in her arms, those bits of clay which were part of her, to protect them
from the eyes of these two men who could command so much of the beauty
of the world. She gripped the back of a chair, while a defiant glare
came into her bright dark eyes.
The little grizzled man touched one of the clay figures. It was a study,
a fantastic interpretation of a famous tenor in one of his most
picturesque rôles.
“You knew him very well, didn’t you?”
She smiled her fleeting, ironic smile.
“From the top gallery. Once I bribed an usher to let me into the dress
circle.”
George Jean Purcell and Ybarra, the art dealer, looked at her sharply.
“My dear young lady,” cried Ybarra, “do you mean to say none of these
people sat to you?”
“To me! Why should they? And, anyway,” she added, “I didn’t want them to
sit to me. These are not portraits. They’re--bits of what goes on inside
of me, I suppose.”
Ybarra started to speak, but Purcell held up his hand. He looked from
Judith Todd to the bits of clay on the table. The tallest were perhaps
fourteen inches, figures of famous men and women, of little shopgirls,
of an ancient hag of a woman, of a blind man. Fantastic, gay, sinister,
and pathetic, each one had its authentic breath of life. They had been
done with the lightness of touch, the half-bitter whimsicality of a
genius that is afraid of itself. And into them there had been poured the
hunger and the rebellion of long repression.
George Jean Purcell shot a keen glance from under his gray brows at the
woman who stood clutching the back of a chair, trying to keep defiance
in her eyes. He noted the old serge suit, carelessly worn, the
unfashionable hat; and over and beyond these details he observed the
lines of endurance about her mouth, which could not obliterate its
humour. He also saw the rather bitter keenness of her dark bright eyes.
“Spinster,” he thought; “iron-bound sense of duty; starving for proper
soil to grow in. What miracle was it that let her do these amazing
things?” And aloud he said, “How did you happen to wait until now?”
She looked as if she thought the question a little stupid.
“I never had time, or a place to work in where I could do as I liked.”
“You have ties, obligations?”
She smiled without bitterness.
“I have to make a living; and I have a mother with a weak heart, who
can’t realize I’ve grown up.”
“You know you have genius?”
Her face became gay with a touch of impish humour.
“I know. It’s God’s little joke with me.”
Purcell chuckled grimly.
“You’re not giving anything away, young lady.” He offered his hand. “I’m
going to leave you with Ybarra and John. They’ll tell you what I want
you to do. And I hope, for the sake of an old man who treasures beauty
wherever he can find it, you will accept their advice.”
Without another glance or word he walked briskly out.
The instant the door closed on him, Ybarra seized her hands with an
exuberant Latin gesture.
“Congratulations, my dear young woman! I’ve never known old George Jean
to go so far for native talent.”
She looked past him appealingly at John Richmond, her face white.
“What does he mean?”
John Richmond detached Ybarra, and himself took her hands and looked
into her eyes. “Judith Todd, it means the end of the long road; it means
a fair chance at last. You know, don’t you, that when George Jean
Purcell puts in an order for an artist’s work, he’s got a pretty canny
idea that that artist has a future? Isn’t that so, Ybarra?”
“It has meant just that several times in the past.”
“Very well, that’s that,” said John Richmond. “Now you’re to finish up a
certain number of those figures--yes, yes, we know you can’t afford to
have them cast, but Mr. Purcell will attend to that. In return you will
sell him six that he chooses. I believe he gave you a check, Ybarra?
Perhaps if she sees that she’ll believe us.”
But though they put in her hands the slip of pale-green paper with its
figure which exceeded her earnings for a year in the novelty shop, she
did not look at it. Instead, her burning gaze clung desperately to John
Richmond’s face.
“You’re not fooling, are you? You wouldn’t be so cruel as that, would
you?”
Richmond’s eyes blurred. He made a signal to Ybarra, and the dealer
slipped out of the room, murmuring something about an engagement.
“Remember,” he said as he went out, “one of my galleries will be ready
for your exhibition in the autumn.”
With the sound of the closing door, Judith Todd collapsed upon a chair.
