His studio was a confusion of silks, cut velvets, tapestries, embroideries, carpets of the East, lay figures glittering with replicas of priceless armour. Delicate fabrics trailed over chair and floor almost under foot; inlaid and gem-hilted weapons, illuminated missals, glass-cased papyri, gilded zones, filets, girdles, robes of fur, hoods, wallets, helmets, hats, lay piled up, everywhere in methodical disorder. And into and out of the studio passed male models of all statures, all ages, venerable, bearded men, men in their prime, men with the hard-hammered features and thick, sinewy necks of gladiators, men slender and pallid as dreaming scholars, youths that might have worn the gold-red elf-locks and the shoulder cloak of Venice, youth chiselled in a beauty as dark and fierce as David wore when the mailed giant went crashing earthward under the smooth round pebble from his sling.
Valerie’s turn in this splendid panoply was soon over. Even had she been so inclined there was, of course, no place for her to visit now, no place to sit and watch him among all these men. After hours, once or twice, she came in to tea — to gossip a little with the old-time ease, and barter with him epigram for jest, nonsense for inconsequence. Yet, subtly — after she had gone home — she felt the effort. Either he or she had imperceptibly changed; she knew not which was guilty; but she knew.
Besides, she herself was now in universal demand — and in the furor of her popularity she had been, from the beginning, forced to choose among a very few with whom she personally felt herself at ease, and to whom she had become confidently accustomed. Also, from the beginning, she had not found it necessary to sit undraped for many — a sculptor or two — Burleson and Gary Graves — Sam Ogilvy with his eternal mermaidens, Querida — nobody else. The other engagements had been for costume or, at most, for head and shoulders. Illustrators now clamoured for her in modish garments of the moment — in dinner gown, ball gown, afternoon, carriage, motor, walking, tennis, golf, riding costumes; poster artists made her pretty features popular; photographs of her in every style of indoor and outdoor garb decorated advertisements in the backs of monthly magazines. She was seen turning on the water in model bathtubs, offering the admiring reader a box of bonbons, demurely displaying a brand of hosiery, recommending cold cream, baked beans, railroad routes, tooth powder, and real-estate on Long Island.
Her beauty, the innocent loveliness of her features, her dainty modest charm, the enchanting outline and mould of her figure were beginning to make her celebrated. Already people about town — at the play, in the park, on avenue and street, in hotels and restaurants, were beginning to recognise her, follow her with approving or hostile eyes, turn their heads to watch her.
Theatrical agents wrote her, making attractive offers for an engagement where showgirls were the ornamental caryatids which upheld the three tottering unities along Broadway. She also had chances to wear very wonderful model gowns for next season at the Countess of Severn’s new dressmaking, drawing-rooms whither all snobdom crowded and shoved to get near the trade-marked coronet, and where bewildering young ladies strolled haughtily about all day long, displaying to agitated Gotham the most startling gowns in the extravagant metropolis.
She had other opportunities, too — such as meeting several varieties of fashionable men of various ages — gentlemen prominently identified with the arts and sciences — the art of killing time and the science of enjoying the assassination. And some of these assorted gentlemen maintained extensive stables and drove tandems, spikes, and fours; and some were celebrated for their yachts, or motors, or prima-donnas, or business acumen, or charitable extravagances…. Yes, truly, Valerie West was beginning to have many opportunities in this generously philanthropic world. And she was making a great deal of money — for her — but nothing like what she might very easily have made. And she knew it, young as she was. For it does not take very long to learn about such things when a girl is attempting to earn her living in this altruistic world.
“She’ll spread her wings and go one of these days,” observed Archie Allaire to Rita Tevis, who was posing as Psyche for one of his clever, thinly brushed, high-keyed studies very much after the manner and palette of Chaplin when they resembled neither Chartrain nor Zier, nor any other artist temporarily in vogue. For he was an adaptable man, facile, adroit, a master navigator in trimming sail to the fitful breeze of popular favour. And his work was in great demand.
