After all, Ludlow decided that he would paint Charmian in her own
studio, with the accessories of her peculiar pose in life about her;
they were factitious, but they were genuine expressions of her
character; he could not realize her so well away from there.
The first afternoon was given to trying her in this light and that, and
studying her from different points. She wished to stand before her
easel, in her Synthesis working-dress, with her palette on her thumb,
and a brush in her other hand. He said finally, "Why not?" and Cornelia
made a tentative sketch of her.
At the end of the afternoon he waited while the girl was putting on her
hat in Charmian's room, where she smiled into the glass at Charmian's
face over her shoulder, thinking of the intense fidelity her friend had
shown throughout to her promise of unconsciousness.
"Didn't I do it magnificently?" Charmian demanded. "It almost killed
me; but I meant to do it if it did kill me; and now his offering to see
you aboard the car shows that _he_ is determined to do it, too, if it
kills _him_. I call it masterly."
"Well, don't go and spoil it now," said Cornelia. "And if you're going
to ask me every day how you've done----"
"Oh, I'm not! Only the first day and the last day!"
"Well!"
As Ludlow walked with Cornelia toward the point where she was to take
her car down town, he began, "You see, she is _so_ dramatic, that if
you tried to do her in any other way--that is, simply--you would be
doing her artificially. You have to take her as she is, don't you
think?"
"I don't know as I think Charmian is acting all the time, if that's
what you mean," said Cornelia. "Or any of the time, even."
Ludlow wished she had said she did not know _that_ instead of _as_, but
he reflected that ninety Americans out of a hundred, lettered or
unlettered, would have said the same. "Oh, I don't at all mean that she
is, intentionally. It's because it's her nature that I want to
recognize it. You think it _is_ her nature, don't you?" he asked
deferentially.
"Oh, I suppose it is," she answered; it amused her to have him take
such a serious tone about Charmian.
"I shall have to depend a great deal on your judgment in that matter,"
he went on. "You won't mind it, I hope?"
"Not if you won't mind it's not being worth anything."
"It will be worth everything!"
"Or if you won't care for my not giving it, sometimes."
"I don't understand."
"Well, I shouldn't want to seem to talk her over."
"Oh, no! You _don't_ think I expected you to do that? It was merely the
right point of view I wanted to get."
"I don't know as I object to that," said Cornelia.
The car which she wished to take came by, and he stopped it and handed
her aboard. She thought he might decide to come with her, but he bowed
his good-night, and she saw him walking on down town as she passed him.
At the end of a fortnight Ludlow had failed to get his picture of
Charmian; at the end of a month he began with a new pose and a fresh
theory. That quality of hers which he hoped to surprise with Cornelia's
help, and which was to give verity and value to his portrait, when once
he expressed it there, escaped him still.
She was capable of perfect poses, but they were mere flashes of
attitude. Then the antique mystery lurking in her face went out of it,
and she became _fin de siecle_ and romantic, and young ladyish, and
uninteresting to Ludlow.
She made tea every afternoon when they finished, and sometimes the talk
they began with before they began work prolonged itself till the time
for the tea had come. On the days when Mr. Plaisdell dropped in for a
cup, the talk took such a range that the early dark fell before it
ended, and then Cornelia had to stay for dinner and to be sent home in
Mrs. Maybough's coupe.
She had never supposed there was anything like it in all the world.
Money, and, in a certain measure, the things that money could buy, were
imaginable in Pymantoning; but joys so fine, so simple as these, were
what she could not have forecast from any ground of experience or
knowledge. She tried to give her mother a notion of what they said and
did; but she told her frankly she never could understand. Mrs.
Saunders, in fact, could not see why it was so exciting; she read
Cornelia's letters to Mrs. Burton, who said she could see, and she told
Mrs. Saunders that, she would like it as much as Cornelia did, if she
were in her place; that she was a kind of Bohemian herself.
She tried to explain what Bohemian meant, and what Bohemia was; but
this is what no one can quite do. Charmian herself, who aimed to be a
perfect Bohemian, was uncertain of the ways and means of operating the
Bohemian life, when she had apparently thrown off all the restrictions,
for the afternoon, at least, that prevented its realization. She had a
faultless setting for it. There never was a girl's studio that was more
like a man's studio, an actual studio. Mr. Ludlow himself praised it;
he said he felt at home in it, and he liked it because it was not
carried a bit too far. Charmian's mother had left her free to do what
she wished, and there was not a convention of Philistine housekeeping
in the arrangement of the place. Everything was in the admired disorder
of an artist's environment; but Mrs. Maybough insisted upon neatness.
Even here Charmian had to submit to a compromise. She might and did
keep things strewn all about in her studio, but every morning the
housemaid was sent in to sweep it and dust it. She was a housemaid of
great intelligence, and an imperfect sense of humor, and she obeyed
with unsmiling scrupulosity the instructions she had to leave
everything in Miss Charmian's studio exactly as she found it, but to
leave it clean. In consequence, this home of art had an effect of
indescribable coldness and bareness, and there were at first some
tempestuous scenes which Cornelia witnessed between Charmian and her
mother, when the girl vainly protested:
"But don't you _see_, mamma, that if you have it regularly dusted, it
never can have any sentiment, any atmosphere?"
