Complete weird tales of.., p.568
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 568
Grass-maddened, frantic, circling in the sun,
Wagging and nosing — see! beneath yon tree
One little mutt meets his affinity:
And, near, another madly wags his tail
Inquiringly; but his advances fail,
And, ‘yap-yap-yap!’ replies the shrewish tyke,
So off the other starts upon a hike,
Rushing at random, crazed with sun and air,
Circling and barking out his canine prayer:
”’Oh, Lord of dogs who made the Out-of-doors
And fashioned mutts to gambol on all fours,
Grant us a respite from the city’s stones!
Grant us a grassy place to bury bones! — A
grassy spot to roll on now and then,
Oh, Lord of dogs who also fashioned men,
Accept our thanks for this brief breath of air,
And grant, Oh, Lord, a humble mongrel’s prayer!’
* * * * *
The hoboe, sprawling, scratches in the sun;
While ‘round and ‘round the happy mongrels run.”
“Good Heavens,” breathed Neville, “that sort of thing may be modern and strong, but it’s too rank for me, Valerie. Shall we bolt?”
“I — I think we’d better,” she said miserably. “I don’t think I care for — for these interesting people very much.”
They rose and passed slowly along the walls of the room, which were hung with “five-minute sketches,” which probably took five seconds to conceive and five hours to execute — here an unclothed woman, chiefly remarkable for an extraordinary development of adipose tissue and house-maid’s knee; here a pathological gem that might have aptly illustrated a work on malformations; yonder a dashing dab of balderdash, and next it one of Rackin’s masterpieces, flanked by a gem of Stanley Pooks.
In the centre of the room, emerging from a chunk of marble, the back and neck and one ear of an unclothed lady protruded; and the sculptured achievement was labelled, “Beatrice Andante.”
“Oh, Lord,” whispered Neville, repressing a violent desire to laugh.
“Beatrice and Aunty! I didn’t know he had one.”
“Is it Dante’s Beatrice, Kelly? Where is Dante and his Aunty?”
“God knows. They made a mess of it anyway, those two — andante — which I suppose this mess in marble symbolises. Pity he didn’t have an aunty to tell him how.”
“Louis! How irreverent!” she whispered, eyes sparkling with laughter.
“Shall I try a five-minute fashionable impromptu, dear?” he asked:
”If Dante’d had an Aunty
Who ante-dated Dante
And scolded him
And tolded him
The way to win a winner,
It’s a cinch or I’m a sinner,
He’d have taken Trix to dinner,
He’d have given her the eye
Of the fish about to die,
And folded her,
And moulded her
Like dough within a pie —
sallow, pallid pie —
And cooked a scheme to marry her,
And hired a hack to carry her
To stately Harlem-by-the-Bronx,
Where now the lonely taxi honks—”
“Kelly!” she gasped.
They both were laughing so that they hastened their steps, fearful of offending, and barely contrived to compose their features when making their adieux to Mrs. Hind-Willet and the Countess d’Enver.
As they walked east along Fifty-ninth Street, breathing in the fresh, sparkling evening air, she said impulsively:
“And to think, Louis, that if I had been wicked enough to marry you I’d have driven you into that kind of society — or into something genetically similar!”
His face sobered:
“You could hold your own in any society.”
“Perhaps I could. But they wouldn’t let me.”
“Are you afraid to fight it out?”
“Yes, dear — at your expense. Otherwise—” She gazed smilingly into space, a slight colour in either cheek.
CHAPTER XI
VALERIE WEST WAS twenty-two years old in February. One year of life lay behind her; her future stretched away into sunlit infinity.
Neville attained his twenty-eighth year in March. Years still lay before him, a few lay behind him; but in a single month he had waded so swiftly forward through the sea of life that the shallows were already passed, the last shoal was deepening rapidly. Only immeasurable and menacing depths remained between him and the horizon — that pale, dead line dividing the noonday of to-day from the phantom suns of blank eternity.
It was that winter that he began the picture destined to fix definitely his position among the painters of his times — began it humbly, yet somehow aware of what it was to be; afraid, for all his courage, yet conscious of something inevitable impending. It was Destiny; and, instinctively, he arose to meet it.
He called the picture “A Bride.” A sapphire sky fading to turquoise, in which great clouds crowded high in argent splendour — a young girl naked of feet, her snowy body cinctured at the waist with straight and silvered folds, standing amid a riot of wild flowers, head slightly dropped back, white arms inert, pendant. And in her eyes’ deep velvet depths the mystery of the Annunciation.
All of humanity and of maturity — of adolescence and of divinity was in that face; in the exquisitely sensitive wisdom of the woman’s eyes, in the full sweet innocence of the childish mouth — in the smooth little hands so unsoiled, so pure — in the nun-like pallor and slender beauty of the throat.
[Illustration: “‘Where do you keep those pretty models, Louis?’ he demanded.”]
Whatever had been his inspiration — whether spiritual conviction, or the physical beauty of Valerie, neither he nor she considered very deeply. But that he was embodying and creating something of the existence of which neither he nor she had been aware a month ago, was awaking something within them that had never before stirred or given sign of life.
