After seven weeks in England Maurice Durant began to look back with
longing on the seven years he had spent away from it, and so turned
his back on Dover and his face to the South of France. Those three
weeks in Coton Manor had disgusted him with the country, another
three weeks in London had more than satisfied his passion for town.
It was there that he realized more keenly than anywhere else that he
was a foreigner in England, and he went abroad in order to feel
himself an Englishman again.
Restless as ever, he spent two years wandering the world, then shut
himself up for three more in a little villa in the Apennines, and
worked as he had never worked before, with the result that at the
end of the five years, he found himself irresistibly drawn back to
England again. Gradually--very gradually--England was waking to the
fact that Maurice Durant was a clever painter; still more gradually
it had dawned on Maurice that he was becoming famous. His name had
traveled to London, as a name frequently does, via Paris and New
York, and Fame had lured him to London by dint of taking it up and
incessantly sounding it, not with a coarse and startling blast from
her favorite instrument, the trumpet, but with a delicate crescendo,
lyrically, subtly, insinuatingly, like a young siren performing on a
well-modulated flute. The trumpet, no doubt, would have deafened or
irritated him; but before he got sick of it the softer music was by
no means disagreeable to his ear.
It seemed that he had scored a double success, being equally happy
in his landscapes and his portraits. The critics were divided. One
evening it would appear that, within the limits of his art, Maurice
Durant was the subtlest, the finest exponent of modern womanhood;
the next morning he would be told that he had rendered the beauty of
the divine visible world more imaginatively, more individually, than
any living artist, but that as a portrait painter he had yet to find
himself. These were the variations on the one familiar theme; for as
to his modernity, which was obvious, they were all agreed. But at
last he came across an account of himself which he acknowledged to
be more or less consistent and correct. It was the final
appreciation, the summing up of a judge who was said to be the only
man in England who had a right to his opinion. And this was his
opinion of Maurice Durant:
"He stands in a unique and interesting position. On his right hand,
the hand he paints with, are the heights unattainable by any but
the great artists; on his left, the dizzy verge of popularity. As a
matter of fact, he is neither popular nor great. His just horror of
vulgarity will save him from the abyss; his equal fear of
committing himself, of letting himself go, the fear, shall I say,
of failure, of the fantastic or ridiculous attitudes a man
necessarily assumes in falling from a height, will keep him forever
from the loftier way. It is not that his temperament is naturally
timorous and cold; if he is afraid of anything, he is afraid of his
own rashness, his own heat. There are about him delicacies and
repugnances, a certain carefully cultivated restraint, and a
half-critical, half-imaginative caution which, we submit, is
incompatible with greatness in his art. But he has imagination."
A little more praise or a little more blame, and he would have
suspected himself of genius; as it was, he was content to stand
distinguished from the ruck of the popular and the respectable by
virtue of that imagination which his critic had allowed to him. He
was not a great painter, and he knew it; but he was a brilliantly
clever one, and he knew that also, and in the fact and his intimate
knowledge of it lay the secret of his success. He kept a cool head
on his shoulders, and thus his position and the personal dignity
depending on it were secure. He would never tumble from his height
through the giddiness of vanity; and when the same high authority
kept on assuring the world, on the word of a critic, that Maurice
Durant was branded with the curse of cleverness, that he was the
victim of his own versatility, and that he had just missed
greatness, Maurice merely remarked that he was glad to hear it, for
he was sure that greatness would have bored him.
Whether it was the same ungovernable terror that restrained him from
marrying, or whether he was the friend of too many women to be the
lover of one, or whether he really was self-contained and
self-sufficient, all this time he had remained single. His
singleness had many advantages; it kept him free; it made it easy
for him to get about from place to place and obtain an uninterrupted
view of the world; it left an open way for his abrupt incalculable
movements, his panic flights.
And as he had always fled from everything that disturbed and
irritated him, so now, in the very middle of an English summer and a
London season, he was flying from the sound of his own fame. Not far
this time; only from the center to the verge, from Piccadilly
pavement to the south coast. He had hired a small cutter for a
month, and lived on board in much physical discomfort and
intellectual peace. He hardly knew it by sight, that beautiful full
face of his own country; but he was learning to know it as he sailed
from the white cliffs to the red, from the red to the gray and
black, the iron slopes and precipices of the Land's End.
