The house where Gerald lived was the same one he had lived in since the
days of Boston and Charlestown. His mother, coming to Florence with her
two children, a boy of ten, a girl of seven, had needed to look for a
modest corner in which to build their nest. The income of which she
found herself possessed after settling up her husband's affairs, even
when supplemented by the allowance made her by his family, so little
permitted of extravagance that she chose the topmost story of the house
in Borgo Pinti, with those long, long stairs that perhaps had
contributed to keep Gerald's legs thin.
Its street door was narrow, its entrance-hall dark; the stone stairs
climbed from darkness into semi-darkness, reaching the daylight when
they likewise reached the Fanes' landing. But the old house was not
without dignity; all three loved it.
As you entered the Fanes', there was another dark hall, very long,
running to right and left. One small window opposite, on an inner court,
was all that lighted it. This hall grew darker still, as well as
narrower, after turning a corner to the left; then it turned to the
right, and was lighter. At the end of it was a window from which, if you
bent out, you saw far below you a garden.
The rooms, without being lofty and vaulted, like those on the ground and
first floors, were pleasantly high, and paved with brick tiles. From the
one large interior room a window-door opened on to a terrace in the
court--a deep brick terrace with a broad ledge on which stood a row of
flower-pots. When water was wanted, you opened a little door in the
kitchen wall and let your copper urn down, down, down into
mossy-smelling blackness; you heard a splash and gurgle, and after
proper exertions got it back brimming.
The Italian-ness of it all captivated the mother, who had been drawn to
this dot on the map, where she was told one could live well at less
expense than in the United States, by the lure of the idea of Italy. She
was very humbly an artist. She had given drawing lessons to young ladies
in an elegant seminary, and, when approaching middle age, married the
father of one of these, a troubled, conscientious man whom the cares of
an entangled and disintegrating business kept awake at night. When his
need for feminine sympathy ceased, and administrators settled in their
summary way the questions that had furrowed his brow, his widow's wish
to start life anew far from the scene of her worries had led to the
balmy thought of Italy--Italy, where were all the wonders which had most
glamour for her fancy.
She had loved it in an undiminished way to the end, had never really
desired to go home, though she spoke of it sometimes when the chill of
the stone floors and walls shook her fortitude, and the remembrance of
furnace heat, gas-light, hot water on tap, glowed rosy as a promise of
eternal summer. The children, however, were taught in their respective
schools that artificial heat is insalubrious; they had Italian ideas and
chilblains; not on account of any creature comfort that they missed
would Florence have been changed back for Charlestown.
In her picturing of days far ahead Mrs. Fane certainly saw Lucile, an
accomplished young lady, receiving tributes of attention in the
drawing-rooms of home; and Gerald, a young man of parts, finding
recognition and fortune among his countrymen. To go home eventually was
among her cloudy plans.
But Lucile died at sixteen, without adequate cause, one almost would
have said. She merely had not the ruggedness, the resistance, needed to
go on living among the rough winds of this world. The mother, a creature
of old-fashioned gentleness and profound affections, survived her by
only a few years.
A business matter then obliged Gerald to go to America, and had he liked
the place, he might have taken up his abode there. It affected him like
vinegar dropped in a wound, like street din heard from a hospital bed.
He turned back, and the long stairs to his empty dwelling were dear and
sweet to him on the day of his return.
This, then, had remained his home. His needs were simple, and he could
live without applying himself to uncongenial work, though the allowance
had been stopped, and the income, as Leslie had said, was incredibly
small. The good Giovanna, who had been his mother's servant, stayed on
with her _signorino_, and economized for him; the wages of an
Italian servant were in those days no extravagance. He had no pleasures
that cost money; he neither traveled nor went to fine restaurants. He
wore neat, old well-brushed clothes, went afoot, gave to the poor single
coppers. But he had liberty, worked when he pleased and as he pleased;
he was content to be poor, so long as his poverty did not reach the
point where it involves cutting a poor figure. Giovanna, prouder than
her master, disliked the thought of _far cattiva figura_ even more
than did he, and was careful in her household management to keep up a
certain style, never forgetting the sprig of parsley on the platter
beside the single _braciolina_.
At one period he had contemplated a change in his mode of living, had
dreamed of entering the contest for laurels and gold, so as to afford a
more appropriate setting for the beauty of his charmer. The Charmer had
attained without need of him the setting she craved, and Gerald went on
climbing his long stairs, painting in his so personal and unpopular way,
and at night reading by light of a solitary lamp the choice and subtle
masterpieces of many literatures.
