“Go! Go! Remove thyself! It is my turn now! …”
Christophe, overhearing their thoughts, longed to say to them:
“Don’t be in such a hurry! I am quite happy here. Please regard me still as a living being.”
He was amused by their naive impertinence.
“You may as well say straight out,” he observed one day when they had crushed him with their disdainful manner. “You may as well say that I am a stupid old man.”
“No, no, my dear old friend,” said Aurora, laughing heartily. “You are the best of men, but there are some things that you do not know.”
“And that you do know, my girl? You are very wise!”
“Don’t laugh at me. I know nothing much. But Georges knows.”
Christophe smiled:
“Yes. You are right, my dear. The man you love always knows.”
It was much more difficult for him to tolerate their music than to put up with their intellectual superiority. They used to try his patience severely. The piano was given no rest when they were in his rooms. It seemed that love had roused them to song, like the birds. But they were by a long way not so skilled in singing. Aurora had no illusions as to her talent, but she was quite otherwise about her fiancé: she could see no difference between Georges’s playing and Christophe’s. Perhaps she preferred Georges’s style, and Georges, in spite of his ironic subtlety, was never far from being convinced by his sweetheart’s belief in him. Christophe never contradicted them: maliciously he would concur in the girl’s opinion (except when, as sometimes happened, he could bear it no longer, and would rush away, banging the doors). With an affectionate, pitying smile he would listen to Georges playing Tristan on the piano. The unhappy young man would conscientiously apply himself to the transcription of the formidable pages with all the amiable sweetness of a young girl, and a young girl’s tender feeling. Christophe used to laugh to himself. He would never tell the boy why he laughed. He would kiss him. He loved him as he was. Perhaps he loved him the more for it. … Poor boy! … Oh! the vanity of art! …
He used often to talk about “his children”—(for so he called them)—to Emmanuel. Emmanuel, who was fond of Georges, used jokingly to say that Christophe ought to hand him over to him. He had Aurora, and it was not fair. He was grabbing everything.
Their friendship had become almost legendary in Parisian society, though they lived apart from it. Emmanuel had grown passionately devoted to Christophe, though his pride would not let him show it. He covered it up with his brusque manners, and sometimes used to be absolutely rude to Christophe. But Christophe was not deceived. He knew how deeply attached to him Emmanuel was, and he knew the worth of his affection. No week went by but they met two or three times. When they were prevented by ill-health from going out, they used to write to each other. Their letters might have been written from places far removed from Paris. They were less interested in external happenings than in the progress of the mind in science and art. They lived in their ideas, pondering their art, or beneath the chaos of facts perceiving the little undistinguished gleam which reveals the progress of the history of the human mind.
Generally it was Christophe who visited Emmanuel. Although, since a recent illness, he was not much better in health than his friend, he had grown used to thinking that Emmanuel’s health called for more consideration than his own. Christophe could not now ascend Emmanuel’s six flights of stairs without difficulty, and when he reached the top he had to wait a moment to recover his breath. They were both incapable of taking care of themselves. In defiance of their weak throats and their fits of despondency, they were inveterate smokers. That was one of the reasons why Christophe preferred that they should meet in Emmanuel’s rooms rather than in his own, for Aurora used to declare war on his habit of smoking, and he used to hide away from her. Sometimes they would both break out coughing in the middle of their conversation, and then they would break off and look at each other guiltily like schoolboys, and laugh: and sometimes one would lecture the other while he was coughing; but as soon as he had recovered his breath the other would vigorously protest that smoking had nothing to do with it.
On Emmanuel’s table, in a clear space among the papers, a gray cat would sit and gravely look at the smokers with an air of reproach. Christophe used to say that it was their living conscience, and, by way of stifling it, he would cover it up with his hat. It was a wretched beast, of the commonest kind, that Emmanuel had picked up half-dead in the street; it had never really recovered from the brutal handling it had received, and ate very little, and hardly ever played, and never made any noise: it was very gentle, and used to follow its master about with its intelligent eyes, and be unhappy when he was absent, and quite content to sit on the table by his side, only breaking off its musing ecstatically, for hours together, to watch the cage where the inaccessible birds fluttered about, purring politely at the least mark of attention, patiently submitting to Emmanuel’s capricious, and Christophe’s rough, attentions, and always being very careful not to scratch or bite. It was very delicate, and one of its eyes was always weeping: it used to