“She’ll be decorating the tonneau of some big touring car with crested panels — and there’ll be a bunch of orchids in the crystal holder, and a Chow dog beside her, defying the traffic squad—”
“No, she won’t!” snapped Rita. “She’s as likely to do that as she is to dine with you again.”
Allaire, caught off his guard, scowled with unfeigned annoyance. Repeated essays to ingratiate himself with Valerie had finally resulted in a dinner at the Astor, and in her firm, polite, but uncompromising declination of all future invitations from him, either to sit for him or beside him under any circumstances and any conditions whatever.
“So that’s your opinion, is it, Rita?” he inquired, keeping his light-blue eyes and his thin wet brush busy on his canvas. “Well, sister, take it from muh, she thinks she’s the big noise in the Great White Alley; but they’re giving her the giggle behind her back.”
“That giggle may be directed at you, Archie,” observed Rita, scornfully; “you’re usually behind her back, you know, hoisting the C.Q.D.”
“Which is all right, too,” he said, apparently undisturbed; “but when she goes to Atlantic City with Querida—”
“That is an utter falsehood,” retorted Rita, calmly. “Whoever told you that she went there with Querida, lied.”
“You think so?”
“I know so! She went alone.”
“Then we’ll let it go at that,” said Allaire so unpleasantly that Rita took fiery offence.
“There is not a man living who has the right to look sideways at Valerie West! Everybody knows it — Neville, Querida, Sam, John Burleson — even you know it! If a man or two has touched her finger tips — her waist — her lips, perhaps — no man has obtained more than that of her — dared more than that! I have never heard that any man has ever even ventured to offend her ears, unless” — she added with malice, “that is the reason that she accepts no more invitations from you and your intimate friends.”
Allaire managed to smile and continue to paint. But later he found use for his palette knife — which was unusual in a painter as clever as he and whose pride was in his technical skill with materials used and applied premier coup.
With October came the opening of many theatres; a premature gaiety animated the hotels and restaurants; winter fabrics, hats, furs, gowns, appeared in shops; the glittering windows along Fifth Avenue reflected more limousines and fewer touring bodies passing. Later top hats reappeared on street and in lobby; and when the Opera reopened, Long Island, Jersey, and Westchester were already beginning to pour in cityward, followed later by Newport, Lenox, and Bar Harbour. The police put on their new winter uniforms; furs were displayed in carriages, automobiles, and theatres; the beauty of the florist’s windows became mellower, richer, and more splendid; the jewellery in the restaurants more gorgeous. Gotham was beginning to be its own again, jacked up by the Horse Show, the New Theatre, and the Opera; and by that energetic Advertising Trust Company with its branches, dependencies, and mergers, which is called Society, and which is a matter of eternal vigilance and desperate business instead of the relaxation of cultivated security in an accepted and acceptable order of things.
Among other minor incidents, almost local in character, the Academy and Society of American Artists opened its doors. And the exhibition averaged as well as it ever will, as badly as it ever had averaged. Allaire showed two portraits of fashionable women, done, this time, in the manner of Zorn, and quite as clever on the streaky surface. Sam Ogilvy proudly displayed another mermaid — Rita in the tub — and two babies from photographs and “chic” — very bad; but as usual it was very quickly marked sol
d.
Annan had a portrait of his sister Alice, poorly painted and even recognised by some of her more intimate friends. Clive Gail offered one of his marines — waves splashing and dashing all over the canvas so realistically that women instinctively stepped back and lifted their skirts, and men looked vaguely around for a waiter — at least Ogilvy said so. As for Neville, he had a single study to show — a full length — just the back and head and the soft contour of limbs melting into a luminously sombre background — a masterpiece in technical perfection, which was instantly purchased by a wise and Western millionaire, and which left the public staring but unmoved.