* * * * *
"My land! shall we _ever_ get to the top?" whispered Aurora to
Estelle as, one behind the other, sliding their hands along the wall,
they felt with their feet for the steps that led to Gerald's door. "He
told us they were long, and he warned us they were dark, but this!... I
wonder why they don't have a lamp going, or something."
"Because there isn't any image of the Virgin," said Estelle, lightly.
"It's our just having come in from the sunshine makes it seem dark. It's
getting lighter. Cheer up! It's good for you."
"It'll make me lose three pounds, I shouldn't wonder."
They spoke in whispers, because when they had pulled the bell-knob and
the door had swung open, a voice from incalculable altitudes had shouted,
"_Chi e?_" They had answered, as instructed, "_Amici_," and now they
pictured somebody listening to their shuffling ascent.
At the top, in fact, stood Giovanna, who regarded them with an eye the
color of strong black coffee and said, "_Riverisco_!"
The small old woman had a thin, bronze Dantesque face, molded by a
thousand indignations--all directed against proper objects of
indignation--to a settled severity; a face of narrow concentrated
passions and perfect fidelity and a preference for few words. The
friendly smiles of Aurora and Estelle produced in her a relenting.
Courtesy here demanded a pleasant look, and Giovanna was always
courteous. She stood aside for Gerald, who came to the very door to
welcome these ladies.
The guests were now assembled. One of them was staying with Gerald--Abbe
Johns, who had come for a few days from Leghorn, where he lived. The
others were Mrs. Foss and Miss Seymour.
What had been in Mrs. Fane's time the drawing-room had since become also
a studio. The landlord had permitted his tenant to increase the light by
extending the windows across the street-side wall. Beyond that, there
were as few signs about of the art-trade as Gerald had affectations of
the artist. The model-stand supporting books and things appeared like a
low table; easel, canvases, portfolios, all the littering properties of
a painter, had been shoved for the occasion into the next room, a
spacious glory-hole which Giovanna did not permit to become dusty beyond
the decent.
The result of removing, first, many of the things that made the room a
drawing-room, then, most of the things that made it a studio, left the
place rather bare. It was according to Gerald's taste: few things in it,
each having the merit of either beauty or interest, else the excuse of
utility.
Mrs. Foss had waited for Aurora's arrival to make the tea. The feast was
very simple. Gerald offered what his mother had used to offer. Giovanna
cut the bread-and-butter as that genteel lady had taught her, and
continued to buy the plum-cake at the same confectioner's.
Aurora had come in from the sunshine and cold with January roses in her
cheeks and exhilaration in her blood. At sight of her beloved Mrs. Foss
she laughed for joy. She rejoiced also to see Miss Seymour, who was one
of her "likes," and she was immensely interested to meet the abbe, whom
she knew to be Gerald's best friend, even as Estelle was hers. She loved
Gerald for having just these people to meet them at tea, the ones he
himself thought most of. She felt sweetly flattered at being made one of
a company so choicely wise and good.
But the result was not exactly fortunate for the gaiety of the little
party, if Aurora's laugh had been counted upon to enliven it. Far from
shy though she was, she developed a disinclination to-day to speak. She
was impressed by the abbe, for whom her conversation did not seem to her
good enough.
The young priest, a convert to Catholicism, was Gerald's age, and had it
not been for his collar, the cut of his coat, would have looked like a
not at all unusual Englishman with blue eyes, curly black hair, a touch
of warm color in his shaven cheeks. Unless you sat across the tea-table
from him and now and then, while he quietly and unassumingly talked, met
his eyes.
Some persons said that he looked ascetic, some austere, some angelic.
Mrs. Foss, not finding the right adjective for his mixture of poise and
humanity, was content to call him charming. Gerald, who had known him
when they were Vin and Raldi to each other and equally far from entering
the Church, regarded him as simply the nicest fellow he knew. Aurora had
no definition for him, but did not feel disposed to ripple on as usual
in his hearing. Yet she would have liked to make friends with him, too.
She would have said to him some such thing as, "What are the thoughts
you have, which make you so calm, deep inside? But I know. We learned
them at our mother's knee, but in the fury of living, having fun,
getting on, we never revisit the chamber where they are kept. You live
in it."
