meticulously. There was no warmth in the care with which she braided her
thin hair and knotted it into a Psyche back of her head. What was her
hair to her? There was no warmth in her choice among her waists of the
one she would wear that morning. She smoothed the loose ends under the
belt and tidied the little linen collar. Her hands were fast at their
work. They did not fail: also they did not linger.
Very neatly, Cornelia spread a napkin for a cloth on the table and
placed down the tray and proceeded to eat her breakfast. She took a
slice of bread and butter and an egg, and two strong cups of black
coffee. She loved coffee. It was her one real vice. Lately she had
needed it more than ever. Night gave her no rest: and coffee weakened
the pall of morning.
She cleared away her dishes.
There was her work before her and it was time to be working.
She looked at the little huddle of clay on the level of her head. She
unwound the clinging cloth. She knew that she was bored. It was nothing
but a huddle of dull clay. In it was lost somewhere the head of a boy.
It was her task to find him, to bring him out, so she could go on when
her model came. She found she did not care. The clay and the boy’s head
were remote. With all her effort, she could not bring them nearer. She
looked at her work as if it had been the work of another person, very
dim and weak, and very far away. She saw that it was hopelessly bad. She
saw that Tom was right. He did not take her Art with any seriousness.
That did not matter. Plenty of people did. She had won prizes. She was
on Committees of Exhibition. Last year the Metropolitan Museum had
bought her Dawn. But all of this was wrong. She did not care. She knew!
She knew her Art was worthless. Because it bored her. It was a task.
Ever since she had had time to give herself to it, it had not deceived
her. Ever since she was an artist she had known she was no artist at
all. David never spoke of her work. It meant nothing to him. He said he
did not understand such matters. Nonsense! She remembered his childish
outburst of joy at a Chinese vase they had seen one day in a shop-window
on Fifth Avenue. What did he know of Chinese vases? Yet he had loved it.
Had he once captured such a moment from her casts, it had perhaps been
different.
How strange it all was, what an ironic time of it the world was having
with its men and women! She had yearned to escape in order to be an
artist. She had left home, risked life. She and Tom slaved, at one time
nearly starved, while she pursued her dream. Here she was: Cornelia
Rennard, Sculptress. And ashes in her hand. But what was more than
strange: she did not seem to care. It all seemed natural enough. Like a
tale whose end she knew and whose telling bored her.
Tom was right....
She found she had unconsciously redraped the wet rag around her model.
She thought of David. The resolve: the resolve! How dimly she reacted to
life this morning! Not alone this morning. She had never thought even of
looking out of the window. Look! it was snowing. She leaned against the
window-seat. The snow came swirling, merry, through blue air. There was
little wind. The street was muffled and passive: strangely quiet street
under the merry snow.
David might have come. Did he hate her? she wondered. She was
importunate, cloying perhaps. Young blood hates such a woman. Almost she
blamed herself for the fact that her nights were streaked with yearning
for him.
“But he does not know. He does not know. I have not bothered him
_really_....” She pleaded with him. Let her have at least her nights of
broken dreams, her days broken with worry.
She had definitely given up her modeling for the day, she had a sense of
relief.
“Giulio does not seem to be coming at any rate,” she excused herself.
She went on: “If he comes, I’ll pay him and send him off.”
Why should she worry about work? She had plenty of money. She had enough
left over from last year to take her through two seasons. She spent so
little.
Her relief widened and deepened. It was as if she had found for herself
a holiday. Let her be alone with her reveries and her anguish. Let her
vegetate, if she would, or die. Let her art die, at any rate. Who
cared?
As she went musing about, she hummed a broken aria, from Tristan. Very
broken since all now that came from her was broken, and since, besides,
she had no ear for music. But often she went to the Opera--away
upstairs--and listened to the cloudy and clotted passions of Richard
Wagner.
Almost unknown to herself she had taken a pile of paper and all the
paraphernalia of water-color from a drawer; set it out on the table.
There it was! She looked at it and smiled.
“Oh, you lazy one,” she said half aloud, “what an escape from your real
work! What nonsense!” Under her hand was a set of sheets she had already
daubed. A new foible, this: which she never more than half allowed.
There was much of her father in Cornelia. Her sculpture she admitted: it
was work. These blind, wandering daubs were play--were some sort of
dissipation--were nonsense and wicked.
