Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “I feel exactly like painting,” he continued, busy with his brushes and colours. “I’m full of it to-day. It’s in me. It’s got to come out.... And you certainly are an interesting subject — with your big grey eyes and bobbed red hair — oh, quite interesting constructively, too — as well as from the colour point.”

  He finished setting his palette, gathered up a handful of brushes:

  “I won’t bother to draw you except with a brush — —”

  He looked across at her, remained looking, the pleasantly detached expression of his features gradually changing to curiosity, to the severity of increasing interest, to concentrated and silent absorption.

  “Dulcie,” he presently concluded, “you are so unusually interesting and paintable that you make me think very seriously.... And I’m hanged if I’m going to waste you by slapping a technically adequate sketch of you onto this nice new canvas ... which might give me pleasure while I’m doing it ... and might even tickle my vanity for a week ... and then be laid away to gather dust ... and be covered over next year and used for another sketch.... No.... No!... You’re worth more than that!”

  He began to pace the place to and fro, thinking very hard, glancing around at her from moment to moment, where she stood, obediently immovable on the blue meshed rug, clasping the Prophet to her breast.

  “Do you want to become my private model?” he demanded abruptly. “I mean seriously. Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean a real model, from whom I can ask anything?”

  “Oh, yes, please,” pleaded the girl, trembling a little.

  “Do you understand what it means?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sometimes you’ll be required to wear few clothes. Sometimes none. Did you know that?”

  “Yes. Mr. Westmore asked me once.”

  “You didn’t care to?”

  “Not for him.”

  “You don’t mind doing it for me?”

  “I’ll do anything you ask me,” she said, trying to smile and shivering with excitement.

  “All right. It’s a bargain. You’re my model, Dulcie. When do you graduate from school?”

  “In June.”

  “Two months! Well — all right. Until then it will be a half day through the week, and all day Saturdays and Sundays, if I require you. You’ll have a weekly salary — —” He smiled and mentioned the figure, and the girl blushed vividly. She had, it appeared, expected nothing.

  “Why, Dulcie!” he exclaimed, immensely amused. “You didn’t intend to come here and give me all your time for nothing, did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why on earth should you do such a thing for me?”

  She found no words to explain why.

  “Nonsense,” he continued; “you’re a business woman now. Your father will have to find somebody to cook for him and take the desk when he’s out at Grogan’s. Don’t worry; I’ll fix it with him.... By the way, Dulcie, supposing you sit down.”

  She found a chair and took the Prophet onto her lap.

  “Now, this will be very convenient for me,” he went on, inspecting her with increasing satisfaction. “If I ever have any orders — any sitters — you can have a vacation, of course. Otherwise, I’ll always have an interesting model at hand — I’ve got chests full of wonderful costumes — genuine ones — —” He fell silent, his eyes studying her. Already he was planning half a dozen pictures, for he was just beginning to perceive how adaptable the girl might be. And there was about her that indefinable something which, when a painter discovers it, interests him and arouses his intense artistic curiosity.

  “You know,” he said musingly, “you are something more than pretty, Dulcie.... I could put you in eighteenth century clothes and you’d look logical. Yes, and in seventeenth century clothes, too.... I could do some amusing things with you in oriental garments.... A young Herodiade ... Calypso ... Theodora.... She was a child, too, you know. There’s a portrait with bobbed hair — a young girl by Van Dyck.... You know you are quite stimulating to me, Dulcie. You excite a painter’s imagination. It’s rather odd,” he added naïvely, “that I never discovered you before; and I’ve known you over two years.”

  He had seated himself on the sofa while discoursing. Now he got up, touched a bell twice. The Finnish maid, Selinda, with her high cheek-bones, frosty blue eyes and colourless hair, appeared in cap and apron.

  “Selinda,” he said, “take Miss Dulcie into my room. In a long, leather Turkish box on the third shelf of my clothes closet is a silk and gold costume and a lot of jade jewelry. Please put her into it.”

