It was a discouraged but resolute Barbara who stepped forth from her
father's house that bright morning in May and passed rather than walked
down the quiet upper stretches of Fifth Avenue. That she might fail in
art, and make a mess of her life generally, sometimes occurred to her.
And it was a thought which immeasurably distressed her. It would be too
dreadful a humiliation to crawl back into the place which she had so
confidently quitted for a better; to be pointed out as a distinguished
amateur who had not succeeded as a professional; and to take up once
more the rounds of dinners, dances, and sports which serve so well to
keep the purposeless young and ignorant.
To society the tragedy of Barbara's back-sliding into art was very real.
Dozens of men said very frankly that they missed her like the very
devil. "There is nobody else," they said, "quite so straightforward, or
quite so good-looking."
Hers was a face not less vivid than a light. It seemed that in her, the
greatest artist of all, abandoning the accepted conventions of beauty,
had created an original masterpiece. If she had been too thin, her eyes,
tranquil, sea-blue, and shining, must have been too large. Her nose was
Phidian Greek; her chin, but for an added youthful tenderness, was
almost a replica of Madame Duse's; a long round throat carried nobly a
gallant round head, upon which the hair was of three distinct colors.
The brown in the Master's workshop had not, it seemed, held out; she had
been finished with tones of amber and deep red. The brown was straight,
the red waved, the amber rioted in curls and tendrils. Below this
exquisite massing of line and color, against a low broad forehead, were
set, crookedly, short narrow eyebrows of an intense black; her eyelashes
were of the same divine inkiness, very warm and long; a mouth level to
the world, resolute, at the corners a little smiling, was scarlet
against a smooth field of golden-brown.
If she had a certain admiration of her own beauty it was the admiration
of an artist for the beauty of a stranger. Since she had had neither
hand nor say in her own making, the results were neither to her credit
nor against it. For success in her chosen line she would have exchanged
her beauty very willingly for a plain mask, her glorious youth for a
sedate middle age. She would have given perhaps an eye, an ear, or so at
least she thought in this ardent and generous period of early beginnings
and insatiable ambition. In her thoughts nothing seemed to matter to
her but art.
There was no sustaining pleasure in the fact that her father had given
in to her. Opposition--unspoken, it is true, but not to be
mistaken--remained in his attitude toward her. He found indirect means
for conveying his idea and that of her friends that she was wasting
herself upon a folly, and was destined, if she persisted in it, to only
the most mediocre success. An exhibition of her works, undertaken with
the avowed wish to know "just where she stood," had been discouraging in
its results. The art critics either refused to take her seriously or
expressed the opinion that there were already in the world too many
sculptors of distinguished technique and no imagination whatsoever. Her
friends told her that she was a "wonder." And there were little
incidents of the farce which caused her to bite her lips in humiliation.
That the critics should be at the pains of telling her that she was
without imagination angered her, since it was a fact already better
known to herself. And in one moment she would determine at all costs to
prove herself an imaginative artist, and in the next "to chuck the whole
business." But she could not make up her mind whether it is worse for a
captain to wait for actual defeat or, having perceived its
inevitability, to surrender. To go down with colors flying appeals
perhaps to noble sides of man; but it is a waste of ships, lives,
and treasure.
Passing swiftly down the avenue, she did not know whether, upon arriving
at her studio in McBurney Place, she should get into her working-apron
or make an end, once and for all, of artistic pursuits. But with the
lifting of the legless beggar's face to hers, all doubts vanished from
her mind like smoke from a room when the windows and doors are opened.
Whatever his face might have revealed to another, to her it was Satan's,
newly fallen, and she read into it a whole wonder of sin, tragedy,
desolation, and courage; and knew well that if she could reproduce what
she seemed to see, the world would be grateful to her. She would give it
a face which it would never make an end of discussing, which should be
in sculpture what the face of Mona Lisa is in painting. It would be the
face of a man whom one jury would hang upon the merest suspicion; for
whom another would return a verdict of "not guilty" no matter what the
nature of his proved crimes; and whether the face was beautiful or
hideous would be a matter of dispute for the ages.
Upon arriving at No. 17 McBurney Place, and having climbed two flights
of stairs, the door of her studio was opened before she could lay hand
to the knob, and a very small boy with very big eyes, and no more flesh
upon his bones than served to distinguish him from a living skeleton,
appeared on the threshold, smiling, you may say, from head to foot. He
was dressed in a blue suit with bobbed tails and a double row of bright
brass buttons down the front, and when she had gathered him from the
gutter in which he had reached to his present stunted stature, a child
half gone in pneumonia, he had told her that his name, his whole name,
was "Bubbles" and nothing but "Bubbles."
"Good morning, Miss Barbara," he said; "the plumber's bin and gone, and
the feller from the hardware store has swore hell be around before noon
to fix the new knobs in the doors."
"Good!" said Barbara. "Well done, Bubbles."
And she passed into the studio, wondering why a little face all knotting
with smiles, affection, and the pleasure of commands lovingly received
and well obeyed, should remind her of that other face, massive,
sardonic, lost, satanic, which had looked up into hers across the
battered tin cup on the top of a battered street-organ. She turned to a
little clay head that she had made recently and for which Bubbles had
sat; touched it here and there, stepped back from it, turned her own
head to the left, to the right, and even, such was the concentration of
her mood, showed between her red lips the tip of a still redder tongue.
But no matter what she did to test and undo her first impression there
persisted between the two faces a certain likeness, though in just what
this resemblance consisted she was unable to say.
"Bubbles," she said, "you were telling me about beggars the other day
and how much they make, and how rich some of them are. Did you ever run
across one that sells shoe-laces, plays a hand-organ, and hasn't got
any legs?"
"Sure," said he; "there's half a dozen in the city." And he named them.
"Burbage: he's the real thing, got his legs took off by a cannon-ball in
the wars. Prior: he ain't no 'count. Drunk and fell under a elevated
train. He ain't saved nothing neither. He drinks _his_. Echmeyer: he's
some Jew; worth every cent of fifty thousand dollars. They calls him
congen_eye_tul, 'cause he was born with his legs lef off him. Fun
Barnheim: he's German, went asleep in the shade of a steam-roller, and
never woke up till his legs was rolled out flat as a pair of pants
that's just bin ironed. Then o' course there's Blizzard."