This morning Cornelia was indulging herself. Giulio had not come. Let
her be wicked. It was no worse to be wicked than to be a wearied artist.
So she spread out her daubs of water-color and examined them. And they
were unlike the model of clay in this, that they seemed near her; she
let her eyes and her mind wander among them and they were very near
herself.
She grasped a brush and wet it and sat down. Something dim came over her
eyes. It was as if they turned inward. Cornelia relaxed. Her breathing
came more like the natural ebb and flow of a tide within her. Her head
and neck fell easily forward. She had the sentiment of having returned,
sweetly and without effort, to her night. It was like the coming to a
loved trysting place. She was once more with her sleep, streaked in
shreddings of dream. Her brush made strokes on paper....
Suddenly, whatever this was she painted was done. For she stopped. She
left her night-world. She held out the sheet at arm’s length and tried
to look critically at what she had committed: she tried to laugh. It was
a very mad and incomprehensible design. It was nonsense. But she could
not laugh at it. The colors _were_ somehow lovely. Of course, color was
not everything.
All the little paintings were different, yet each of them in some
mysterious way was a record of her broken nights. Each of them had come
to being while her mind returned to some dim hinterland, and found her
nights, and brought them back. Swathes of color passionate against a
brooding background; spirals of flame in space: parabolas of red and
gold and green dragging a fever across darkling worlds of black and
gray. In all of them was a phantasmagoria of design Cornelia had no name
for: but could not wholly reject. They were herself. The diary of her
passionate anguish. No one would ever see them. Whom did they hurt? She
had joyous rest in looking at them, in letting herself out among their
distances. She promised herself that she would always laugh at them:
when she felt a little stronger and her fight was won, she promised
herself to leave them and return to her Art.
A thought came sudden from the outer world.
“Why,” she cried, standing up, “it’s Thanksgiving Day! No wonder Giulio
did not come.”
She put away the sheets of her confessional.
“I must have a walk. Goodness! I nearly forgot. People are coming to
tea!”
She had marketing to do. The stores would still be open in the morning.
She trudged through the bright pink snow: she said to herself:
“I wonder if I am mad making these mad pictures. They _are_ mad. They
have no subjects or anything. Well, I don’t care. Supposing I _am_
mad?...”
The pink snow danced lazy through blue air. The City was a great beast
snoring with snout on the ground. She pondered.
“It sometimes seems to me things are not really half so clear and
concise as we artists make them. I wonder if we would be more concise
painting these misty moods....” She saw how fluent and filmy a thing was
the snowing City. People passing were strokes of smudge across the snow.
“They aren’t really like people at all--noses and limbs and thoughts!”
But she was at her shop. She was buying chocolate éclairs: very clear
things, these, with particular prices. Her inspiration melted in the
sticky air. Cornelia had no fingers to grasp these luminous moments
fleeting across her.
As she came back a little cavalcade of ragamuffins pranced and begged
pennies. She gave each of them five cents. They danced and cavorted in
the snow. Their faces were running with grease and paint. The boys wore
women’s skirts tucked high under their armpits, feathers in vast broken
derbies abandoned by their fathers. The girls were trim in trousers:
their little buttocks pointed rakishly back under their flowing curls.
“How like flowers they are, in the snow,” said Cornelia to herself. “And
the great monster City with his snout snoring away. They’ll tickle him
with their antics: he’ll shake himself and snarl and swallow them up.”
The mood was thinning. Once more she was thinking of David and of the
tea that was to be a torture. What did she want of friends? What did she
have to give them? How, with no work and no joy in her heart, was she
ever to pass through the countless hours of life?...
A doctor would have said to Cornelia: “The trouble with you is, you do
not eat enough.”
Thus this day, when Cornelia was once more in her room, she was too
tired to go out again to dine, too bored to cook a dinner for herself.
“I’ll eat at tea,” she explained to her sense of unfitness. She brewed
herself a cup of coffee. That was easy.
She recalled her last Thanksgiving. She and Tom went together to the New
Jersey heights above the Hudson River; they dined at a mushroom farm.
What a jolly jaunt--only a year ago! The last, she thought, of her
excursions with Tom. A silent rule they had had always to spend their
holidays together--a rule unbroken for twelve years, broken now by the
war between them that broke all things.