He was talking with Estelle like any other man whose conversation should
not contain the faintest element of gallantry, and Estelle was talking
to him with an ease that Aurora marveled at. Aurora marveled how Estelle
could know, or seem to know, a lot of things which she had never before
given sign of caring about. If the two of them were not conversing upon
the symbolism of religious art! Having finished his tea, the abbe went
to fetch a book from Gerald's shelves, which he knew as well as his own,
and Estelle was shown reproductions of carvings on old cathedrals.
Mrs. Foss, who had been talking of the Carnival now beginning, telling
Aurora about corsi and coriandoli of the past as compared with the poor
remnants of these customs, and describing the still undiminished glories
of a veglione, perceiving finally that the usually merry lady was on her
best behavior to the point of almost complete taciturnity, from
necessity addressed herself more directly to Miss Seymour, who shared
the sofa with her; and from talking of _veglioni_ the two slid into
talking of Florentine affairs more personal.
The task of entertaining Mrs. Hawthorne thus devolving upon Gerald, he
took it up in a way that flatteringly presupposed in her an interest in
general questions. His manner seemed to her very formal. She forgot
that, innocent as their relations were, he yet could not before people
speak to her with the lack of ceremony that in private made her feel
they were such good friends. But even aside from this cool and correct
manner, Gerald seemed to her different to-day--calmer, more serene, less
needing sympathy, as if something of his friend the abbe had rubbed off
on to him.
As he was going on, in language that reminded her of a book, she
interrupted him.
"Don't you want to show me your house?"
"I was going to suggest it," he said at once. "There are several things
I should like to show you. Will you come?"
She rose to follow, losing some of her constraint.
"It's what we always do on the Cape. Any one comes for the first time,
we show them all over our house."
When they were outside the drawing-room door, she felt more like
herself.
"Oh, I'm so glad I can't tell you to see the place where you live!" she
expanded.
They went down the long corridor, past a closed door which he
disappointingly did not open.
"It's a dark room we use to store things," he explained. Neither did he
open the door at the end of the hall. "It's Vincent's room," he said.
They turned into the darker, narrower corridor, bent again, and went
toward the little window high over somebody else's garden. He ushered
Mrs. Hawthorne into the kitchen, for here, near the ceiling, was the
door-bell, and on it the well-known coat of arms, crown and
cannon-balls, which testified to the age and aristocracy of the house.
While he sought to interest her in this curiosity, Aurora was looking at
everything besides; for Giovanna was making preparations for dinner, and
Aurora's thoughts were busy with the fowl she saw run on a long spit and
waiting to be roasted before a bundle of sticks at the back of the sort
of masonry counter that served as kitchen stove.
"They do have the queerest ways of doing things!" she murmured.
He took her across the passage and into the dining-room. He wished to
show her an old china tea-set, quaintly embellished with noble palaces
and parks, that had been his great-grandmother's. There again she looked
but casually at the thing he accounted fit for her examination, and
carefully, if surreptitiously, at all the rest.
Last he showed her into the great square interior room with the glass
door on to the terrace over the court, the room which had been his
mother's and was now his own, and where hung a portrait of his mother.
On this Aurora fixed attentive and serious eyes, and had no need to
feign feeling, for appropriate feelings welled in her heart.
"How gentle she looks!" she said softly. "And how much you must miss
her!"
She stood for some time really trying to make acquaintance with the
vanished woman through that faded pastel likeness of her in youth which
Gerald kept where it had hung in her day, the portrait of herself which
she womanishly preferred because, as she did not conceal, it flattered
her.
"She looks like one of those people you would have just loved to lift
the burdens off and make everything smooth for," Aurora said; "and yet
she looks like one of those people who spend their whole lives trying to
make things smooth for others."
"Yes," said Gerald to that artless description of the feminine woman his
mother had been, and stood beside his guest, looking pensively up at the
portrait.
All at once, Aurora felt like crying. It had been increasing, the
oppression to her spirits, ever since she entered this house to which
she had come filled with gay anticipation and innocent curiosity. It had
struck her from the first moment as gloomy, and it was undoubtedly cold,
with its three sticks of wood ceremoniously smoking in the unaccustomed
chimney-place. Its esthetic bareness had affected her like the
meagerness of poverty. And now it seemed to her sad, horribly so,
haunted by the gentle ghosts of that mother and sister who had known and
touched all these things, sat in the chairs, looked through the windows,
and who conceivably came back in the twilight to flit over the
uncarpeted floor and peer in the dim mirrors to see how much the grave
had changed them. She shivered. Yes, cold and bare and sad seemed
Gerald's dwelling. And Gerald, whose very bearing was a dignified denial
that anything about himself or his circumstances could call for
compassion--Gerald, thin and without color, looked to her cold-pinched
and under-nourished. She had a sense of his long evenings alone,
drearily without fire, his solitary meals in that dining-room so
unsuggestive of good cheer; she thought of that single candle on the
night-table burning in this cold, large room where he went to bed in
that bed of iron, laying his head on that small hair pillow, to dream
bitter dreams of a fair girl's treachery.
