Meanwhile there was that going on which would have disturbed both these
elderly men had they known anything about it.
Jennie Follett, in a Greek peplum of white-cotton cloth, her
amber-colored hair drawn into a loose Greek knot, was on her knees
before a plaster cast of Aphrodite, to which she was holding up a
garland of tissue-paper flowers.
While there was nothing alarming in this pagan act, the freedom with
which two young men laid hands on her little person threw out hints of
impropriety.
The pretexts were obvious, and, in the case of one of the young men,
were backed by what might have been called professional necessity. One
bare arm needed to be raised, the other to be lowered. One sandaled foot
was too visible beneath the edge of the peplum, the other not visible
enough. Adjustments called for readjustments, and readjustments for
revisions of the scheme. What one young man approved of the other
disallowed, to a running accompaniment of Miss Follett's laughter.
"Do go away," she implored, when Mr. Bob Collingham, with one hand
beneath her elbow and the other at her finger-tips, tilted her arm at
what seemed to him its loveliest angle.
"Clear out, Bob," the artist seconded, in half-vexed good humor. "We'll
never get the pose with you here."
"You'd never get anything if I went away, because Miss Follett wouldn't
work. Would you, Miss Follett?"
The artist having gone in search of something at the far end of the
studio, Miss Follett replied to Mr. Collingham alone.
"I don't know what I'd do if you went away; but if you stay I shall go
frantic. If you touch me again I shall get up."
"I'm not touching you again," he said, going on to bend her left arm
ever so slightly, "because this is the same old time all along. The
picture is all I care about."
"But it's Mr. Wray's picture. It isn't yours."
"It will be if I buy it. I said I would if I liked it, and I sha'n't
like it unless I get it the way I want it."
"You know you don't mean to buy it."
"I don't mean to let anybody else buy it; you can lay down your life on
that."
There was so much earnestness in this declaration that Miss Follett
laughed again. It was an easy, silvery laugh, pleasant to the ear, and
not out of keeping with the medley of beautiful things round her.
"Jennie's value in a studio is more than that of a model," Wray had
recently confided to his friend, Bob Collingham. "It's as if she
extracted the beauty from every bit of tapestry or bronze and turned it
into animate life."
"By doing nothing or standing still," Collingham had added, "she can pin
your eyes on her as other girls can't by frisking about. And when she
moves--"
An exclamation from Wray conveyed the fact that Jennie's motion was
beyond what either of these young experts in womanhood could possibly
put into words.
But that Jennie knew where to draw a certain kind of line became evident
when, either by inadvertence or design, the back of Bob Collingham's
hand rubbed along her cheek. With a smile at once kindly and cold she
put away his arm and rose. In the few yards she placed between them
before she turned again, still with her kind, cold smile, there was
rebuke without offense.
Being fair, the young man colored easily. When he colored, the three
inches of scar across his temple which he had brought home from the war
became a streak of red. It was one of the reasons why Jennie, who was
sensitive to the physical, didn't like to look at him. Not to look at
him, she pretended to arrange the folds of her peplum, which kept her
gaze downward.
But had she looked, she would have seen that he was hurt. His face was
of the honest, sympathetic cast that quickly reflects the wounding of
the feelings. If men had prototypes in dogs, Bob Collingham's would have
been the mastiff or the St. Bernard--big, strong, devoted, slow to
wrath, and with an almost comic humiliation at sound of a harsh word.
Though there was no harsh word in Jennie's case, Bob was sure he
detected a harsh thought. It hurt him the more for the reason that she
was a model, while he had advantages of social consideration. Little as
he would have been discourteous to a girl of his own station, he would
have thought it unworthy of a cad to profit by Jennie's helplessness in
a place like a studio.
"I hope you didn't think I was trying to be fresh."
Now that she felt herself secured by distance, she laughed again.
"I didn't think anything at all. I just--just don't like people touching
me."
"Not any people?"
"Not any I need speak about to you."
"Why me?"
"Because I hardly know you."
"You could know me better if you wanted to."
"Oh, I could know lots of people better if I wanted to."
"And you don't want to--for what reason?"
"It isn't always a reason. Sometimes it's just an instinct."
