Complete weird tales of.., p.727
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 727
And all the while, though Brown was not aware of it, the memory of a face he had seen in the dining-room grew vaguely and faded, waxing and waning alternately, like a phantom illustration accompanying his thoughts.
As for the model he should choose to study, she ought to be thoroughly feminine, he thought; young, probably blonde, well formed, not very deeply experienced, and with every human capacity for good and bad alike.
He would approach her frankly, tell her what he required, offer her the pay of an artist’s model, three dollars a day; and, if she accepted, she could have her head and do what she liked. All that concerned him was to make his observations and record them.
In the blue starlight people passed and re-passed like ghosts along the shell-road — the white summer gowns of young girls were constantly appearing in the dusk, taking vague shape, vanishing. On the lagoon, a guitar sounded very far away. The suave scent of oleander grew sweeter.
Spectral groups passed in clinging lingerie; here and there a ghost lingered to lean over the coquina wall, her lost gaze faintly accented by some level star. One of these, a slender young thing, paused near to Brown, resting gracefully against the wall.
All around her the whip-poor-wills were calling breathlessly; the perfume of oleander grew sweeter.
As for the girl herself, she resembled the tenth muse. Brown had never attempted to visualise his mistress; it had been enough for him that she was Thalomene, daughter of Zeus, and divinely fair.
But now, as he recognised the face he had noticed that evening in the dining-room, somehow he thought of his muse for the first time, concretely. Perhaps because the girl by the coquina wall was young, slim, golden haired, and Greek.
His impulse, without bothering to reason, was to hop from the wall and go over to where she was standing.
She looked around calmly as he approached, gave him a little nod in recognition of his lifted hat.
“I’m John Brown, 4th,” he said. “I’m stopping at the Villa Hibiscus. Do you mind my saying so?”
“No, I don’t mind,” she said.
“There is a vast amount of nonsense in formality and convention,” said Brown. “If you don’t mind ignoring such details, I have something important to say to you.”
She looked at him unsmilingly. Probably it was the starlight in her eyes that made them glimmer as though with hidden laughter.
“I am,” said Brown, pleasantly, “an author.”
“Really,” she said.
“When I say that I am an author,” continued Brown seriously, “I mean in the higher sense.”
“Oh. What is the higher sense, Mr. Brown?” she asked.
“The higher sense does not necessarily imply authorship. I do not mean that I am a mere writer. I have written very little.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Very little,” repeated Brown combatively. “You will look in vain among the crowded counters piled high with contemporary fiction for anything from my pen.”
“Then perhaps I had better not look,” she said so simply that Brown was a trifle disappointed in her.
“Some day, however,” he said, “you may search, and, perhaps, not wholly in vain.”
“Oh, you are writing a book!”
“Yes,” he said, “I am, so to speak, at work on a novel.”
“Might one, with discretion, make further inquiry concerning your novel, Mr. Brown?”
“You may.”
“Thank you,” she said, apparently a trifle disconcerted by the privilege so promptly granted.
“You may,” repeated Brown. “Shall I explain why?”
“Please.”
“You will not mistake me, I am sure. Will you?”
She turned her pretty face toward him.
“I don’t think so,” she said after a moment. The starlight was meddling with her eyes again.
* * *
XIV
SO BROWN TOLD her about his theory; how he desired to employ a model, how he desired to study her; what were his ideas of the terms suitable.
He talked fluently, earnestly, and agreeably; and his pretty audience listened with so much apparent intelligence and good taste that her very attitude subtly exhilarated Brown, until he became slightly aware that he was expressing himself eloquently.
He had, it seemed, much to say concerning the profession and practice of good literature. It seemed, too, that he knew a great deal about it, both theoretically and practically. His esteem and reverence for it were unmistakable; his enthusiasm worthy of his courage.
He talked for a long while, partly about literature, partly about himself. And he was at intervals a trifle surprised that he had so much to say, and wondered at the valuable accumulations of which he was unburdening himself with such vast content.
The girl had turned her back to the lagoon and stood leaning against the coquina wall, facing him, her slender hands resting on the coping.
Never had he had such a listener. At the clubs and cafés other literary men always wanted to talk. But here under the great southern stars nobody interrupted the limpid flow of his long dammed eloquence. And he ended leisurely, as he had begun, yet auto-intoxicated, thrillingly conscious of the spell which he had laid upon himself, upon his young listener — conscious, too, of the spell that the soft air and the perfume and the stars had spun over a world grown suddenly and incredibly lovely and young.
She said in a low voice: “I need the money very much.... And I don’t mind your studying me.”
“Do you really mean it?” he exclaimed, enchanted.
“Yes. But there is one trouble.”
“What is it?” he asked apprehensively.
“I must have my mornings to myself.”
He said: “Under the terms I must be permitted to ask you any questions I choose. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then — why must you have your mornings to yourself?”
“I have work to do.”
“What work? What are you?”
She flushed a trifle, then, accepting the rules of the game, smiled at Brown.