She sat sipping her coffee, and wandered over the frozen hills where
their feet had struck. They pitied David laughingly, that day. As so
often on set occasions, he had been gobbled up by the Deanes. The
conventional time, they found, for not counting on David was the
conventional feast-day. She remembered what Tom said: “These families
have so little imagination! They cannot even invite a chap to dinner
except on a public holiday.”
Cornelia thought now how good it would be to be embraced in some
convention: however stiff it was it would be warm to be shut in tight.
She had been alone the Christmas of last year. She was not used to it.
Christmas was coming again.
She made herself a little mound of cushions on her couch and settled
with a book. It was a silly novel some one had given her. There, uncut,
was the package of books in the corner, which Tom had sent. Something
kept her away from them. She was not sure what shafts Tom might thus
unsheath and aim at her. She was not suspicious but indifferent. Her
mind was torpid. They must be heavy books. She would have to work to
understand them.
The novel, on the contrary, did not make demands enough. It was the
story of a Belle of Philadelphia, loyal to the Revolution during the
British Occupation. It was very plain that the lovely American was to
win valuable secrets of war from the vicious British officer who loved
her: would give them after hazardous adventure to Washington’s
aide-de-camp who was her true love and so help win the war. Sure enough,
there she was galloping the dangerous country to Valley Forge.
Cornelia’s mind wandered as she idly turned pages. She put down the
book. Her mind was a weary woman stumbling with dead feet across the
snow. She ached. The snow had stopped. A gentle pall came in from the
muffled world. The elevated trains were a memory, life stirred like a
larval city hidden from her eyes. She lay in a blue night, and the name
of David fell across her night in livid snow. The name of David and the
eyes of David and the thoughts of him, cutting her face and melting.
Cornelia was on horseback, although she could not see her horse; she was
hurrying to Valley Forge with an important secret. Her horse stumbled:
he was forever turning, forever turning back. He was trying to carry her
into the snare of the British officer. The officer was a short, slim
man, he was Tom. Cornelia was lifted up. Her eyes seemed to peer through
a viscous film and part it. She lay there prostrate, now, and conscious,
neither asleep nor awake; she felt the weariness within her body and the
great strain of how she lay, like a wrack upon her. She was tired,
tired! Could she not sleep? Could she not have rest? Let her but stretch
out and relax and fall away, deeper down where the hectic grays were
black.
She remained as she was. She felt that she was tied in a hard knot. She
was caught in the vice of her nerves. She could not swing herself free:
she could not hold herself fast. She lay there and suffered. Though she
was half asleep, she could feel her energy fall away in her strain, and
her thoughts bound and strike her like iron balls.
When it was time, she got up and prepared the tea things.
The day was low and away. Where had it gone? It seemed to have left her
behind. She had the haunted instinct of having been abandoned. Looking
back on the day, it seemed a vivid thing, swift and heavy with laughter
and paint-smudged children: it had rolled over her body and left her
behind. She was bruised by its passage. Day of Thanksgiving!... And here
about her now, where the Day had been, a void gray like her sleep:
within it just such scant scatter of life--herself.
Each little thing that stirred--a teacup against a saucer, the tick of
the clock--had a thousand jagged echoes.
The bell rang. It jangled against her nerves.
Cornelia gripped herself. She had a sense of her head careening.
The door opened. She went forward and smiled.
A stately woman with a gentle face came in, behind her a little dapper
man. She kissed Cornelia. Seeing Cornelia she stood on the threshold of
some passionate understanding. But her husband broke the warming
silence. He ran about the room and chattered. He was very gay. Cornelia
smiled wanly at him.
It was Sylvain Purze, maker of fashionable portraits: and his wife,
maker of Sylvain Purze.
They sat, the two women sheathed themselves up, so the little man should
not be hurt with any truths. Mrs. Purze was a woman bathed in a sweet
melancholy. Her fine features were a little vague under the dawn of her
gold hair.
“What a jolly place you have here, you know, Miss Rennard!” exclaimed
Mr. Purze. “How I envy you your simplicity. Ah, me!” He sighed, thinking
with satisfaction of his luxurious studio on Gramercy Park. “When you’re
married----” he intimated treacherously. But his wife did not mind. She
knew Cornelia’s opinion of her husband’s talk. She knew her own. The
trouble was precisely that her husband had never given her the excuse to
leave him.