She was not the crying sort of woman; tears hurt her as they do a man;
but now the floods rushed over her. All the years when she had borne the
pain and the wonder of her gift alone, all the years when it had been
denied, were in that flood. And John Richmond went down on his knees. He
held her racked body close, murmuring his deep sympathy and
understanding. But presently, when she had grown calmer, she tried to
draw herself away, looking much ashamed.
“I’m a frightful fool, letting go like this; and I haven’t thanked you
yet. If you hadn’t lent me this studio, if you hadn’t encouraged me----”
“Don’t, Judith! You know--I’ve told you--ever since that rainy Sunday
afternoon in the Museum, when I saw you prowling around the Rodin things
like a hungry ghost, and finally got up courage to speak to you because
your face had such longing in it--ever since then I’ve believed in you.”
“Yes, you’ve believed in me,” she whispered, as if the wonder of it were
something she could never fathom. “The first one to believe in me.”
“But more than that,” he went on in a low voice. “I’ve loved you.”
She shrank a little and put up her hand.
“No, no, that can’t be so! Look at me, a shabby old maid. I know! I
haven’t got young nieces for nothing; and I’m considered a bit queer
too. That has always been rubbed into me too. But it doesn’t matter now.
You don’t need to think you love me, for I have so much now. A chance to
work, unashamed--and your friendship. I--I shall be content with that; I
don’t ask more than that.”
“Judith, don’t you know it’s a privilege to love you? Don’t you know
you’re wonderful in your courage and strength? Don’t you know you’re
beautiful?”
All the light and amazement there was in the world seemed to be in her
enormous eyes.
“It is too much,” she whispered, “to be offered love and fame all in one
hour. I’m afraid. I’ve never been afraid before, but now I’m scared. I’m
afraid of waking up.”
He drew her to her feet.
“Come and look at something real and you’ll know this is no dream.”
Together they stood beside the long table and bent over the little
figures so vital and so gay, which were the soul of Judith Todd squeezed
out of her by the drab discipline of the years, turning itself at the
first touch of encouragement into these vivid and mordant fragments.
“How did you do it?” he cried. “How did you get underneath the surface
like that, as if you had stripped off the smooth skin and seen what was
rioting underneath, the ridiculous and sublime fantasy of the soul?”
It was then that she laughed, low and happily.
“Because I am like that--all smooth and gray on the surface, and
underneath amazing--little coloured worlds within worlds, always
something dying and something else being born. No one ever is
commonplace, underneath. Why, take my family--at the supper table we
sit, a dull family in a narrow house in a Harlem street. But if you
watch with patience and insight, you see worlds opening up behind each
pair of eyes, longings, incredible dreams----”
She stopped abruptly, her eyes fixed on the door.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I thought I heard my name. Wait, let me look. Someone out there----”
She threw open the door. A sleek young man dropped his hand from the arm
of a girl who sprang forward with a cry of the frankest relief, “Aunt
Jude! I want to go home with you.”
* * * * *
The socks and stockings were all darned and they lay neatly folded in a
ring around the darning basket. The evening noises in the street outside
were stilled, and the narrow house in the Harlem street was quietly
breathing, waiting. Alyse yawned, looked at the clock and put on her
sad-coloured hand-loomed hat. Another evening practically wasted. Of
course, she had a sense of having done her duty, and it was nice to
spend a peaceful evening with Mother. But from the point of view of
literature she had got nothing out of it. Families were mostly like
that, nice as something to come home to occasionally, but utterly
unstimulating to the imagination.
“Mother, do you suppose Father could afford to send me to Russia----”
And just there the telephone rang. It was her father, and he told Allie
to tell her mother not to be worried if he was a bit late getting home.
The fact was, he chuckled, he and Wally had got arrested.
“Arrested! Father! What for?”
“Well, you see,” he explained, “Wally bid on a package at the
express-company auction, and we were taking it away down a side street,
sort of dark, you know, when the darned thing dropped and broke. A
policeman came snooping along just at that minute and he ran us in.”