Since the last section of the mural decoration for the new court house had been shipped to its destination, he had busied himself on two canvases, a portrait of his sister in furs, and the portrait of Valerie.
Lily Collis came in the mornings twice a week to sit for her; and once or twice Stephanie Swift came with her; also Sandy Cameron, ruddy, bald, jovial, scoffing, and insatiably curious.
“Where do you keep all those pretty models, Louis?” he demanded, prying aside the tapestry with the crook of his walking stick, and peeping behind furniture and hangings and big piles of canvases. “Be a sport and introduce us; Stephanie wants to see a few as well as I do.”
Neville shrugged and went on painting, which exasperated Cameron.
“It’s a fraud,” he observed, in a loud, confidential aside to Stephanie; “this studio ought to be full of young men in velvet coats and bunchy ties, singing, ‘Oh la — la!’ and dextrously balancing on their baggy knees a series of assorted soubrettes. It’s a bluff, a hoax, a con game! Are you going to stand for it? I don’t see any absinthe either — or even any Vin ordinaire! Only a tea-pot — a tea-pot!” he repeated in unutterable scorn. “Why, there’s more of Bohemia in a Broad Street Trust Company than there is in this Pullman car studio!”
Mrs. Collis was laughing so that her brother had difficulty in going on with her portrait.
“Get out of here, Sandy,” he said— “or take Stephanie into the rest of the apartment, somewhere, and tell her your woes.”
Stephanie, who had been exploring, turning over piles of chassis and investigating canvases and charcoal studies stacked up here and there against the wainscot, pulled aside an easel which impeded her progress, and in so doing accidentally turned the canvas affixed to it toward the light.
“Hello!” exclaimed Cameron briskly, “who is this?”
Lily turned her small, aristocratic head, and Stephanie looked around.
“What a perfectly beautiful girl!” she exclaimed impulsively; “who is she, Louis?”
“A model,” he said calmly; but the careless and casual exposure of the canvas had angered him so suddenly that his own swift emotion astonished him.
Lily had risen from her seat, and now stood looking fixedly at the portrait of Valerie West, her furs trailing from one shoulder to the chair.
“My eye and Betty Martin!” cried Cameron, “I’ll take it all back, girls! It’s a real studio after all — and this is the real thing! Louis, do you think she’s seen the Aquarium? I’m disengaged after three o’clock—”
He began to kiss his hand rapidly in the direction of the portrait, and then, fondly embracing his own walking stick, he took a few jaunty steps in circles, singing “Waltz me around again, Willy.”
Lily Collis said: “If your model is as lovely as her portrait, Louis, she is a real beauty. Who is she?”
“A professional model.” He could scarcely contain his impatience with his sister, with Cameron’s fat humour, with Stephanie’s quiet and intent scrutiny — as though, somehow, he had suddenly exposed Valerie herself to the cool and cynically detached curiosity of a world which she knew must always remain unfriendly to her.
He was perfectly aware that his sister had guessed whose portrait confronted them; he supposed, too, that Stephanie probably suspected. And the knowledge irritated him more than the clownishness of Cameron.
“It is a splendid piece of painting,” said Stephanie cordially, and turned quietly to a portfolio of drawings at her elbow. She had let her fleeting glance rest on Neville for a second; had divined in a flash that he was enduring and not courting their examination of this picture; that, somehow, her accidental discovery of it had displeased him — was even paining him.
“Sandy,” she said cheerfully, “come here and help me look over these sketches.”
“Any peaches among ‘em?”
“Bushels.”
Cameron came with alacrity; Neville waited until Lily reluctantly resumed her seat; then he pushed back the easel, turned Valerie’s portrait to the wall, and quietly resumed his painting.
Art in any form was powerless to retain Cameron’s attention for very many consecutive minutes at a time; he grew restless, fussed about with portfolios for a little while longer, enlivening the tedium with characteristic observations.
“Well, I’ve got business down town,” he exclaimed, with great pretence of regret. “Come on, Stephanie; we’ll go to the Exchange and start something. Shall we? Oh, anything — from a panic to a bull-market! I don’t care; go as far as you like. You may wreck a few railroads if you want to. Only I’ve got to go…. Awfully good of you to let me — er — see all these — er — interesting and er — m-m-m — things, Louis. Glad I saw that dream of a peacherino, too. What is she on the side? An actorine? If she is I’ll take a box for the rest of the season including the road and one-night stands…. Good-bye, Mrs. Collis! Good-bye, Stephanie! Good-bye, Louis! — I’ll come and spend the day with you when you’re too busy to see me. Now, Stephanie, child! It’s the Stock Exchange or the Little Church around the Corner for you and me, if you say so!”
Stephanie had duties at a different sort of an Exchange; and she also took her leave, thanking Neville warmly for the pleasure she had had, and promising to lunch with Lily at the Continental Club.
When they had departed, Lily said:
“I suppose that is a portrait of your model, Valerie West.”
“Yes,” he replied shortly.
“Well, Louis, it is perfectly absurd of you to show so plainly that you consider our discovery of it a desecration.”
He turned red with surprise and irritation:
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean exactly what I say. You showed by your expression and your manner that our inspection of the picture and our questions and comments concerning it were unwelcome.”