Cornelia’s mind was a twilight swept clear of the mists of the sun. Each
nerve stood out alone, and took its toll of its surroundings. The bell
jangled again.
A young girl came in, diffident, spring-like; before a tall dark man
with head thrust stiffly back, so that he seemed to be leaning in the
direction contrary to his coming.
Cornelia greeted her with real pleasure. Cornelia’s sudden brightness
was like a pitiful flower budding above strewn ashes.
“Helen! I am so glad you thought of coming. And this is Doctor
Westerling?” She shook his hand silently. “I have heard of you.” She was
not interested really. She introduced them.
“Miss Helen Daindrie....”
She had expected the Purzes only. No one else would come. The little
party caught from the hostess the sense of its completion. It threw out
its arms and wove a comfortable net about itself. It settled down.
The talk ran easy and subdued: a sluggish circulation within this
temporary creature. Mr. Purze was suave with words. His wife had a poise
that cradled all the room and gave the creature rest. Dr. Westerling was
taciturn: but he was intense in listening. He was a pleasure to Mr.
Purze. And Helen Daindrie sat there sweetly, neither talkative nor
silent. Cornelia had no need to exert herself. The party would be an
easy one. It would live and come to a good end. She found herself
looking more and more at Miss Daindrie, drawn to her by a fascination
bitter-sweet. She wondered why. She asked her senses. They were clear in
their reports like bells.
She was a little woman--half girl, not more than twenty-two. She was
rather plump, but gently so and with grace. It was a quality, invisible
like perfume, that came from her. Under her prettiness a sturdy note.
She must be capable. Her eyes were a light blue: Cornelia saw them in
the candles she had lighted: but her mouth was straight, long, even, and
her chin had strength in its womanly rondure. Looking at her, Cornelia
felt the great good health of this woman.
Her career told something, but what Cornelia’s sharpened nerves now gave
her told more in an instant. Miss Daindrie was a college graduate, and a
student in medicine. She was going to employ her science not in practice
but in expert work among the children and mothers of the City. This
sounded serious almost to forbidding. But the girl, sitting quiet and
drinking her tea with a sober head, as if this were a meal, not a
convention, was different from her work. She was at once lovely with
youth and indestructibly firm with a quaint mother-sense. Her
stalwartness was about her girlhood, protecting it, as her strong full
body was about the dance of her eyes.
Cornelia mused away.... She need not worry about her guests. Mr. Purze
had aroused Doctor Westerling to talk. He was saying serious things
about the advance of Science in America, as compared to Europe. He had
spent four years in Paris, Vienna, Berlin. It was plain he knew.
Whatever he said he knew. He had taken up Mr. Purze’s challenge, “We are
children in art,” as one would take up a problem to be answered.
“In America,” he said, “our art is Science.”
Cornelia watched him detachedly. He was talking really to impress Miss
Daindrie. There was a caress in his voice as he said Science. What did
it mean to him, that had a body and soul? He loved Miss Daindrie.
Did she love him? No. Would she? Cornelia leaned back in her chair.
For the first time, she noticed the tilt of Miss Daindrie’s head on her
lovely neck: the whimsical curve of the cheekbone and the clear, almost
protrusive outline of the jaw. There must be something Irish about her.
Her father--Judson Daindrie--he was Scotch.... Doubtless her mother.
Also there was something romantic. A pinch of romance, like a pinch of
explosive powder. She was steady: her thrust in life was sure and long.
This was one reason why the assertive and uncertain Doctor loved her.
But in order to set her off, that pinch of powder. Did the Jewish
scholar, exact and intransigent, hold the needed spark? Cornelia thought
not. How those blue eyes could gleam! Could they gleam for him? Of
course, she pondered, she might marry him, unlighted. He must have a
pounding, indefatigable way. Look at him driving his point into Mr.
Purze who was really not so very concerned. Yes: she might marry him. If
no one else touched off the powder. If she remained unaware of it. She
might go unmellowed through life, unfertilized. Such things happened. It
would be a pity....
The talk was animated now. The party bloomed to its fullest life. Miss
Daindrie was curiously self-conscious about Dr. Westerling’s oration.
She was teasing him. How steady she was, for one with a perfume so
diffident and sweet! He did not like her jests. His mind sensed only
dully what they meant: sharply what she meant behind them. For some
reason, a rebuke. He bore it. He was used to battle, and to resistance.