“I am a school-teacher,” she said. “Ill health from overwork drove me South to convalesce. I am trying to support myself here by working in the mornings.”
“I am sorry,” he said gently. Then, aware of his concession to a very human weakness, he added with businesslike decision: “What is the nature of your morning’s work?”
“I — write,” she admitted.
“Stories?”
“Yes.”
“Fiction?”
“Anything, Mr. Brown. I send notes to fashion papers, concerning the costumes at the Hotel Verbena; I write for various household papers special articles which would not interest you at all. I write little stories for the women’s and children’s columns in various newspapers. You see what I do is not literature, and could not interest you.”
“If you are to act for me in the capacity of a model,” he said firmly, “I am absolutely bound to study every phase of you, every minutest detail.”
“Oh.”
“Not one minute of the day must pass without my observing you,” he said. “Unless you are broad-minded enough to comprehend me you may think my close and unremitting observation impertinent.”
“You don’t mean to be impertinent, I am sure,” she faltered, already surprised, apprehensive, and abashed by the prospect.
“Of course I don’t mean to be impertinent,” he said smilingly, “but all great observers pursue their studies unremittingly day and night — —”
“You couldn’t do that!” she exclaimed.
“No,” he admitted, troubled, “that would not be feasible. You require, of course, a certain amount of slumber.”
“Naturally,” she said.
“I ought,” he said thoughtfully, “to study that phase of you, also.”
“What phase, Mr. Brown?”
“When you are sleeping.”
“But that is impossible!”
“Convention,” he said disdainfully, “makes it so. A literary student is fettered.
“But it is perfectly possible for you to imagine what I look like when I’m asleep, Mr. Brown.”
“Imagination is to play no part in my literary work,” he said coldly. “What I set down are facts.”
“But is that art?”
“There is more art in facts than there are facts in art,” he said.
“I don’t quite know what you mean.”
He didn’t, either, when he came to analyse what he had said; and he turned very red and admitted it.
“I mean to be honest and truthful,” he said. “What I just said sounded clever, but meant nothing. I admit it. I mean to be perfectly pitiless with myself. Anything tainted with imagination; anything hinting of romance; any weak concession to prejudice, convention, good taste, I refuse to be guilty of. Realism is what I aim at; raw facts, however unpleasant!”
“I don’t believe you will find anything very unpleasant about me,” she said.
“No, I don’t think I shall. But I mean to detect every imperfection, every weakness, every secret vanity, every unworthy impulse. That is why I desire to study you so implacably. Are you willing to submit?”
She bit her lip and looked thoughtfully at the stars.
“You know,” she said, “that while it may be all very well for you to say ‘anything for art’s sake,’ I can’t say it. I can’t do it, either.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t. You know perfectly well that you can’t follow me about taking notes every minute of the twenty-four hours.”
He said very earnestly: “Sir John Lubbock sat up day and night, never taking his eyes off the little colony of ants which he had under observation in a glass box!”
“Do you propose to sit up day and night to keep me under observation?” she asked, flushed and astounded.
“Not at first. But as my studies advance, and you become accustomed to the perfectly respectful but coldly impersonal nature of my observations, your mind, I trust, will become so broadened that you will find nothing objectionable in what at first might scare you. An artist’s model, for example — —”
“But I am not an artist’s model!” she exclaimed, with a slight shiver.
“To be a proper model at all,” he said, “you must concede all for art, and remain sublimely unconscious of self. You do not matter. I do not matter. Only my work counts. And that must be honest, truthful, accurate, minute, exact — a perfect record of a woman’s mind and personality.”
For a few moments they both remained silent. And after a little the starlight began to play tricks with her eyes again, so that they seemed sparkling with hidden laughter. But her face was grave.
She said: “I really do need the money. I will do what I can.... And if in spite of my courage I ever shrink — our contract shall terminate at once.”
“And what shall I do then?” inquired Brown.
The starlight glimmered in her eyes. She said very gravely:
“In case the demands of your realism and your art are too much for my courage, Mr. Brown — you will have to find another model to study.”
“But another model might prove as conventional as you!”
“In that case,” she said, while her sensitive lower lip trembled, and the starlight in her eyes grew softly brilliant, “in that case, Mr. Brown, I am afraid that there would be only one course to pursue with that other model.”
“What course is that?” he asked, deeply interested.
“I’m afraid you’d have to marry her.”
“Good Lord!” he said. “I can’t marry every girl I mean to study!”
“Oh! Do you mean to study very many?”
“I have my entire life and career before me.”
“Yes. That is true. But — women are much alike. One model, thoroughly studied, might serve for them all — with a little imagination.”
“I have no use for imagination in fiction,” said Brown firmly. After a moment’s silence, he added: “Is it settled, then?”
“About our — contract?”
“Yes.”
She considered for a long while, then, looking up, she nodded.
“That’s fine!” exclaimed Brown, with enthusiasm.