“I’m sorry I showed it…. But they were unwelcome.”
“Will you tell me why?”
“I don’t think I know exactly why — unless the portrait was a personal and private affair concerning only myself—”
“Louis! Has it gone as far as that?”
“As far as what? What on earth are you trying to say, Lily?”
“I’m trying to say — as nicely and as gently as I can — that your behaviour — in regard to this girl is making us all perfectly wretched.”
“Who do you mean by ‘us all’?” he demanded sullenly.
“Father and mother and myself. You must have known perfectly well that father would write to me about what you told him at Spindrift House a month ago.”
“Did he?”
“Of course he did, Louis! Mother is simply worrying herself ill over you; father is incredulous — at least he pretends to be; but he has written me twice on the subject — and I think you might just as well be told what anxiety and unhappiness your fascination for this girl is causing us all.”
Mrs. Collis was leaning far forward in her chair, forgetful of her pose; Neville stood silent, head lowered, absently mixing tints upon his palette without regard to the work under way.
When he had almost covered his palette with useless squares of colour he picked up a palette-knife, scraped it clean, smeared the residue on a handful of rags, laid aside brushes and palette, and walked slowly to the window.
It was snowing again. He could hear the feathery whisper of the flakes falling on the glass roof above; and he remembered the night of the new year, and all that it had brought to him — all the wonder and happiness and perplexity of a future utterly unsuspected, undreamed of.
And now it was into that future he was staring with a fixed and blank gaze as his sister’s hand fell upon his shoulder and her cheek rested a moment in caress against his.
“Dearest child,” she said tremulously, “I did not mean to speak harshly or without sympathy. But, after all, shouldn’t a son consider his father and mother in a matter of this kind?”
“I have considered them — tried to.”
Mrs. Collis dropped into an arm-chair. After a few moments he also seated himself listlessly, and sat gazing at nothing out of absent eyes.
She said: “You know what father and mother are. Even I have something left of their old-fashioned conservatism clinging to me — and yet people consider me extremely liberal in my views. But all my liberality, all my modern education since I left the dear old absurdities of our narrow childhood and youth, can not reconcile me to what you threaten us with — with what you are threatened — you, your entire future life.”
“What seems to threaten you — and them — is my marriage to the woman with whom I’m in love. Does that shock you?”
“The circumstances shock me.”
“I could not control the circumstances.”
“You can control yourself, Louis.”
“Yes — I can do that. I can break her heart and mine.”
“Hearts don’t break, Louis. And is anybody to live life through exempt from suffering? If your unhappiness comes early in life to you it will pass the sooner, leaving the future tranquil for you, and you ready for it, unperplexed — made cleaner, purer, braver by a sorrow that came, as comes all sorrow — and that has gone its way, like all sorrows, leaving you the better and the worthier.”
“How is it to leave her?”
He spoke so naturally, so simply, that for the moment his sister did not recognise in him what had never before been there to recognise — the thought of another before himself. Afterward she remembered it.
She said quietly: “If Valerie West is a girl really sincere and meriting your respect, she will face this matter as you face it.”
“Yes — she would do that,” he said, thoughtfully.
“Then I think that the sooner you explain matters to her—”
He laughed: “I don’t have to explain anything to her, Lily.”
“What do you mean?”
“She knows how things stand. She is perfectly aware of your world’s attitude toward her. She has not the slightest intention of forcing herself on you, or of asking your indulgence or your charity.”
“You mean, then, that she desires to separate you from your family — from your friends—”
“No,” he said wearily, “she does not desire that, either.”
His sister’s troubled eyes rested on him in silence for a while; then:
“I know she is beautiful; I am sure she is good, Louis — good in — in her own way — worthy, in her own fashion. But, dear, is that all that you, a Neville, require of the woman who is to bear your name — bear your children?”
“She is all I require — and far more.”
“Dear, you are utterly blinded by your infatuation!”
“You do not know her.”
“Then let me!” exclaimed Mrs. Collis desperately. “Let me meet her,
Louis — let me talk with her—”
“No…. And I’ll tell you why, Lily; it’s because she does not care to meet you.”
“What!”
“I have told you the plain truth. She sees no reason for knowing you, or for knowing my parents, or any woman in a world that would never tolerate her, never submit to her entrance, never receive her as one of them! — a world that might shrug and smile and endure her as my wife — and embitter my life forever.”
As he spoke he was not aware that he merely repeated Valerie’s own words; he remained still unconscious that his decision was in fact merely her decision; that his entire attitude had become hers because her nature and her character were as yet the stronger.
But in his words his sister’s quick intelligence perceived a logic and a conclusion entirely feminine and utterly foreign to her brother’s habit of mind. And she realised with a thrill of fear that she had to do, not with her brother, but with a woman who was to be reckoned with.
“Do you — or does Miss West think it likely that I am a woman to wound, to affront another — no matter who she may be? Surely, Louis, you could have told her very little about me—”
“I never mention you to her.”
Lily caught her breath.
“Why?”
“Why should I?”
“That is unfair, Louis! She has the right to know about your own family — otherwise how can she understand the situation?”
