For the next twenty-four hours Jennie did her best to suspend the
operation of thought. Thought got her nowhere. It led her into so many
blind alleys that it made her head ache. She had once heard a returned
traveler describe his efforts to get out of the labyrinth at Hampton
Court, and felt herself now in the same situation. Each way seemed easy
till she followed it and found herself balked by a hedge.
But the fact that her head ached gave her an excuse for going to her
room and locking herself in. She could thus pull her books from beneath
the bed without fear of detection. The points as to which she needed
enlightenment being spires and Lady Hamilton, she went at her task with
the avidity of a starving person at sight of food.
As to spires, she was quickly appeased, for her volume on the old
churches of Paris had the Sainte-Chapelle as its frontispiece. Now that
she had seen the name in print, she was sure of it. Because of being so
little taxed, her memory was the more retentive. Every sound that had
fallen from Mrs. Collingham's lips was stamped on her mind like a
footprint hardened into rock on a bit of untracked soil. Within half an
hour, she had learned the outlines of the history of the
Sainte-Chapelle, and, with some fluttering of timid vanity, had grasped
the comparison of its strong and exquisite grace with her own
personality.
But, after all, the Sainte-Chapelle was a thing of stone, whereas Lady
Hamilton--she loved, the name--must have been of flesh and blood. Here,
too, there was a frontispiece, the very Dian of the Frick Gallery to
which Mrs. Collingham had referred. Unfortunately, the illustrations
were in black and white, so that she could get no adequate idea as to
the complexion or the color of the hair. The face, however, with its
bewitching softness, its heavenly archnesses, bore some resemblance to
her own.
It was a shock to learn that the possessor of so much beauty, the bearer
of so melodious a title, had begun life as Emma Lyon, a servant girl,
but, after all, she reflected, the circumstance only created analogies
with herself. There were more analogies still. Emma Lyon had been an
artist's model. In an artist's studio she had made the acquaintance of
men of lofty station, just as she herself had met Bob. She had loved and
been loved. Romney was perhaps her Hubert Wray. Her career had been
exciting and dramatic--the friend of a queen, the more-than-wife of one
of the great men of the age. The tragic, miserable death didn't frighten
Jennie, since misery and tragedy always stalked on the edge of her
experience. She fell asleep amid vast, vague concepts of queens and
heroes beset with loves and problems not unlike Jennie Follett's.
All through the next day she stilled the working of thought by
application to _The Egoist_. She took to it as to a drug. In the
intervals of her household duties, or whenever her mind became active
over her affairs, she ran to her room to begin again, "Comedy is a game
played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human
nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no
dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent clashes, to make
the correctness of the representation convincing." She got little
farther, since, for her purpose, this was far enough. She was drugged
already, as by dentist's gas. The more she read the more she felt
herself wandering sleepily through realms of dream, where words, as she
understood them, had ceased to have significance.
So, by sheer force of will, she brought herself to that moment in the
afternoon when she stood at the studio door. She hadn't thought; she
hadn't, in her own phrase, _imagined_. She had allowed herself no
instant in which to count the cost or to shrink from paying it. Hubert,
love, and the family deliverance from poverty would be hers before
nightfall, and she meant not to look beyond. She opened the door softly.
Before showing herself, she stopped and listened. There was not a sound.
It was often so if Hubert was painting, and the silence only assured her
that if he was there, as he probably was, he was waiting for her alone.
He was waiting for her alone with that look in his eyes, that maddened
animal look which she had seen yesterday, so bestial and yet so
compelling! Still more softly she moved forward among the studio odds
and ends.
Then she saw--and stopped.
In the Byzantine chair, a nude woman, seated in the manner of the
Egyptian cat-goddess, was holding up a skull. Though the woman looked
the other way, Jennie could see her as a lovely creature, straight,
strong, triumphant, and unashamed. Hubert was painting, busily, eagerly.
