The Master

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Title:     The Master
Author: Perceval Gibbon [More Titles by Gibbon]

Papa Musard, whenever he felt that he was about to die, which happened three times a year at least, would beckon as with a finger from the grimy Montmartre tenement in which he abode and call Rufin to come and bid him farewell. The great artist always came; he never failed to show himself humble to humble people, and, besides, Papa Musard had known Corot--or said that he had--and in his capacity of a model had impressed his giant shoulders and its beard on the work of three generations of painters.

The boy who carried the summons sat confidently on the kerb outside the restaurant at which Rufin was used to lunch, and rose to his feet as the tall, cloaked figure turned the corner of the street and approached along the sunlit pavement.

"Monsieur Musard said you would be here at one o'clock," he explained, presenting the note.

"Then it is very fortunate that I am not late," said Rufin politely, accepting it. "But how did you know me?"

The boy--he was aged perhaps twelve--gave a sophisticated shrug.

"Monsieur Musard said: 'At one o'clock there will approach an artist with the airs of a gentleman. That is he.'"

Rufin laughed and opened the note. While he read it the boy watched him with the admiration which, in Paris, even the rat-like gamin of the streets pays to distinction such as his. He was a tall man splendidly blonde, and he affected the cloak, the slouch hat, the picturesque amplitude of hair which were once the uniform of the artist. But these, in his final effect, were subordinate to 'a certain breadth and majesty of brow, a cast of countenance at once benign and austere, as though the art he practiced so supremely both exacted much and conferred much. He made a fine and potent figure as he stood, with his back to the bright street and the gutter-child standing beside him like a familiar companion, and read the smudged scrawl of Papa Musard.

"So Musard is very ill again, is he?" he asked of the boy. "Have you seen him yourself?"

"Oh yes," replied the boy; "I have seen him. He lies in bed and his temper is frightful."

"He is a very old man, you see," said Rufin. "Old men have much to suffer. Well, tell him I will come this afternoon to visit him. And this"--producing a coin from his pocket--"this is for you."

The gamin managed, in some fashion of his own, to combine, in a single movement, a snatch at the money with a gesture of polite deprecation. They parted with mutual salutations, two gentlemen who had carried an honorable transaction to a worthy close. A white- aproned waiter smiled upon them tolerantly and held open the door that Rufin might enter to his lunch.

It was in this manner that the strings were pulled which sent Rufin on foot to Montmartre, with the sun at his back and the streets chirping about him. Two young men, passing near the Opera, saluted him with the title of "maitre;" and then the Paris of sleek magnificence lay behind him and the street sloped uphill to the Place Pigalle and all that region where sober, industrious Parisians work like beavers to furnish vice for inquiring foreigners. Yet steeper slopes ascended between high houses toward his destination, and he came at last to the cobbled courtyard, overlooked by window-dotted cliffs of building, above which Papa Musard had his habitation.

A fat concierge, whose bulged and gaping clothes gave her the aspect of an over-ripe fruit, slept stonily in a chair at the doorway. Rufin was not certain whether Musard lived on the fourth floor or the fifth, and would have been glad to inquire, but he had not the courage to prod that slumbering bulk, and was careful to edge past without touching it. The grimy stair led him upward to find out for himself.

On the third floor, according to his count, a door looked like what he remembered of Musard's, but it yielded no answer to his knocking. A flight higher there was another which stood an inch or so ajar, and this he ventured to push open that he might look in. It yielded him a room empty of life, but he remained in the doorway looking.

It was a commonplace, square, ugly room, the counterpart of a hundred others in that melancholy building; but its window, framing a saw- edged horizon of roofs and chimneys, faced to the north, and some one, it was plain, had promoted it to the uses of a studio. An easel stood in the middle of the floor with a canvas upon it; the walls were covered with gross caricatures drawn upon the bare plaster with charcoal. A mattress and some tumbled bedclothes lay in one corner, and a few humble utensils also testified that the place was a dwelling as well as a workshop.

Rufin looked back to be sure that no one was coming up the stairs, and then tiptoed into the room to see what hung on the easel.

"After all," he murmured, "an artist has the right."

The picture on the easel was all but completed; it was a quarter- length painting of a girl. Stepping cautiously around the easel, he came upon a full view of it suddenly, and forthwith forgot all his precautions to be unheard. Here was a thing no man could keep quiet! With his first glance he saw--he, himself a painter, a creator, a judge--that he stood in the presence of a great work of art, a vision, a power.