“But why, why, Father?”
“I guess he thought we were bootleggers, because Wally, for a joke, kind
of helped it along, and----”
“But what was in the package, father?”
“Well, that was a joke on us,” said George Todd, and she could hear his
appreciative chuckle over the wire. “You see, there was two dozen
bottles of hair tonic in that darned package.”
Alyse hung up the telephone with a disapproving face.
“You might know that if anything happened to Father it would be
something ridiculous,” she sighed.
DERRICK’S RETURN
BY GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
From _Cosmopolitan_
Derrick dreamed that Indians had captured him and had laid him face down
in their camp fire and were slowly burning his head off. As a matter of
fact a surgeon was working out a difficult problem in the back of
Derrick’s throat, and for a little while, toward the end of the
operation, anesthesia had not been complete.
The operation was a success. Something that ought not to have been in
Derrick’s throat was now out of it, and an incorrect arrangement of this
and that had been corrected. The only trouble was a slight, ever so
slight bleeding which could not be stopped. The measures taken to stop
it were worse than the dream about the Indians, and, still worse, they
didn’t stop it. The thin trickle of blood kept on trickling until the
reservoirs from which it came were empty, and then the doctors--there
were a good many of them now--told the woman who sobbed and carried on
that her husband’s sufferings were all over. They told her that Derrick
was dead.
But Derrick wouldn’t have admitted that. Even the bleeding and the pain
of which he seemed to have died were now but vague and negligible
memories. The great thing was to get out of that body which had already
begun to decay, and making use of a new and perfectly delightful power
of locomotion, to get as far away from it as possible. He caught up with
sounds and passed them. And he discovered presently that he could move a
little more quickly than light. In a crumb of time some unerring
intuition told him that he had come to the Place to which some other
unerring intuition had directed him.
Among the beautiful lights and shadows and colours of that Place, he
learned fast. There were voices which answered his questions just as
fast as he could think them. And something wonderful had happened to his
memory, because it was never necessary to think the same question twice.
Knowledge came to stay. To discover how very little he had ever really
known about anything didn’t humiliate him. It was funny. It made him
laugh.
And now that he was able to perceive what insuperable obstacles there
must always be between the man-mob and real knowledge of any kind, he
developed a certain respect for the man-mob. It had taken them, for
instance, so many millions of years to find out that the world on which
they lived was not flat but round. The wonder was that they had made the
discovery at all. And they had succeeded in prying into certain other
secrets that they were not supposed to know--ever. As, for instance, the
immortality of the soul, and how to commit race suicide.
To let the man-mob discover its own immortality had been a dreadful
mistake. Everybody admitted that now. The discovery had made man take
himself seriously and caused him to evolve the erroneous doctrine that
the way to a happy immortality lay only through making his brief
mortality and that of others as miserable as possible.
He thought a question and received this answer, only the answer was in
terms of thought rather than in words:
“No, they were put on earth to be happy and to enjoy themselves. For no
other reason. But for some reason or other nobody told them, and they
got to taking themselves seriously. They were forced to invent all kinds
of sins and bad habits so that they could gain favour by resisting
them.... But with all respect to what you are now, you must perceive and
admit what a perfect ass you were up to the time of your recent, and so
called, death.”
He thought another question. The answer was a negative.
“No. They will not evolve into anything better. They have stood still
too long and got themselves into much too dreadful a mess. As a pack
they will never learn that they were meant only to be happy and to enjoy
themselves. Individuals, of course, have from time to time had this
knowledge and practised it, and will, but the others won’t let them
practise it. But don’t worry. Man will die out, and insects will step in
and succeed where he failed. Souls will continue for millions of years
to come to this place, to learn what you are learning, and be happy to
know that they have waked for ever from the wretched little nightmare
they made for themselves on earth. And since happiness is inseparable
from laughter, it will make them laugh to look back and see how
religiously they side-stepped and ducked out of everything that was
really worth while.”
II
In the first days of some novel, beautiful, or merely exciting
experience a man misses neither his friends nor his family. And it was a
long time, as time is reckoned here on earth, before Derrick realized
that he had parted from all his without so much as bidding any one of
them good-bye.