"And which is it in my case?"
"In your case, it doesn't have to be discussed. I shouldn't know you,
anyhow. We're like creatures in different--what do they call it?--not
spheres--elements, isn't it?--We're like creatures in different
elements--a bird and a fish--that don't get a point of contact."
"You mayn't _see_ the points of contact--"
"And if I don't see them they're not there." She turned toward Wray, who
was coming back in their direction, addressing him in the idiom she
heard among young native-born Americans, and which accorded best with
her position in the studio. "Oh, Mr. Wray, could you let me off posing
any more to-day? This friend guy of yours has got me all on springs."
"Clear out, friend guy. Can't you see you're in the way?"
She continued to take the tone she was trying to make second nature,
since it was not first.
"That's something he wouldn't notice if a car was running over him. But
please let me go. There's a quarter of an hour left on to-day, but I'll
make it up some other time."
She moved down the studio with as much seeming unconcern as if she
didn't know that two pairs of eyes were following her. Picking her way
between old English chairs with canvases stacked against their legs,
past dusty brocade hangings, and beneath an occasional plaster cast
lifted on a pedestal, she went out at the model's exit without a glance
behind her.
Bob spoke only when she had disappeared.
"Listen, Hubert. I'm going to marry that girl."
Wray stepped back to the front of the easel, flicking in a touch or two
on the rough sketch of the Greek girl kneeling before Aphrodite.
"I was afraid you were getting some such bug in your head."
Bob limped to a table on which he had thrown his hat and the stick that
helped his lameness.
People at Marillo Park, where the Collinghams lived for most of the
year, said that, with the wounds he had got while in the French army in
the early days of the war, he had brought back with him a real
enhancement of manhood. Having come through Groton and Harvard little
better than an uncouth boy, his experience in France had shaped his
outlook on life into something like a purpose. It was not very clear as
yet, or sharply defined; but he knew that certain preliminary conditions
must be met before he could settle down. One of these had to do with
Miss Jennie Follett; and what Hubert called "a bug in his head" was, in
his own mind, at least, as vital to his development as his braving his
family in going to the war.
That had been in the famous year when the American nation was trying to
be "neutral in thought." "I'm not neutral in thought," Bob, who had only
that summer left Harvard, had declared to his father. "I'm not neutral
in any way. Give me my ticket over, dad, and I'll do the rest myself."
He got his ticket over, and fifteen months later, bandaged and crippled,
a ticket back. On the return voyage he had as his companion a young
American stretcher-man who had helped to carry him off the battlefield,
and who, a few weeks later, nervously shattered, had joined him in the
hospital. Wray, who, on the outbreak of war, had been painting in
Latoul's atelier, had now got what he called "a sickener of Europe," and
was glad to hang out his shingle in New York. A New England man of
Gallicized ways of thinking, he had means enough to wait for
recognition, so long as he kept his expenses within relatively narrow
bounds.
With his soft hat plastered provisionally on the back of his head, Bob
leaned heavily on his stick.
"I've got to marry some one," he said, as if in self-defense. "I'm that
kind. I can't begin fitting my jig saw together till I do it."
Wray kept on painting.
"Why don't you pick out a girl in your own class? Lots of nice ones at
Marillo."
"You don't marry girls just because they're nice, old thing. You take
the one who's the other half of yourself."
"I don't see that you're the other half of Miss Follett."
"Well, I am."
"Miss Follett herself doesn't think so."
"She'll think so, all right, when I show her that she can't do without
me."
"Some job!" Wray grunted, laconically.
"Sure it's some job; but the bigger the job the more you're on your
mettle. That's the way we're made."
The artist continued to add small touches to the shadows of the
Aphrodite cast as he changed his tactics.
"If you married Miss Follett, wouldn't your family raise hell?"
"They'd raise hell at first, and put a can on it afterward. Families
always do."
"And what would Miss Follett feel--before they'd put on the can?"
Bob limped uneasily toward the door.
"Life wouldn't be all slip-and-go-down for her, of course; but that's
what I should have to make up to her."
"Oh, you'd make it up to her."
With his hand on the knob, Collingham turned in mild indignation.
