -- of my stock.' Down below,"
-- but I pulled myself together, and asked pardon of my Muse.
It may be that I had
offended her by my fooling. Or it may be that she had a sisterly desire to
shield Mlle. Angélique from my mordant art. Or it may be that she was bent on
saving M. de Maupassant from a dangerous rivalry. Anyway, she withheld from me
the inspiration I had so confidently solicited. I could not think what had led
up to that scene on the terrace. I tried hard and soberly. I turned the
"chose vue" over and over in my mind, day by day, and the fan-stump
over and over in my hand. But the "chose à figurer" -- what, oh what,
was that? Nightly I revisited the café, and sat there with an open mind -- a
mind wide open to catch the idea that should drop into it like a ripe golden
plum. The plum did not ripen. The mind remained wide open for a week or more,
but nothing except that phrase about the sea rustled to and fro in it.
A full quarter of a
century has gone by. M. Joumand's death, so far too fat was he all those years
ago, may be presumed. A temper so violent as Mlle. Angélique's must surely have
brought its owner to the grave, long since. But here, all unchanged, the stump
of her fan is; and once more I turn it over and over in my hand. The chord this
relic strikes in me is not one of curiosity as to that old quarrel, but (if you
will forgive me) one of tenderness for my first effort to write and for my
first hopes of excellence.