He was used to rebukes. But he was uneasy. The cruder lists of argument
and quarrel were more to his measure. It seemed to him that this Mr.
Purze, if he was an artist, needed a lot of informing.
“We _have_ here a tendency,” he found the need of explaining his debate
to Miss Daindrie, “----to misjudge America by overlooking what America
excels in, and wishing in our hearts she were merely another Europe.”
Mr. Purze was suddenly agreeing. He saved the Doctor from another
teasing. He was nothing, if not a soother of self-important people. He
was marvelously informed in the prerequisites of his art of
portraiture. He knew who Westerling was. Not rich, but already an
emerging figure at the great Magnum Institute. Great men sat for
portraits.
Westerling discoursed on the need of a new critical scientific standard
in Art. Did not Mr. Purze agree? Oh, indeed. It was nonsense, was it
not? to say that values in beauty could not be determined like any other
element in a material solution. Painting was a chemical solution. Music
and poetry were physical solutions: sound waves illustrative of certain
documentary matter which of course was open to intellectual
appraisal.... He was very interested in that.
“I was invited sometime ago to a private recital of Lahlberg. You
know--that Russian pianist. He played many of his own compositions. I
asked him to state to me in scientific terms what his music meant: why,
for instance, he used seconds and sevenths where Chopin employed thirds
and fifths. He was quite dumb, I assure you. I needed no further proof
of what I had already expected----” the Doctor had meant to say
“suspected”--: “the man is a clever charlatan.”
“But he plays so beautifully,” pleaded Mrs. Purze.
“We cannot trust uneducated senses any more than we can uneducated
people.”
“No,” decided Cornelia in herself, “this is not what she wants.”
She had been watching Helen Daindrie with a growing singleness of
interest. She saw how the girl’s body faintly stiffened when the Doctor
spoke. She was aware of the implied direction, of the source of the heat
of his words: she was attentive, she was respectful and impressed. And
yet, Cornelia felt a specific turning away in the young girl’s mind, a
wavering of interest, almost a recoil and a revolt from this
intellectual tribute. He did not really hold her. When she wandered,
Cornelia saw her relax. Now, during these last long words, suddenly
Miss Daindrie turned and met Cornelia’s eyes. In them a twinkle of
disdain, a gladness to be looking away.
“Have you heard Lahlberg?” Cornelia asked her. Dr. Westerling still
talked.
“Yes.”
“Do you care for him?”
“I think he is very wonderful,” said Miss Daindrie. In her remark there
was specific rebellion against what Dr. Westerling was saying. Cornelia
noticed. It proved to her that there was danger after all of the
Doctor’s winning....
Suddenly, she said to herself: “_Why do I care?_”
She had been watching Miss Daindrie. Now, for the first time, she
watched herself to know why she was watching.
As she went groping, she understood.
For a long time she had walked through a dark cave with a lantern,
placing it against the dripping walls, seeking a certain thing....
Sudden, there was her lantern against it, what she sought!--and she
recoiled, she withdrew her light, she did not want to see.... With her
body strained and her nerves singing against the pull of her will, she
lifted her light again, she forced herself to look.
She felt it ... in her heart she could have no doubt of it.... Helen
Daindrie was meant to make the rescue of David!
How clear it was, terribly clear. The one way! She wondered by what
painful blessing she had not seen before. She knew that she had seen and
had not wanted to see it. It was too bitter, too cruel. Unfair! How
could she stand this, who was willing to bear all things? This giving
David into the arms of another woman? How could she be sure? How dared
she? Reasons had tumbled upon her: knowing was blotted out. Now, what
had been dim was clear: what had been so hard, seemed strangely natural
and easy.
She looked at Helen. She felt her presence. Never had she so felt a life
before. Helen was lovely and girlish and strong. She would lead David
the way of his dreams, the way of his young gods--they must be her gods
also! She would lead him firmly. Her sense of right was clear like her
blue eyes. Feeling her there, Cornelia loved Helen Daindrie. Her heart
went out to her, her hands pleaded to embrace her. She seemed to hold
her face in her trembling hands and to look deep in Helen. Yes: she was
lovely, for she was to be the beloved. She was sacred, for it was she
who was chosen.