"Say, Hubert, what do you think I'm made of? A girl I'm crazy about--"
"Oh, I only wondered how you were going to do it."
"Well, wonder away." A steely glint came into the deep-set, small gray
eyes as he added, "That's something I don't have to explain to you
beforehand, now do I?"
Left alone, the painter went on painting. As it always does, the house
of Art opened its door to the troubles of the artist. Wray neither
turned his head as his friend went out nor muttered a farewell. He
merely laid on his strokes with an emotional vigor which hardened the
surface of the plaster cast into marble. Neither did he turn his head
nor utter a greeting when he became aware that Jennie, in her sport suit
of tobacco color set off with collar and cuffs of ruby red, was moving
toward him among the studio properties. It was easier to work his desire
to look at her into this swift, sure wielding of the brush.
In the spirit rather than with the eyes he knew that she had paused
within ten or twelve feet of him, that her kind, soft, bantering glance
was resting on him as he worked, and that a kind, soft, bantering smile
was flickering about her lips. With a deft force, he found the colors
and gave this expression to the mouth and eyes of the kneeling girl. It
was the work of a second--the merest twist of the fingers.
"I just wanted to say," Jennie explained, after waiting for him to see
her, "that I'm sorry to have been so horrid just now, and I'd like to
know when I'm to come again."
"You could marry Bob Collingham--if you wanted to."
His efforts had become so passionately living that he couldn't afford to
look up at her now, even had he wished to do so. He did not so wish,
because he knew, still in the spirit, how she would take this
announcement--without the change of a muscle, without a change of any
kind beyond a flame in the amber depths of the irises. It would be a
tawny flame, with an indescribable red in it, and he managed, on the
instant, to translate it into paint. The girl on her knees was getting a
soul as the lumpish white of the plaster cast was taking on the gleam of
ancient, long-worshiped stone.
"And would you advise me to do that?"
The voice had the charm of the well-placed mezzo, the enunciation a
melodious precision. Born in Halifax, where she had spent her first
twelve years, the English tradition of musical speech, which in that old
fortified town makes its last tottering stand on the American continent,
had been part of her inheritance.
Still working at his highest pitch of tensity, Wray considered his
answer.
"I shouldn't advise you to do that--if I thought about myself."
"Then why say anything about it?"
"Because I thought I ought to put you wise."
"What's the good of that, when I don't like him?"
"Girls often marry men they don't like when they have as much money as
he'll have."
"Money's an object, of course; but when a fellow--"
"He's not so bad. I like him. Most men do."
"Most men wouldn't have to stand his pawing them about. I like him,
too--except for the physical."
"Then you wouldn't marry him?"
"Not unless it was the only way not to starve to death."
"But you'll marry some one."
"Probably; and, probably--so will you."
Her voice was as cool and unflurried as if the words were tossed off
without intention.
Both knew that an electric change had come into the mental atmosphere.
Of the two, the girl was the less perturbed. Though beneath her feet the
floor seemed to heave like the deck of a ship in a storm, she could
stand in a jaunty attitude, her hands in her ruby-red pockets, and throw
up at its sauciest angle her daintily modeled chin.
With him it was different. He had two main points to consider. In the
first place, Bob Collingham had just made an announcement to which he,
Wray, was obliged to give some thought. He didn't need to give much to
it, because the conclusions were so obvious. Jennie had hit the poor
fellow in the eye, and, instead of viewing the case in a common-sense,
Gallicized way, he was taking it with crazy American solemnity. There
was nothing to it. The Collinghams would never stand for it. It would be
a favor to them, as well as to Bob himself, to put the whole thing out
of the question.
"So that settles that," he said to himself.
Because as he continued to reflect he worked furiously, Jennie saw in
him the being whom the lingo of the hour had taught her to call a
caveman. In the motion-picture theaters she generally frequented,
cavemen struggled with vampires in duels of passion and strength. Jennie
longed to be loved by one of this race; and a caveman who came to her
with violet eyes and a sweeping brown mustache possessed an appeal
beyond the prehistoric. In spite of the challenge in her smile and the
daring angle at which she held her chin, she waited in violent emotion
for what he would say next.