But it was José Querida who dominated the whole show, flooding everything with the splendour of his sunshine so that all else in the same room looked cold or tawdry or washed out. His canvas, with its superbly vigorous drawing, at once became the sensation of the exhibition. Sunday supplements reproduced it with a photograph of Querida looking amiably at a statuette of Venus which he held in his long, tapering fingers; magazines tried to print it in two colours, in three, in dozens, and made fireworks of it to Querida’s inwardly suppressed agony, and their own satisfaction. Serious young men wrote “appreciations” about it; serious young women published instructive discourses concerning it in the daily papers. Somebody in the valuable columns of the Tribune inquired whether Querida’s painting was meant to be symbolical; somebody in the Nation said yes; somebody in the Sun said no; somebody in something or other explained its psychological subtleties; somebody in something else screamed, “bosh!”
Meanwhile the discussion was a god-send to fashionable diners-out and to those cultivated leaders of society who prefer to talk through the Opera and philharmonic.
In what the educated daily press calls the “world of art” and the “realm of literature,” Querida’s picture was discussed intelligently and otherwise, but it was discussed — from the squalid table d’hôte, where unmanicured genius punctures the air with patois and punches holes in it with frenzied thumbs, to quiet, cultivated homes, where community of taste restricts the calling lists — from the noisy studio, where pianos and girls make evenings lively, to the austere bare boards or the velvet elegance of studios where authority and preciousness, and occasionally attainment, reside, and sometimes do not.
Cognatis maculis similis fera.
Neville was busy, but not too busy to go about in the evening among his own kind, and among other kinds, too. This unexpected resurgance within him of the social instinct, he made no attempt to account for to others or to himself. He had developed a mental and physical restlessness, which was not yet entirely nervous, but it had become sufficiently itching to stir him out of fatigue when the long day’s work had ended — enough to drive him out of the studio — at first merely to roam about at hazard through the livelier sections of the city. But to the lonely, there is no lonelier place than a lively one; and the false brilliancy and gaiety drove him back upon himself and into his lair again, where for a while he remained meditating amid the sombre menace of looming canvases and the heavy futility of dull-gold hangings, and the mischievous malice of starlight splintering into a million incandescent rainbow rays through the sheet of glass above.
Out of this, after some days, he emerged, set in motion by his increasing restlessness. And it shoved him in the direction of his kind once more — and in the direction of other kinds.
He dined at his sister’s in Seventy-ninth Street near Madison Avenue; he dined with the Grandcourts on Fifth Avenue; he decorated a few dances, embellished an opera box now and then, went to Lakewood and Tuxedo for week ends, rode for a few days at Hot Springs, frequented his clubs, frequented Stephanie, frequented Maxim’s.
And all the while it seemed to him as though he were temporarily enduring something which required patience, which could not last forever, which must one day end in a great change, a complete transformation for himself, of himself, of the world around him and of his aim and hope and purpose in living. At moments, too, an odd sensation of expectancy came over him — the sense of waiting, of suppressed excitement. And he could not account for it.
Perhaps it concerned the finishing of his great mural frieze for the Court House — that is, the completion of the section begun in September. For, when it was done, and cleared out of his studio, and had been set in its place, framed by the rose and gold of marble and ormolu, a heavy reaction of relief set in, leaving him listless and indifferent at first, then idle, disinclined to begin the companion frieze; then again restless, discontented, tired, and lonely in that strange solitude which seemed to be growing wider and wider around him in rings of silence. Men praised and lauded the great frieze; and he strove to respond, to believe them — to believe in the work and in himself — strove to shake off the terrible discouragement invading him, lurking always near to reach out and touch him, slinking at his heels from street to street, from room to room, skulking always just beyond the shadows that his reading lamp cast.
Without envy, yet with profound sadness, he stood and faced the splendour of Querida’s canvas. He had gone to Querida and taken him by both of his thin, olive-skinned hands, and had praised the work with a heart clean of anything unworthy. And Querida had laughed and displayed his handsome teeth, and returned compliment for compliment…. And Neville had seen, on his dresser, a photograph of Valerie, signed in her long, girlish, angular hand— “To José from Valerie”; and the date was of mid-winter.