"I don't see how you can call _dust_ atmosphere, my dear," said her
stepmother. "If I left your studio looking as you want it, and there
should be a fire, what would people think?"
"Well, if there should happen to be anybody from Wilbraham, Mass.,"
Charmian retorted, "they might criticise, but I don't think the New
York Fire Department would notice whether the place had been dusted or
not. But, go on, mamma! _Some_ day I shall have a studio out of the
house--Cornelia and I are going to have one--and then I guess you won't
have it dusted!"
"I'm sure Miss Saunders wouldn't let it get dusty," said Mrs. Maybough,
and then, in self-defence, Charmian gave Cornelia the worst character
for housekeeping that she could invent from her knowledge of Cornelia's
room.
She begged her pardon afterwards, but she said she had to do it, and
she took what comfort she could in slamming everything round, as she
called it, in her studio, when she went with Cornelia to have her
coffee there. The maid restored it to its conscious picturesqueness the
next day.
Charmian was troubled to decide what was truly Bohemian to eat, when
they became hungry over their work. She provided candy and chocolate in
all their forms and phases, but all girls ate candy and chocolate, and
they were so missish, and so indistinctive, and they both went so badly
with tea, which she must have because of the weird effect of the
spirit-lamp under the kettle, that she disused them after the first
week. There remained always crackers, which went with anything, but the
question was what to have with them. Their natural association with
cheese was rejected because Charmian said she should be ashamed to
offer Mr. Ludlow those insipid little Neufchatel things, which were
made in New Jersey, anyway, and the Gruyere smelt so, and so did
Camembert; and pine-apple cheese was Philistine. There was nothing for
it but olives, and though olives had no savor of originality, the
little crescent ones were picturesque, and if you picked them out of
the bottle with the end of a brush-handle, sharpened to a point, and
the other person received them with their thumb and finger, the whole
act was indisputably Bohemian.
There was one day when they all got on particularly well, and Charmian
boldly ordered some champagne for a burst. The man brought back
Apollinaris water, and she was afraid to ask why, for fear he should
say Mrs. Maybough sent it. Ludlow said he never took champagne, and was
awfully glad of the Apollinaris, and so the change was a great success,
for neither Charmian nor Cornelia counted, in any case; they both hated
every kind of wine.
Another time, Cornelia, when she came, found Charmian lighting one of
the cigars kept for show on her mantel. She laughed wildly at
Cornelia's dismay, and the smoke, which had been going up her nose,
went down her throat in a volume, and Cornelia had to run and catch
her; she was reaching out in every direction for help.
Cornelia led her to the couch, which was still waiting its rugs to
become a bed, and she lay down there, very pale and still, and was
silent a long time, till Cornelia said, "Now, if I could find a moose
somewhere to run over you," and they both burst into a shriek of
laughter.
"But I'm going to _learn_" Charmian declared. "Where did that cigar
go?" She sprang up to look for it, but they never could find it, and
they decided it must have gone into the fire, and been burnt up; that
particular cigar seemed essential to the experiment, or at least
Charmian did not try another.
They were both very grave after Ludlow came. When he went away, he
said, with an absent look at Charmian, "You have a magnificent pallor
to-day, Miss Maybough, and I must compliment you on keeping much
quieter than usual."
"Oh, thank you," said Charmian, gravely, and as soon as the door closed
upon him she flung herself into Cornelia's arms, and they stifled their
laughter in each other's necks. It seemed to them that nothing so
wildly funny had ever happened before; they remained a long while
quaking over the question whether there was smell of smoke enough in
the room to have made him suspect anything, and whether his
congratulations were not ironical. Charmian said that her mistake was
in not beginning with a cigarette instead of a cigar; she said she was
ready to begin with a cigarette then, and she dared Cornelia to try
one, too. Cornelia refused the challenge, and then she said, well, she
would do it herself, some day.
There was a moment when it seemed to her that the Bohemian ideal could
be realized to a wild excess in pop-corn. She bought a popper and three
ears of corn, and brought them home tied up in paper, and fastened to
some canvases she got for Cornelia. She insisted that it was part of
the bargain that she should supply Cornelia's canvases. But the process
of popping made them all very red in the face; they had to take it by
turns, for she would not let Ludlow hold the popper the whole time.
They had a snowy heap of corn at last, which she put on the hearth
before them in the hollow of a Japanese shield, detached from a suit of
armor, for that use. They sat on the hearth to eat it, and they told
ghost-stories and talked of the most psychological things they could
think of. In all this Charmian put Cornelia forward as much as she
dared, and kept herself in a sort of impassioned abeyance. If Cornelia
had been the most jealous and exacting of principals she could not have
received from her second a more single and devoted allegiance.