  So Dulcie Soane went away with her cat in her arms, beside the neat and frosty-eyed Selinda; and Barres opened a portfolio of engravings, where were gathered the lovely aristocrats of Van Dyck and Rubens and Gainsborough and his contemporaries — a charmingly mixed company, separated by centuries and frontiers, yet all characterised by a common something — some inexplicable similarity which Barres recognised without defining.

  “It’s rather amusing,” he murmured, “but that kid, Dulcie, seems to remind me of these people — somehow or other.... One scarcely looks for qualities in the child of an Irish janitor.... I wonder who her mother was....”

  * * * * *

  When he looked up again Dulcie was standing there on the thick rug. On her naked feet were jade bracelets, jade-set rings on her little toes; a cascade of jade and gold falling over her breasts to the straight, narrow breadth of peacock hue which fell to her ankles. And on her childish head, clasping the ruddy bobbed hair, glittered the jade-incrusted diadem of a fairy princess of Cathay.

  [Illustration: “YOU LITTLE MIRACLE!”]

  The Prophet, gathered close to her breast, stared back at Barres with eyes that dimmed the splendid jade about him.

  “That settles it,” he said, the tint of excitement rising in his cheeks. “I have discovered a model and a wonder! And right here is where I paint my winter Academy — right here and right now!... And I call it ‘The Prophets.’ Climb up on that model stand and squat there cross-legged, and stare at me — straight at me — the way your cat stares!... There you are. That’s right! Don’t move. Stay put or I’ll come over and bow-string you! — you little miracle!”

  “Do — you mean me?” faltered Dulcie.

  “You bet, Sweetness! Do you know how beautiful you are? Well, never mind — —” He had begun already to draw with a wet brush, and now he relapsed into absorbed silence.

  The Prophet watched him steadily. The studio became intensely still.

  CHAPTER VIII

  DULCIE ANSWERS

  The studio door bell rang while Barres was at breakfast one morning late in June. Aristocrates leisurely answered the door, but shut it again immediately and walked out into the kitchenette without any explanation.

  Selinda removed the breakfast cover and fetched the newspaper. Later, Aristocrates, having washed his master’s brushes, brought them into the studio mincingly, upon a silver service-salver.

  “No letters?” inquired Barres, glancing up over the morning paper and laying aside his cigarette.

  “No letters, suh. No co’espondence in any shape, fo’m or manner, suh.”

  “Anybody to see me?” inquired Barres, always amused at Aristocrates’ flights of verbiage.

  “Nobody, suh, excusin’ a persistless ‘viduality inquihin’ fo’ you, suh.”

  “What persistless individuality was that?” asked Barres.

  “A ve’y or-nary human objec’, suh, pahshially afflicted with one bad eye.”

  “That one-eyed man? He’s been here several times, hasn’t he? Why does he come?”

  “Fo’ commercial puhposes, suh.”

  “Oh, a pedlar?”

  “He mentions a desiah, suh, to dispose, commercially, of vahious impo’ted materials requiahed by ahtists.”

  “Didn’t you show him the sign in the hall, ‘No pedlars allowed’?”

  “Yaas, suh.”

  “What did
he say?”

  “I would not demean myse’f to repeat what this human objec’ said, suh.”

  “And what did you do then?”

  “Mistuh Barres, suh, I totally igno’hed that man,” replied Aristocrates languidly.

  “Quite right. But you tell Soane to enforce the rule against pedlars. Every day there are two or three of them ringing at the studio, trying to sell colours, laces, or fake oriental rugs. It annoys me. Selinda can’t hear the bell and I have to leave my work and open the door. Tell that persistless one-eyed man to keep away. Tell Soane to bounce him next time he enters Dragon Court. Do you understand?”

  “Yaas, suh. But Soane, suh, he’s a might friendly Irish. He’s spo’tin’ ‘round Grogan’s nights, ‘longa this here one-eyed ‘viduality. Yaas, suh. I done seen ’em co-gatherin’ on vahious occasionalities.”

  “Oho!” commented Barres. “It’s graft, is it? This one-eyed pedlar meets Soane at Grogan’s and bribes him with a few drinks to let him peddle colours in Dragon Court! That’s the Irish of it, Aristocrates. I began to suspect something like that. All right. I’ll speak to Soane myself.... Leave the studio door open; it’s warm in here.”