"But here!" he exclaimed amazedly. "Of all places--here!"

The painted face looked out at him with all the sorrowful wisdom that is comprised in a life sharpened on the grindstone of a remorseless civilization. It was a girl such as one might find anywhere in that neighborhood, she had the hardy prettiness, the alertness, the predatory quality which belong to wild creatures civilized by force. It was set on the canvas with a skill that made Rufin smile with frank pleasure; but the skill, the artifice of the thing, were the least part of it. What was wonderful was the imagination, the living insight, that represented not only the shaped product of a harsh existence, but the womanhood at the root of it. It was miraculous; it was convincing as life is convincing; it was great.

Rufin, the painter whose fame was secure, upon whom Art had showered gifts, gazed at it, absorbed and reverent. He realized that in this picture his age had achieved a masterpiece; he was at least the contemporary of an immortal.

"Ah!" he said, with an impulse of high indignation. "And while he paints here and sleeps on the floor, they buy my pictures!"

He stepped back from the easel. He was equal to a great gesture, as to a great thought. As though he had greeted a living princess, he swept his hat off in a bow to the work of this unknown fellow.

Papa Musard in his bed, with his comforts--mostly in bottles-- arranged within his reach, found it rather shocking that a distinguished artist should enter the presence of a dying man like-- as he remarked during his convalescence--a dog going into a pond. He sat up in astonishment.

"Musard," demanded Rufin abruptly, "who is the artist who lives in the room below this?"

"Oh, him!" replied Papa Musard, sinking back on his pillow. "M'sieur Rufin, this is the last time I shall appeal to you. Before long I shall again be in the presence of the great master, of Corot, of him who----"

Rufin, it seemed, had lost all respect both for Corot and death. He waved an imperious arm, over which his cloak flapped like a black wing.

"Who is the artist in the room below?" repeated Rufin urgently. "Do you know him?"

"No," replied Papa Musard, with emphasis. "Know him--an Italian, a ruffian, an apache, a man with hair on his arms like a baboon! I do not know him. There!"

He was offended; a dying man has his privileges, at least. The face, gnarled and tempestuously bearded, which had been perpetuated by a hundred laborious painters, glared from the pillow at Rufin with indignation and protest.

Rufin suppressed an impulse to speak forcibly, for one has no more right to strip a man of his pose than of his shirt. He smiled at the angry invalid conciliatingly.

"See how I forget myself!" he said apologetically. "We artists are all alike. Show us a picture and our manners go by the board. With you, Musard, need I say more?"

"You have said a lot," grumbled the ancient of days. "Coming in roaring like a bull! What picture has upset you?"

"A picture you have not seen," said Rufin, "or you would be grasping my hand and weeping for joy--you who know pictures better than us all!" He surveyed the invalid, who was softening. Musard knew no more of pictures than a frame-maker; but that was a fact one did not mention in his presence.

"Since Corot," sighed Musard, "I have seen few pictures which were-- en effet--pictures."

"You have great memories," agreed Rufin hastily. "But I have just seen a picture--ah, but a picture, my friend!"

The old cunning face on the pillow resisted the charm of his manner, the gentleness of his appeal.

"Not his?" demanded Papa Musard. "Not in the room underneath? Not one of the daubs of that assassin, that cut-throat, that Italian?"

Rufin nodded, as though confirming a pleasant surprise. "Is it not strange," he said, "how genius will roost on any perch? It is true, then, that he is a person who offends your taste? That is bad. Tell me about him, Musard."

He reached himself a chair and sat down near the foot of the bed.

"You are always making a fuss of some worthless creature," grumbled Musard. "I do not even know the man's name. They speak of him as Peter the Lucky--it is a nickname he has on the streets, an apache name. He has been in prison, too, and he bellows insults at his elders and betters when they pass him on the stairs. He is a man of no soul!"

"Yes," said Rufin. "But did you say he had been in prison?"

"I did," affirmed Musard. "Ask anyone. It is not that I abuse him; he is, in fact, a criminal. Once he threw an egg at a gendarme. And yet you come to me--a dying man--and declare that such a creature can paint! Bah!"

"Yes," said Rufin, "it is strange."