He raised his eyes, saw Jennie as she cowered, took no notice of her at
all, and went on with his work. It passed all that she had ever imagined
of cruelty that, as she turned to make her way out again, he should
glance up once more--and let her go.
Hubert--and the woman _dressed like that_! The woman _dressed like
that_--in this intimacy with Hubert! She herself shut out--cast
out--sent to the devil! Some one else in her place, when she might so
easily have kept it!
Jennie's suffering was in the dry and stony stage at which it hardly
seemed suffering at all. Yes, it did; she knew it was suffering--only,
she couldn't feel. She could think lucidly and yet put the whole
situation away from her for the reason that it would keep. Anguish would
keep; tears would keep. She could postpone everything, since she had all
the rest of her life to give to its contemplation. Just for the present,
the memory of the woman in the chair with _Hubert looking at her_ was so
scorching to the mind that she could do nothing but snatch her faculties
away from it.
Coming to Fifth Avenue and seeing an electric bus stop near the curb,
she climbed into it. It was the old story of not knowing where to go or
what to do once her simple round of habits had been upset. Snuggled
close to a window, she could at least be jolted along without effort of
her own while she still fought off the consciousness of the frightful
thing that had happened. It was not merely Hubert and the woman; it was
everything. So much was included that she couldn't bear to think of this
ruin to her beautiful house of cards.
Such wealth and beauty in the shop windows! Such streams of people in
their new spring clothes! She had heard it said that every heart had its
bitterness, but she didn't think that that could be possible. If
everyone had a heartache like hers, or even the memory of such a
heartache, it would make too monstrous a world, too deplorable a human
race. After all, there must be _some_ sense in the presence of mankind
on earth, and if all were kicked about and bruised, there would be none.
She preferred to think that the people on the pavements and in the
limousines were as happy as they looked, and that she alone was selected
for bewilderment and pain.
She wondered where she was going. There was a ferry far up on the
Riverside Drive which would take her across to New Jersey, and thence,
by a combination of trolley-cars, she could work her way southward to
Pemberton Heights. This would consume an hour and more, and so eat up
part of the afternoon. What she would do when she arrived home with her
dreams all shattered God alone knew. If she could only have seen her
friend, Mrs. Collingham, clinging to that kind hand as she poured out
her heart....
Just then a huge building came into sight on the left, and with it a new
impulse. She had often meant to visit it, though the day never seemed to
come. Gussie had once gone to the Metropolitan Museum in company with
Sadie Inglis, since when she had been in the habit of saying that she
had as good as taken a trip abroad. Jennie didn't want a trip abroad;
she wanted soothing, comforting, affection. She wanted another drop of
that experienced, womanly sympathy, instinct with kindliness and
knowledge of the world which she had tasted for the first and only time
on that blissful afternoon at Collingham Lodge.
[Illustration: _JENNIE, YOU HAVEN'T GOT A HUNDRED DOLLARS! TELL ME YOU
HAVEN'T!_]
It was to get nearer to Collingham Lodge that she left the bus to drag
herself up the long flight of steps and into the vast, cool hall. There
were others going in, chiefly the Slavs and Italians for whom she felt a
legitimate Anglo-Saxon contempt, so that she had nothing to do but to
follow them. Thus she found herself at the top of another long flight of
steps, gazing about her in an awe that soon became an intoxicating sense
of beauty.
It was Jennie's first approach to beauty on this scale of immensity and
variety. It was her first draught of Art. Her childhood's poring over
_Ancient Rome Restored_ had given her a feeling for line and economy,
but she had never dreamed that color, substance, and texture could be
used with this daring, profuse creativeness. Having no ability to seize
details, she drifted helplessly up and down aisles of splendor and
gleam. Here there were gold and silver, here was tapestry, here crystal,
here enamel. The pictures were endless, endless. She could no more deal
with them than with a sunset. Life came to the Scarborough tradition in
her as it does to a frozen limb, with distress and yet with an element
of ecstasy. A soul that had passed to a higher plane of existence, whom
there was no one to welcome and guide, might have ventured timidly into
the celestial land as Jennie among these lovely things outside her
comprehension.