"Oh, I sha'n't marry for years to come," he jerked out, still going on
with his work. "Sha'n't be able to afford it. If I didn't have a few, a
very few, hundred dollars a year, I couldn't pay you your miserable six
a week."
She took this manfully. The head, with its ruby-red toque, to which a
tobacco-colored wing gave the dash which was part of Jennie's
personality, was perhaps poised a little more audaciously; but there was
no other sign outside the wildness of her heart.
"Oh, well; you're only beginning your career as yet. One of these days
you'll do a big portrait--"
"But, Jennie, marriage isn't everything."
It was the caveman's plea, the caveman's tone; and though Jennie knew
she couldn't respond to it in practice, the depths of her being
thrilled.
"No it isn't everything; but for a girl like me it's so much that--"
"Why specially for a girl like you?"
"Because her ring and her marriage lines are about all she's got to
show. No woman can hold a man for more than--well, just so long; and
when his heart's gone where is she, poor thing, except for the ring and
the parson's name?"
"A woman's heart is as free as a man's; and when he goes his way--"
"She's left standing in the same old place. We'd all be better off if we
felt as free to wander as the men; but most of us are made so that we
don't want to. God! what a life!" she moaned, with a comic grimace to
take the pain from the exclamation. "But, tell me, Mr. Wray, what day do
you want me to come again?"
He asked, as if casually:
"Why do you say, 'God! what a life'?"
"Oh, I don't know. I suppose because it's the only thing _to_ say.
Wouldn't you say it if--"
"If what?"
"Oh, nothing."
"Is it anything to do with me?"
"No--not specially. It's everything--beginning with being born."
"I shouldn't think you had any kick against being born--with a face and
a figure like yours."
"What good are they to me? My mother used to be--Well, I'm only pretty,
and she was a great beauty--but look at her now."
"But you don't have to go the same way."
"All women of our class go the same way. It's awful to spend your whole
life toiling and aching and worrying and scraping and paring just on the
hither side of starving to death; and yet, if it was only yourself, you
could stand it. But when you see that your father and mother did it
before you, and that your children will have to do it after you--"
"Not in this country, Jennie," he put in, sententiously. "This country
gives everyone a chance."
She gave another of her comic little moans.
"This country is like every other country. It's a football field. If
you're big enough and tough enough, with skin padded and conscience
wadded, and legs to kick hard enough--you get a chance--yes--and one man
in a hundred thousand is able to make use of it. But if you're just a
decent, honest sort, willing to do a decent, honest day's work, your
only chance will be to keep at it till you drop."
"Aren't you rather pessimistic?"
She ignored this question to pace up and down with little tossings of
the hands which Wray found infinitely graceful.
"Look at my father. He's worked like a convict all his life, just to
reach the magnificent top-notch of forty-five a week. We've been praying
to God to give him a raise--"
"And perhaps God will."
She snapped her fingers. "Like that he will! God has no use for the
prayers of the decent, honest sort. He's on the side of the football
tough with the biggest kick in the scrimmage--Ah, what's the use? I'm
born, and I've got to make the best of it. Tell me when to come again,
and let me go."
Laying aside his brushes and palette, he went close to her. All the
poetry in the world seemed to Jennie to vibrate in his tones.
"Making the best of it because you're born is loving and letting
yourself be loved, Jennie."
"So it is." She laughed, with a ring of the desperate in her mirth. "You
don't have to tell me that."
His voice sank to a whisper.
"Then why not do it?"
"I would like a shot if I had only myself to think about."
"In love, there are only two to think about, Jennie."
She laughed--a hard little laugh, in spite of its silvery tinkle.
"When I love I've got two sisters and a brother, all younger than
myself, to bring into the little affair, to say nothing of a nice old
dad and a mother that I'm very fond of. I've got to love for them as
well as for myself--"
"Then why don't you love Bob Collingham?"
She threw him a reproachful look.
"Don't! Please don't! That's brutal of you! But then, you are brutal,
aren't you? I suppose, if you weren't, I shouldn't--"
A little nondescript gesture expressed her thought better than she could
have put it into words; and with this tribute to the caveman she slipped
away again amid the brocades, pedestals, and old furniture.