  * * * * *

  The month of May was now turning somewhat sultry as it melted into June. Every pivot-pane in the big studio window had been swung wide open. The sun had already clothed every courtyard tree with dense and tender foliage; hyacinth and tulip were gone and Soane’s subscription geraniums blazed in their place like beds of coals heaped up on the grass plot of Dragon Court.

  But blue sky, sunshine of approaching summer, gentle winds and freshening rains brought only restlessness to New Yorkers that month of May.

  Like the first two years of the war, the present year seemed strange, unreal; its vernal breezes brought no balm, its blue skies no content. The early summer sunlight seemed almost uncanny in a world where, beyond the sea, millions of men at arms swayed ceaselessly under sun and moon alike, interlocked in one gigantic death grip! — a horrible and blood-drenched human chain of butchery stretching half around the earth.

  Into every Western human eye had come strange and subtle shadows which did not depart with moments of forgetful mirth, intervals of self-absorption, hours filled with familiar interests — the passions, hopes, perplexities of those years which were now no more.

  Those years of yesterdays! A vast and depthless cleft already divided them from to-day. They seemed as remote as dusty centuries — those days of an ordered and tranquil world — those days of little obvious faiths unshattered — even those days of little wars, of petty local strifes, of an almost universal calm and peace and trust in brotherhood and in the obligations of civilisation.

  Familiar yesterday had vanished, its creeds forgotten. It was already decades away, and fading like a legend in the ever-increasing glare of the red and present moment.

  And the month of May seemed strange, and its soft skies and sun seemed out of place in a world full of dying — a world heavy with death — a western world aloof from the raging hell beyond the seas, yet already tense under the distant threat of three continents in flames — and all aquiver before the deathly menace of that horde of blood-crazed demons still at large, still unsubdued, still ranging the ruins of the planet which they had so insanely set on fire.

  Entire nations were still burning beyond the ocean; other nations had sunk into cinders. Over the Eastern seas the furnace breath began to be felt along the out-thrust coast lines of the Western World. Inland, not yet; but every seaward city became now conscious of that first faint warning wave of heat from hell. Millions of ears strained to catch the first hushed whisper of the tumult. Silent in its suspense the Great Republic listened. Only the priesthood of the deaf and wooden gods continued voluble. But Israel had already begun to lift up its million eyes; and its ancient faith began to glow again; and its trust was becoming once more a living thing — the half-forgotten trust of Israel in that half-forgotten Lord, who, in the beginning, had been their helper and their shield.

  * * * * *

  Through the open studio door came Dulcie Soane. The Prophet followed at her slender heels, gently waving an urbane tail.

  * * * * *

  After his first smiling greeting — he always rose, advanced, and took her hand with that pleasant appearance of formality so adored by femininity, youthful or mature — he resumed his seat and continued to write his letters.

  These finished, he stamped them, rang for Aristocrates, picked up his palette and brushes, and pulled out the easel upon which was the canvas for the morning.

  Dulcie, still in the hands of Selinda, had not yet emerged. The Prophet sat upright on the carved table, motionless as a cat of ebony with green-jewelled eyes.

  “Well, old sport,” said Barres, stepping across the rug to caress the cat, “you and your pretty mistress begin to look very interesting on my canvas.”

  The Prophet received the blandishments with dignified gratitude. A discreet and feathery purring filled the room as Barres stroked the jet black, silky fur.

  “Fine cat, you are,” commented the young man, turning as Dulcie entered.

  She laid one hand on his extended arm and sprang lightly to the model stand. And the next moment she was seated — a slim, gemmed thing glimmering with imperial jade from top to toe.

  Barres laid the Prophet in her arms, stepped back while Dulcie arranged the docile cat, then retreated to his canvas.

  “All right, Sweetness?”

  “All right,” replied the child happily. And the morning séance was on.

  Barres was usually inclined to ramble along conversationally in his pleasant, detached way while at work, particularly if work went well.