Christmas came; he sent Valerie some furs and a note, and, before he went to Aiken to spend the holidays with his father and mother, he tried to get her on the telephone — tried half a dozen times. But she was either busy with business or with pleasure somewhere or other — and he never found her at home; so he went South without hearing from her.
[Illustration: “Querida had laughed … and returned compliment for compliment.”]
After he arrived, it is true, he received from her a cigarette case and a very gay and frank Christmas greeting — happy and untroubled apparently, brimming with gossip, inconsequences, and nonsense. In it she thanked him for his letter and his gift, hoped he was happy with his parents, and expressed an almost conventional desire to see him on his return.
Then his parents came back to New York with him. Two days before New Year’s Day they went to Spindrift House instead of sailing for Egypt, where for some years now they had been accustomed to spend the winters shivering at Shepherd’s. And he and his sister and brother-in-law and Stephanie dined together that evening. But the plans they made to include him for a New Year’s Eve home party remained uncertain as far as he was concerned. He was vague — could not promise — he himself knew not why. And they ceased to press him.
“You’re growing thin and white,” said Lily. “I believe you’re getting painter’s colic.”
“House painters acquire that,” he said, smiling. “I’m not a member of their union yet.”
“Well, you must use as much white lead as they do on those enormous canvases of yours. Why don’t you start on a trip around the world, Louis?”
He laughed.
Later, after he had taken his leave, the suggestion reoccurred to him. He took enough trouble to think about it the next morning; sent out his servant to amass a number of folders advertising world girdling tours of various attractions, read them while lunching, and sat and pondered. Why not? It might help. Because he certainly began to need help. He had gone quite stale. Querida was right; he ought to lie fallow. No ground could yield eternally without rest. Querida was clever enough to know that; and he had been stupid enough to ignore it — even disbelieve it, contemptuous of precept and proverb and wise saw, buoyed above apprehension by consciousness and faith in his own inexhaustible energy.
And, after all, something really seemed to have happened to him. He almost admitted it now for the first time — considered the proposition silently, wearily, without any definite idea of analysing it, without even the desire to solve it.
Somehow, at some time, he had lost
pleasure in his powers, faith in his capacity, desire for the future. What had satisfied him yesterday, to-day became contemptible. Farther than ever, farther than the farthest, stars receded the phantoms of the great Masters. What they believed and endured and wrought and achieved seemed now not only hopelessly beyond any comprehension or attainment of his, but even beyond hope of humble discipleship.
And always, horribly, like an obsession, was creeping over him in these days the conviction of some similarity between his work and the thin, clear, clever brush-work of Allaire — with all its mastery of ways and means, all its triumph over technical difficulties, all its tricks and subtle appeals, and its falsity, and its glamour.
Reflection, retrospection sickened him. It was snowing and growing late when he wrote to a steamship agent making inquiries and asking for plans of staterooms.
Then he had tea, alone there in the early winter dusk, with the firelight playing over Gladys who sat in the full heat of the blaze, licking her only kitten, embracing its neck with one maternal paw.
He dressed about six, intending to dine somewhere alone that New Year’s Eve. The somewhere, as usual, ended at the Syrinx Club — or rather at the snowy portal — for there he collided with Samuel Strathclyde Ogilvy and Henry Knickerbocker Annan, and was seized and compelled to perform with them on the snowy sidewalk, a kind of round dance resembling a pow-wow, which utterly scandalised the perfectly respectable club porter, and immensely interested the chauffeurs of a row of taxicabs in waiting.
“Come! Let up! This isn’t the most dignified performance I ever assisted at,” he protested.
“Who said it was dignified?” demanded Ogilvy. “We’re not hunting for dignity. Harry and I came here in a hurry to find an undignified substitute for John Burleson. You’re the man!”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 529