He had just returned from a fortnight's cruise, and was wondering
what he would do with the weeks that remained to him--whether he
would explore the west coast of England or set sail for the Channel
Islands--when he found himself, very lazy and very happy, lying at
anchor in a certain white-walled harbor in the south of Cornwall. A
neighboring regatta had carried off, the fleet of yachts that had
their moorings there, and the harbor was dotted with fishing-boats,
pilot-boats, ocean steamers, steam tugs, wherries, and such craft.
The little _Torch_, rocking madly on miniature waves as she played
with her chain, was almost alone in her lightness and frivolity.
About an hour before midnight Durant woke in his berth, and felt
this vivacity of hers increasing; larger waves lapped her and broke
against her sides, but overhead, on deck, there was no sign of a
wind. He got up, climbed the companion ladder, and put his head out
over the hatch. A schooner yacht had come in, and lay straining at
her cable in the narrow channel between the _Torch_ and a Portsmouth
pilot. She had only just put into harbor, for her crew were still
busy taking down her sails. As if it were her own movement alone
that made her visible, she swayed there, dimly discerned, while she
slipped her white canvas like a beauty disrobing in the dark, sail
by sail, till she stood naked under a veil of dusk, and the light
went up above her bows.
A restless thing that schooner yacht; her canvas was hardly lowered
before it was up again. She had not long lain dreaming, passive to
the will of the tide. At sunrise she awoke, and what with her own
swinging and vibration, and the voices and trampling of her joyous,
red-capped, blue-jerseyed crew, there was no sleep for anyone in her
neighborhood after three o'clock. So Durant rolled out of his berth,
dressed hastily, and went on deck, eager to see her in her beauty,
robed for the morning and the wind. There she was, so near now that
he could almost have tipped a rope-end down her skylight from the
skylight of the _Torch_, every line of her exquisite body new-washed
in gold and shivering under the touches of the dawn. She was awake,
alive; the life that had still beaten through her dreams in the
night, stirred by the drowsy fingering of the harbor tide, was
throbbing and thrilling with many pulses as she shook out her
streamers to the wind. And now her mainsail went slowly up, and she
leapt and shuddered through all her being, passionate as though the
will of the wind was her will.
Durant stared at her with undisguised admiration. She was a fair
size for her kind, and from the sounds that came up through her
cabin skylight he judged that she had a party on board. Standing
on the deck of the _Torch_ in his light flannels, Durant looked
much too long for his own ridiculously tiny cutter. He was so
deeply absorbed in spelling out the letters on the yacht's
life-belts--_Windward_--that he was quite unaware that he himself
was an object of considerable interest to a lady who had just come
on deck. Literally flying as he was from the sound of his own
name, he was unprepared to hear it sung out in cheerful greeting.
"Mr. Durant!"
He started and blinked, unable to recognize the lady of the voice.
Assuming that he had once known, and since forgotten her, he had
raised his cap on the chance.
She was trying to say something to him now, but the noise of the
struggling sail cut off her words. She turned, and seemed to be
calling to somebody else. Another lady, whom the sail had hidden
from his sight till now, came forward and leaned eagerly over the
rail, steadying herself by the shrouds. This lady did not shout his
name; but, as her eyes met his across the narrow channel, she
smiled--a smile he could not place or recognize or understand; he
could only raise his cap to it blindly as before.
She was smiling still, while the first lady laughed, if possible in
a more bewildering manner than before. "Don't you know us?" She
seemed to be whispering across the gulf.
He shook his head in desperation, whereupon the second lady gave
orders to the men to stop hoisting the mainsail.
"If you _are_ Mr. Durant, come on board!"
This time the voice was distinct in the silence that followed the
hoisting of the sail. He knew that lady now.
And he knew the other also, though there was nothing but the turn of
her head and the black accent over her eyes to remind him of Frida
Tancred.