She came to herself, as it were, on hearing a man's voice say, in a kind
of tone and idiom with which she was familiar:
"Have you looked at this Cellini now? That's the only authentic bit of
Cellini in the United States. There's six or seven other pieces in
different museums that people says is Cellini, but there's always a
hitch in the proof."
Turning, she saw a stocky man in custodian's uniform who was addressing
a group of Italians, two bareheaded women, three children between ten
and fifteen, and a man. All were interested. All studied the gold shell
with its dragon-shaped handle in purplish enamel. They commented,
criticized, appraised, even the children pointing out excellencies to
one another. When they had drifted away, Jennie turned to the kindly
Irishman, who, by dint of living with beauty, had grasped its spirit,
and put a hesitating question. She asked him to repeat the name of the
gold-smith, pronouncing it after him till she registered it on her mind
as she had that of Lady Hamilton.
"Sure, there was an artist for you," the custodian went on. "The breed
is dead and gone. Hot-timpered fellow, though. Had more mistresses and
killed more men than you could count. Should read about him in a book he
wrote himself." He looked at Jennie from the corner of an eye,
accustomed to "size up" an individual here and there among the thousands
who floated daily through his little domain, apparently finding in her
something that merited further favors. "Are you wise to this Memling?"
he asked, leading the way to a corner of the wall where hung a small
portrait. "There's only two other men in the wor-rld that could have
painted that head, and that's Holbein and Rembrandt. Memling himself
never did it but just that wance."
Jennie looked, registering Memling's name. It was the head of an elderly
man; so living, kindly, and humorous that she loved him. When she turned
to her guide he stood with a smile of curiosity, like that of a mother
showing her baby to a friend.
"What d'ye say to that now?"
Jennie said what she could--that it was marvelous, but that she didn't
know anything about art. Since he was so kind, she ventured, however, on
another question. Did the museum contain a portrait of Lady Hamilton?
He pursed up his nose. Not a good one. Not a Romney. There was one in
gallery twenty-four, but it was by John Opie, of whom he had no high
opinion. In comparison with Romney, he thought Opie big and coarse, but,
since there was nothing better to be seen, Jennie might choose to glance
at this second-rate specimen.
"And I'll tell you another thing," he went on, confidentially. "You're
not used to looking at pictures and such like, are you, now?"
Jennie said she was not.
"Well, then, go to gallery twenty-four. Find your Opie, which you'll see
hanging over one of the doors--and don't look at anything else. You'll
have seen all you can absor-rb in wan day. Come back to-morrer, or anny
other toime, and come straight to me. You'll find me here, and I'll tell
you what to look at next. But don't take more to-day than you can
enjoy."
He walked with her till she reached the boundary of his realm.
"You look like a gur-rl that'd have an eye and a taste for beauty. You
don't find them often among Americans, and when you do it's a god-send.
Poles, Jews, Russians, yes. When the French and Italian officers was in
New York, their eyes 'd fairly eat the museum up. But Americans--they
don't know and they don't want to know--not wan in a hundred thousand.
Well, good-day to you and good luck. I'm always here, and I'm just the
wan to tell you which is the things to pick out."
But by the time she discovered her Lady Hamilton she had only the
courage to note listlessly that the hair _was_ somewhat the color of her
own--not chestnut, not russet, not copper, not red-gold, but perhaps a
combination of them all. She had reached her limitations unexpectedly.
The tide she had dammed had burst its barriers and rushed in on her. She
sank to a chair in the middle of the almost empty room, her eyes blinded
by sudden tears.
Hubert was still with that woman! The woman was perhaps resting now and
they were talking! She would be so much at her ease that she would talk
without taking the trouble to throw her wrap round her. Hubert, too,
would be at ease, preferring her without her wrap rather than with it.