It was clearly hopeless to try to extract any real information from Papa Musard; that veteran was fortified with prejudices. Rufin resigned himself to the inevitable; and, although he was burning with eagerness to find the painter of the picture he had recently seen, to welcome him into the sunlight of fame and success, he bent his mind to the interview with Papa Musard.

"I have had my part in the development of Art," the invalid was saying at the end of three-quarters of an hour. "Perhaps I have not had my full share of recognition. Since Corot, no artist has been magnanimous; they have become tradesmen, shopkeepers."

"You are hard on us, Musard," said Rufin. "We're a bad lot, but we do our best. Here is a small matter of money that may help to make you comfortable. I'm sorry you have such an unpleasant neighbor."

"You are going?" demanded Musard.

"I must," said Rufin. "To-morrow I go into the country for some weeks, and nothing is packed yet."

"Corot would not have left an old man to die in solitude," remarked Musard thoughtfully.

Rufin smiled regretfully and got away while he could. Papa Musard in an hour could wear down even his patience.

The painter's room was still unlocked and unoccupied as he descended the stairs; he entered it for another look at the picture. He needed to confirm his memory, to be assured that he had not endowed the work with virtue not its own. The trivial, cheaply pretty face fronted him again, with its little artificial graces only half-masking the sore, tormented femininity behind it. Yes, it was the true art, the poignant vision, a thing belonging to all time.

In the courtyard the fat concierge was awake, in a torpid fashion, and knitting. She lifted her greedy and tyrannical eyes at the tall figure of Rufin, with its suggestion of splendors and dignities. But she was not much more informative than Papa Musard had been.

"Oh, the painter!" she exclaimed, when she understood who was in question. "Ah, M'sieur, it is two days since I have seen him. He is not of a punctual habit--no! How often have I waked in the blackness of night, upon a frightful uproar of the bell, to admit him, and he making observations at the top of his voice that would cause a fish to blush! An Italian, M'sieur--yes! But all the same it astonishes no one when he is away for two days."

"The Italians are like that," generalized Rufin unscrupulously. "His door is unlocked, Madame, and there is a picture in his room which is--well, valuable."

"He sold the key," lamented Madame, "and the catches of the window, and the bell-push, and a bucket of mine which I had neglected to watch. And he called me a she-camel when I remonstrated."

"In Italian it is a mere jest," Rufin assured her. "See, Madame, this is my card, which I beg you to give him. I am obliged to leave Paris to-morrow, but on my return I shall have the honor to call on him. And this is a five-franc piece!"

The big coin seemed to work on the concierge like a powerful drug. She choked noisily and was for the while almost enthusiastic.

"He shall have the card," she promised. "I swear it! After all, artists must have their experiences. Doubtless the monsieur who resides above is a great painter?"

"A very great painter," replied Rufin.

His work, during the next three weeks, exiled him to a green solitude of flat land whose horizons were ridged by poplars growing beside roads laid down as though with a ruler, so straight they were as they sliced across the rich levels. It was there he effected the vital work on his great picture, "Promesse," a revelation of earth gravid with life, of the opulent promise and purpose of spring. It is the greater for what lodged in his mind of the picture he had seen in the Montmartre tenement. It was constant in his thought, the while he noted on his canvas the very texture of the year's early light; it aided his brush. In honesty and humbleness of heart, as he worked, he acknowledged a debt to the unknown Italian who stole the key of the room to sell, and called his concierge a she-camel.

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.

The priest had set the girl on her knees before the improvised altar and stood beside her in silence. The three, with no word spoken, proceeded with their business. With deft speed they lashed their man's hands behind his back, forcing them back with rough skill. The chief of them motioned his subordinates to take him by the elbows and signed to the priest with his hand. The priest came forward, holding the crucifix, and took his place close to the prisoner. For a final touch of the grotesque the executioner produced and put on a tall silk hat.

"March!" he said, and they took the condemned man toward the door. He twisted his head round for a last glance at the room.

"Good-bye, little one!" he cried loudly. The kneeling girl only moaned.

"Good-bye, M'sieur Rufin."

Rufin stepped forward and bowed mechanically.

"Adieu, Maitre," he answered.

He saw that the condemned man's eyes lightened, a flush rose in his face; he smiled as if in triumph. Then they passed out, and Rufin, after standing for a moment in uncertainty, crossed the room and knelt beside the girl, with his hands pressed to his ears.

[The end]
Perceval Gibbon's short story: The Master

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