In time, of course, they would all come to the place where he now found
himself, and share with him all that delicious wealth of knowledge and
clear vision the lack of which now stood between them and happiness.
Here the knowing how to be happy seemed the mere _a b c_ of happiness.
It was the first thing you learned. You not only learned how to be
happy; but you applied your easily acquired knowledge and you actually
_were_ happy.
But how, the earth dweller asks, can the spirit of a man, separated from
his wife and children and from the friends he loves, and conscious of
the separation, be happy? Very easily. It was one of Derrick’s first
questions, and the answer had been perfectly satisfactory.
He could always go back. He had learned that almost at once. There is no
such thing as separation. If he chose to wait where he was, gathering
the sweetest and delightfulest knowledge among the lovely lights and
shadows and colours and perfumes, even as a man gathers flowers in a
beautiful garden, in the course of time all those whom he had loved so
greatly would come to him and be with him for ever. But if waiting would
make him unhappy, here where no one need be unhappy, he could always go
back. When? Now. Soon. Whenever he liked. Oh, it took a little time to
get back; but not much. If, for instance, his wife at a given moment
were about to lift her hands to her hair, and at that same moment he
made up his mind to go back to her and actually started, he would get to
her before her hands had moved more than a thousandth of an inch from
her lap.
How could he communicate with her? As of old, if he liked. He could be
with her. She could hear his voice, on occasions, if the actinic and
electrical conditions were just right. She might actually see him. And
of course he would be able to see her and to hear her. There was never
any trouble about that. If he wanted to be with his family _all_ the
time, until they in turn got ready to come here, there was nothing to
prevent--absolutely nothing. But had he, in his earth life, ever wanted
to be with his dear ones _all_ the time? Probably not. One of these days
he would probably run into Romeo and Juliet. Very likely he would find
them together. They were often together; but not always. Probably, like
other loving spirits, he would not wish to be with _his_ family _all_
the time. He would probably do as other spirits did--go and come, and go
and come.
About communicating? He would probably find that plain straight talk was
too strong for earth dwellers. It had been tried out on them often, and
usually disastrously. It was like forcing champagne and brandy on men
who had always been content with beer. Straight talk from the spirit
world often produced epilepsy among earth dwellers. It was too much for
them to have all at once. And then such a very little was enough to
content them, and he would find it far more satisfactory to furnish them
with a little--a mysterious and nicely stage-managed _little_--than with
a plain-spoken straight from the shoulder _lot_. To the wise, and he was
now beginning to be wise, a hint is sufficient. Suppose, his wife being
at her dressing table, he were to plant himself beneath and rap out a
few words in the Morse code? Let him keep on with these rappings until
she called in someone to interpret them for her.
He could not only comfort her about his death and reassure her as to his
general whereabouts and activities, but he could have a lot of fun with
her. There is no harm in having harmless fun with those you love. It is
the fear of fun, the suspicion with which it is regarded, more than any
one single thing, that has given the man-pack such a miserable run for
its money. By means of the Morse code, he could persuade her to buy a
ouija board. He would love that, and so would she and the children.
But Derrick kept putting off his return to the earth.
If a loving husband and father were turned loose in the finest jewellery
store in the world and told to take his pick of the diamonds and rubies
and pearls, as many as he could carry, he would not at once rush off to
tell his loved ones of the astounding privilege that had been extended
to him. He would stick to the store. He would hang about it possibly for
days taking mental stock of all its precious contents. Blurring the tops
of the glass show cases with his breath and staring till his eyes ached.
Derrick was in somewhat the same case. He had the impulse to rush off at
once to his family to tell them of the extraordinary wisdom and mental
equilibrium which were being lavished upon him; but he was restrained by
the very natural wish to remain where he was until the last vestiges of
earth marks had been rubbed from him.
He had been a very decent man as men go; but the amazing sense of purity
which now pervaded his being was new in his experience. It was not so
much a smug consciousness and conceit in personal purity as a happy
negation of all that is not directly of the spirit in its most calm and
lucid moments.