In vain she reminded herself that the situation was one to which an
artist was accustomed. She hadn't been in a studio for a year without
learning that much, though she got no comfort from it now. No comfort
was possible with the vision of this naked magnificence seared on her
memory. Hubert had let her come without a welcome, and go without a
protest. He was probably glad when she went so that he might be alone
with this wanton who didn't know shame.
In the end, she saw but one course before her. She would make the best
of Bob. To do so would mean that Bob would be disinherited by his ogre
of a father, but with Mrs. Collingham's aid a counteracting influence
might be found. Moreover, she could thus return home, confess herself
Bob's wife, and offer the hundred dollars to her father as cash lawfully
her own. Life would be simplified in this way, even though happiness
were dead.
She was the last of the commuting family to reach the house that
evening, and on crossing the threshold was greeted with a sense of
cheer. It did not mean much to her at first, for, with the optimism of a
hand-to-mouth existence, a sense of cheer was the last thing the family
ever abandoned. She herself cast all outward air of trouble away from
her on opening the door, because it was in the tradition.
Her father was seated quietly smoking his pipe, which he had not done
for the past week or more. Gussie held the middle of the floor, her arms
extended in a serpentine wave, humming a dance tune and practicing the
step. To mark the rhythm, Gladys was clapping her hands with a slow,
tom-tom beat. Pansy alone stood apart, blinking and unresponsive, as if
for reasons of her own she considered this mirth ill-timed.
"Look, Jen!" Gladys giggled, as her eldest sister passed down the room.
"This is the new thing at the Washington. Gus has got it so you wouldn't
know her from Samarine herself."
Jennie went on to the kitchen, where, as she expected, her mother was
getting the supper, and did her best to be nonchalant.
"Hello, momma! What's the good word? What makes everyone so gay?"
Lizzie looked up, a cover in one hand and a spoon in the other. Her face
was so radiant that Jennie was still more mystified.
"Oh, Jennie darling, your father has the money! He can make the payment
to-morrow, and everything will come right."
So Jennie's plans recoiled upon herself. She had meant to tell her
mother here and now that for four days past she had been Bob
Collingham's wife, and had a hundred dollars in her top bureau drawer.
Her mother was to tell her father, and her father Teddy and the girls.
But now--well, what would be the use? By keeping her secret she might
put off inevitable fate a little longer.
"Who lent it?" Jennie asked, after she had chosen her line of action.
"Nobody; that's the wonderful part of it. It's a hundred and fifty
dollars Teddy has earned."
"'Earned!' How?"
"Selling bonds for a man he knows. He doesn't want anything said about
it, because it's what he calls 'on the side.' If the house knew of
it--that he was working in off times for some one else--he might lose
his job. But, oh, Jennie, isn't it wonderful?"
Jennie thought it wonderful for other reasons than Teddy's glory and the
peace of the family mind. It was less easy to renounce Hubert than it
had been an hour or two earlier. If he snapped his fingers she had said
to herself, while crossing the ferry, she would run to him like a dog,
in spite of everything; and if she did it, she would want to be free
from the complications that must ensue if she were to proclaim herself
Bob's wife.
Having assented to her mother's praise of Teddy, she went back through
the living room and on upstairs to take off her hat and coat. Near the
top of the stairs, the door of the bathroom opened suddenly and Teddy
appeared in his shirt sleeves. There being nothing unusual in that, she
was about to say, "Hello, Ted!" and ascend the few remaining steps to
her room.
But seeing her moving upward in the dim hall light, Teddy started back
within the bathroom, and, with a movement he couldn't control, slammed
the door noisily. The action was so odd that she called out to him:
"It's only me, goose! What's the matter with you? Have you got the
jumps?"
The door opened and Teddy reappeared, grinning sheepishly.
"I--I didn't have my coat on," was the only explanation he could find.
"Dear, dear!" Jennie threw over her shoulder, as she passed into her own
room. "We've got terribly modest all of a sudden, haven't we?"
But weeks later she recalled this lame excuse.