  “Where were we yesterday, Dulcie? Oh, yes; we were talking about the Victorian era and its art; and we decided that it was not the barren desert that the ultra-moderns would have us believe. That’s what we decided, wasn’t it?”

  “You decided,” she said.

  “So did you, Dulcie. It was a unanimous decision. Because we both concluded that some among the Victorians were full of that sweet, clean sanity which alone endures. You recollect how our decision started?”

  “Yes. It was about my new pleasure in Tennyson, Browning, Morris, Arnold, and Swinburne.”

  “Exactly. Victorian poets, if sometimes a trifle stilted and self-conscious, wrote nobly; makers of Victorian prose displayed qualities of breadth, imagination and vision and a technical cultivation unsurpassed. The musical compositions of that epoch were melodious and sometimes truly inspired; never brutal, never vulgar, never degenerate. And the Victorian sculptors and painters — at first perhaps austerely pedantic — became, as they should be, recorders of the times and customs of thought, bringing the end of the reign of a great Queen to an admirable renaissance.”

  Dulcie’s grey eyes never left his. And if she did not quite understand every word, already the dawning familiarity with his vocabulary and a general comprehension of his modes of self-expansion permitted her to follow him.

  “A great Queen, a great reign, a great people,” he rambled on, painting away all the while. “And if in that era architecture declined toward its lowest level of stupidity, and if taste in furniture and in the plastic, decorative, and textile arts was steadily sinking toward its lowest ebb, and if Mrs. Grundy trudged the Empire, paramount, dull and smugly ferocious, while all snobbery saluted her and the humble grovelled before her dusty brogans, yet, Dulcie, it was a great era.

  “It was great because its faith had not been radically impaired; it was sane because Germany had not yet inoculated the human race with its porcine political vulgarities, its bestial degeneracy in art.... And if, perhaps, the sentimental in British art and literature predominated, thank God it had not yet been tainted with the stark ugliness, the swinish nakedness, the ferocious leer of things Teutonic!”

  He continued to paint in silence for a while. Presently the Prophet yawned on Dulcie’s knees, displaying a pink cavern.

  �
��Better rest,” he said, nodding smilingly at Dulcie. She released the cat, who stretched, arched his back, yawned again gravely, and stalked away over the velvety Eastern carpet.

  Dulcie got up lithely and followed him on little jade-encrusted, naked feet.

  A box of bon-bons lay on the sofa; she picked up Rossetti’s poems, turned the leaves with jewel-laden fingers, while with the other hand she groped for a bon-bon, her grey eyes riveted on the pages before her.

  During these intervals between poses it was the young man’s custom to make chalk sketches of the girl, recording swiftly any unstudied attitude, any unconscious phase of youthful grace that interested him.

  Dulcie, in the beginning, diffidently aware of this, had now become entirely accustomed to it, and no longer felt any responsibility to remain motionless while he was busy with red chalk or charcoal.

  When she had rested sufficiently, she laid aside her book, hunted up the Prophet, who lazily endured the gentle tyranny, and resumed her place on the model stand.

  And so they worked away all the morning, until luncheon was served in the studio by Aristocrates; and Barres in his blouse, and Dulcie in her peacock silk, her jade, and naked feet, gravely or lightly as their moods dictated, discussed an omelette and a pot of tea or chocolate, and the ways and manners and customs of a world which Dulcie now was discovering as a brand new and most enchanting planet.

  CHAPTER IX

  HER DAY

  June was ending in a very warm week. Work in the studio lagged, partly because Dulcie, preparing for graduation, could give Barres little time; partly because, during June, that young man had been away spending the week-ends with his parents and his sister at Foreland Farms, their home.

  From one of these visits he returned to the city just in time to read a frantic little note from Dulcie Soane:

  “DEAR MR. BARRES, please, please come to my graduation. I do want somebody there who knows me. And my father is not well. Is it too much to ask of you? I hadn’t the courage to speak to you about it when you were here, but I have ventured to write because it will be so lonely for me to graduate without having anybody there I know.