Here nothing soiled and nothing tired. An immense and delicious mental
activity swept one past all the earthly halting places. There was no
eating or drinking or love-making. There was no sleeping, and the mere
fact of existence among the lights and shadows and colours was more
cleansing than the most refined species of Oriental bathing.
Life here was mental. Burning curiosities and instantaneous
satisfactions thereof seemed at once the aim and the end of existence.
And since there can be no limit to the number and extent of the spirit’s
curiosities, it was obvious that there could be no limit to existence
itself. And Derrick together with those spirits which had passed into
the Place at the same time with his own began to have a clear
understanding of humanity.
Here, for instance, all that one learned about God was fact, but there
was so much to learn that heaping fact on fact, with a speed unknown on
earth--even in the heaping of falsehood upon falsehood--it would take
from now until eternity to learn all about God. And this, of course,
had to be the case. Since God is infinite, He can only be wholly
revealed to those who, by pursuing knowledge to infinity, have acquired
infinite knowledge.
The man-mob conception of God seemed very absurd to him. For man had
formed it in the days when he still believed the earth to be flat, and
had subsequently seen no good reason or obligation to change it. The
man-mob had never gone beyond the idea that God was a definite person to
whom certain things like praise and toadying were infinitely agreeable,
and to whom certain other things like being happy and not very serious
were as a red rag to a bull. This conception was the work of certain men
who, the moment they had conceived a God in their own narrow and
intolerant image, became themselves godlike. To men of that stamp simple
and practical discoveries in geography, mechanics, or ceramics would
have been utterly out of the question. But the greatest discovery of all
with its precise descriptions and limitations lay to their credit. And
from that time to this no very great number of men had ever taken the
trouble to gainsay them, or ever would.
“I never did, for one,” thought Derrick, and he recalled with a smile
the religious phases through which he had passed in his earth life. As
he remembered that he had once, for a short period of his childhood,
believed in the fiery, old-fashioned Hell of the Puritans, the smile
broadened, and he burst into joyous and musical laughter.
III
There was one thing that he must be prepared to face. His wife and their
three children would _look_ just as they had looked when he last saw
them, and as a matter of fact they would _be_ just what they were; but
to him, with all his new and accurate knowledge and his inconceivably
clear vision, they would seem to have changed greatly.
He had always considered his wife an intelligent, well-educated, even an
advanced woman, and he had considered his children, especially the
youngest, who was a girl, altogether brighter and more precocious than
his neighbour’s children. Well, along those lines he must be prepared
for shocks and disillusionment.
It would not be possible, for instance, to sit down with his wife to a
rational discussion of anything. She would seem like a moron to him:
superstitious, backward, ignorant, and stubborn as a mule. He would find
her erroneous beliefs and convictions hard to change. It would be the
same with the children, but in less degree. The oldest was twelve, and
his brain was still capable of a little development. He would have some
inclination to listen to his father and to believe what his father told
him. With Sammy aged ten, and Ethel, aged eight, much might be done.
He would begin by asking these young hopefuls to forget everything that
had been taught them, with the exception of that one startling fact,
that the world is round. He would then proceed to feed their eager young
earth minds on as many simple and helpful truths as would be good for
them, and he would show them, what was now so clear to him, how to find
happiness on earth with a minimum of labour and worry.
A question carelessly thought and instantly answered caused him to
return to earth sooner than he had intended. The answer to his question
had been in the nature of a hard jolt. It had to do with sin.
Sin, he learned, is not doing something which other people regard as
sinful, but something which you yourself know to be sinful. Lying,
theft, arson, murder, bigamy may on occasion be acts of light, charity,
and commiseration, no matter how the man-mob may execrate, judge, and
punish them. But the same things may be also the worst of crimes. And
only the individual who commits them can possibly know. That individual
doesn’t even have to know. It is what he thinks that counts; not what he
pretends to think, not what he swears in open court that he did think,
but what, without self-deception, he actually did and does think.