They walked back to the Villa Hibiscus together, slowly, through the blue starlight. Brown asked her name, and she told him.
“No,” he said gaily, “your name is Thalomene, and you are the tenth muse. For truly I think I have never before been so thoroughly inspired by a talk with anyone.”
She laughed. He had done almost all the talking. And he continued it, very happily, as by common consent they seated themselves on the veranda.
* * *
XV
THE INHABITANTS OF the Villa Hibiscus retired. But Brown talked on, quite unconscious that the low-voiced questions and softly modulated replies were magic which incited him to a perfect ecstasy of self-revelation.
Perhaps he thought he was studying her — for the compact by mutual consent was already in force — and certainly his eyes were constantly upon her, taking, as no doubt he supposed, a cold and impersonal measure of her symmetry. Calmly, and with utter detachment, he measured her slender waist, her soft little hands; noting the fresh, sweet lips, the clear, prettily shaped eyes, the delicate throat, the perfect little Greek head with its thick, golden hair.
And all the while he held forth about literature and its true purpose; about what art really is; about his own art, his own literature, and his own self.
And the girl was really fascinated.
She had seen, at a distance, such men. When Brown had named himself to her, she had recognised the name with awe, as a fashionable and wealthy name known to Gotham.
Yet, had Brown known it, neither his eloquence nor his theories, nor his aims, were what fascinated her. But it was his boyish enthusiasm, his boyish intolerance, his immaturity, his happy certainty of the importance of what concerned himself.
He was so much a boy, so much a man, such a candid, unreasonable, eager, selfish, impulsive, portentous, and delightfully illogical mixture of boy and man that the combination fascinated every atom of womanhood in her — and at moments as the night wore on, she found herself listening perilously close to the very point of sympathy.
He appeared to pay no heed to the flight of time. The big stars frosted Heaven; the lagoon was silvered by them; night winds stirred the orange bloom; oleanders exhaled a bewitching perfume.
As he lay there in his rocking chair beside her, it seemed to him that he had known her intimately for years — so wonderfully does the charm of self-revelation act upon human reason. For she had said almost nothing about herself. Yet, it was becoming plainer to him every moment that never in all his life had he known any woman as he already knew this young girl.
“It is wonderful,” he said, lying back in his chair and looking up at the stars, “how subtle is sympathy, and how I recognise yours. I think I understand you perfectly already.”
“Do you?” she said.
“Yes, I feel sure I do. Somehow, I know that secretly and in your own heart you are in full tide of sympathy with me and with my life’s work.”
“I thought you had no imagination,” she said.
“I haven’t. Do you mean that I only imagine that you are in sympathy with me?”
“No,” she said. “I am.”
After a few moments she laughed deliciously. He never knew why. Nor was she ever perfectly sure why she had laughed, though they discussed the matter very gravely.
A new youth seemed to have invaded her, an exquisite sense of lightness, of power. Vaguely she was conscious of ability, of a wonderful and undreamed of capacity. Within her heart she seemed to feel the subtle stir of a new courage, a certainty of the future, of indefinable but splendid things.
The manuscript of the novel which she had sent North two weeks ago seemed to her a winged thing soaring to certain victory in the empyrean. Suddenly, by some magic, doubt, fear, distress, were allayed — and it was like surcease from a steady pain, with all the blessed and heavenly languor relaxing her mind and body.
And all the while Brown talked on.
Lying there in her chair she listened to him while the thoughts in her eased mind moved in delicate accompaniment.
Somehow she understood that never in her life had she been so happy — with this boy babbling beside her, and her own thoughts responding almost tenderly to his youth, his inconsistencies, to the arrogance typical of his sex. He was so wrong! — so far from the track, so utterly astray, so pitiably confident! Who but she should know, who had worked and studied and failed and searched, always writing, however — which is the only way in the world to learn how to write — or to learn that there is no use in writing.
Her hand lay along the flat arm of her rocking-chair; and once, when he had earnestly sustained a perfectly untenable theory concerning success in literature, unconsciously she laid her fresh, smooth hand on his arm in impulsive protest.
“No,” she said, “don’t think that way. You are quite wrong. That is the road to failure!”
It was her first expression of disagreement, and he looked at her amazed.
“I am afraid you think I don’t know anything about real literature and realism,” she said, “but I do know a little.”
“Every man must work out his salvation in his own way,” he insisted, still surprised at her dissent.
“Yes, but one should be equipped by long practice in the art before definitely choosing one’s final course.”
“I am practiced.”
“I don’t mean theoretically,” she murmured.
He laughed: “Oh, you mean mere writing,” he said, gaily confident. “That, according to my theory, is not necessary to real experience. Literature is something loftier.”
In her feminine heart every instinct of womanhood was aroused — pity for the youth of him, sympathy for his obtuseness, solicitude for his obstinacy, tenderness for the fascinating combination of boy and man, which might call itself by any name it chose — even “author” — and go blundering along without a helping hand amid shrugs and smiles to a goal marked “Failure.”