Charmian's joy in her fortunately mounted in proportion to the devotion
she paid her, rather than Cornelia's gratitude for it. She did not like
to talk of herself, and these seances were nothing if not strictly
personal; but Charmian talked for her, and represented her in phases of
interest which Cornelia repudiated with a laugh, or denied outright,
without scruple, when the invention was too bold. Charmian contrived
that she should acquire the greater merit, from her refusals of it, and
went on to fresh self-sacrifices in her behalf.
Sometimes she started the things they talked of; not because she ever
seemed to have been thinking of them, or of anything, definitely, but
because she was always apparently letting her mind wander about in
space, and chanced upon them there. Mostly, however, the suggestions
came from Ludlow. He talked of art, its methods, its principles, its
duties to the age, the people, the civilization; the large moral uses,
which kindled Charmian's fancy, and made Cornelia laugh when Charmian
proposed a scheme for the relief and refinement of the poor on the East
Side, by frescoing the outsides of the tenement houses in Mott Street
and Mulberry Bend, with subjects recalling the home life of the
dwellers there: rice-fields and tea-plantations for the Chinese, and
views of Etna and Vesuvius and their native shores for the Sicilians
and Neapolitans, with perhaps religious histories.
Ludlow had to explain that he had not meant the employment of any such
direct and obvious means, but the gradual growth of a conscience in
art. Cornelia thought him vague, but it seemed clear to Charmian. She
said, "Oh, yes; _that_," and she made tea, and had him set fire to some
pieces of Southern lightwood on her hearth, for the sake of the murky
fumes and the wreaths of dusky crimson flame, which she said it was so
weird to sit by.
In all matters of artistic theory and practice she set Cornelia the
example of grovelling at the master's feet, as if there could be no
question of anything else; but in other things Cornelia sometimes
asserted herself against this slavish submission with a kind of
violence little short of impertinence. After these moral paroxysms, in
which she disputed the most obviously right and reasonable things, she
was always humiliated and cast down before his sincerity in trying to
find a meaning in her difference from him, as if he could not imagine
the nervous impulse that carried her beyond the bounds of truth, and
must accuse himself of error. When this happened she would not let
Charmian take her to task for her behavior; she would not own that she
was wrong; she put the blame on him, and found him arrogant and
patronizing. She had always known he was that kind of person, and she
did not mean to be treated like a child in everything, even if he was a
genius.
By this time they were far away from that point in Charmian's romance
where the faithful friend of the heroine remains forever constant to
her vow not to speak to the heroine of the hero's passion for her, and
in fact rather finds it a duty to break her vow, and enjoys being
snubbed for it. As the transaction of the whole affair took place in
Charmian's fancy, Cornelia had been obliged to indulge her in it, with
the understanding that she should not let it interfere with their work,
or try to involve her visibly or palpably in it.
With all their idling they had days when they worked intensely, and
Ludlow was as severe with Cornelia's work as he was with his own. He
made her rub out and paint out, and he drew ruthless modifications of
her work all over it, like the crudest of the Synthesis masters. He
made her paint out every day the work of the day before, as they did in
the Synthesis; though sometimes he paused over it in a sort of puzzle.
Once he said, holding her sketch into the light he wanted, at the close
of the afternoon, "If I didn't know you had done that to-day, I should
say it was the one you had done yesterday."
Toward the end of the month he recurred to this notion again.
"Suppose," he said, "we keep this, and you do another to-morrow."
The next day he said, in the same perplexity, "Well, keep this, and do
another."
After a week he took all her canvases, and set them one back of
another, but so that he could see each in nearly the same light. He
stood looking at them silently, with the two girls behind him, one at
either shoulder.
"It's as lovely as standing between two mirrors," Charmian suggested
dreamily.
"Pretty much of a sameness," Cornelia remarked.
"Mm," Ludlow made in his throat. He glanced over the shoulder next her,
and asked, as if Charmian were not there, "What makes you do her always
alike?"
"Because she _is_ always alike."
"Then I've seen her wrong," said Ludlow, and he stared at Charmian as
if she were a lay-figure. She bore his scrutiny as impassively as a
lay-figure could.
He turned again to Cornelia's sketches, and said gloomily, "I should
like to have Wetmore see these."
"Oh!" said Cornelia.
Charmian came to life with another "Oh!" and then she demanded. "When?
We must have something besides tea for Mr. Wetmore."
"I think I'll ask him to step round in the morning," said Ludlow, with
authority.
Charmian said "Oh!" again, but submitted with the eagerness of a
disciple; all phases of the art-life were equally precious, and even a
snub from such a master must be willingly accepted.
He went away and would not have any tea; he had an air of
trouble--almost of offence. "Isn't he grand, gloomy and peculiar?"
Charmian said. "I wonder what's the matter?"
She turned to Ludlow's picture which he had left standing on the chair
where he painted at it in disdain of an easel, and silently compared it
with Cornelia's sketches. Then she looked at Cornelia and gave a
dramatic start.
"What is the matter?" asked Cornelia. She came up and began to look at
the picture, too.