She wanted to turn to him protesting:
"Oh, I can't stand it! What makes you do it?"
His next words changed the current of her thoughts.
"I have another portrait of my mother," he said; "one I painted, which I
will show you if you care to see it."
She cheered up.
"Do! do!" she urged heartily. "I'm crazy to see something you've
painted."
"You won't care for my painting," he pronounced without hesitation; "but
the portrait gives a good idea of my mother, I think, when she was older
than this."
They returned to the drawing-room, where their friends were in the same
way engaged as when they left them. One pair was looking at a large
illustrated book; the other two sat leaning toward each other talking in
undertones.
"The bird which you see," the abbe was saying, "with the smaller birds
crowding around him, is a pelican. The pelican, you know, who opens his
breast to feed his young, is a symbol of the Church."
"It's not true, though, that the pelican does that," Estelle was on the
point of saying with American freedom, "any more than that a scorpion
surrounded by fire commits suicide. I read it in a Sunday paper where a
lot of old superstitions were exploded." But she tactfully did nothing
of the sort. She appeared instructed and impressed.
What Miss Seymour was saying to Mrs. Foss would have sounded a little
singular to any one overhearing. The two women had been friends for
years, but never come so near to each other as, it chanced, they did
that afternoon, when all fell so favorably for a heart to heart talk.
"I feel as if I had lost a key!" said Miss Seymour, and looked like a
bewildered princess turned old by a wicked fairy's spell. "When I
possessed it I thought nothing of it. It opened all the doors, but I
didn't know what it was made them so easy to open. Only now, when it's
gone, I know the value of that little golden key."
"I know," said Mrs. Foss, sympathetically. "There's no use in us women
pretending we don't mind! Those who really and truly don't must be great
philosophers or great fools, or else selfless to a degree that is rarer
even than philosophy...."
Gerald and Aurora crossed the room unhailed and entered the room beyond,
where dusty canvases, many deep, stood face to the wall.
He found the unframed painting of his mother and placed it on the easel.
The short winter day was waning, but near the window where the easel
stood there was still light enough to see by.
Aurora looked a long time without saying anything; Gerald did not speak
either. After the length of time one allows for the examination of a
picture, he took away that one and put another in its place; and so on
until he had shown her a dozen.
"I don't know what to say," she finally got out, as if from under a
crushing burden of difficulty to express herself.
"Please don't try!" he begged quickly. "And please not to care a bit if
you don't like them."
She let out her breath as at the easing of a strain. He heard it.
"I won't be so offensive," he went on, "as to say that in not liking
them you merely add yourself to the majority, nor yet that my feelings
are in no wise hurt by your failure to like them. But I do wish you to
know that I think it a sin and a shame to get a person like you, who
can't pretend a bit, before a lot of beastly canvases inevitably
repugnant to your mood and temperament, and make you uncomfortable with
the feeling that compliments are expected."
"All right, then; I won't tell any lies." She added in a sigh, "I did
want so much to like them!"
And he would never know what shining bubble burst there. She had wanted
so much, as she said, to like them, and, as she did not say, to buy some
of them, a great many of them, and make him rich with her gold.
He replied to her sigh:
"You are very kind."
After a moment spent gazing at the last painting placed on the easel, as
if she hoped tardily to discover some merit in it, she said:
"I don't know a thing about painting, so nothing I could say about your
way of doing it could matter one way or the other. But I have eyes to
see the way things and people look. Tell me, now, honest Injun, do they
look that way to you--the way you paint them?"
He laughed.
"Mrs. Hawthorne, no! Emphatically, no. And emphatically yes. When I look
at them as you do, in the street, across the table, they look to me
probably just as they do to you; but when I sit down to paint them--yes,
they look to me as I have shown them looking in these portraits."
"But they're so sad! So sad it's cruel!" she objected.
"Oh, no," he objected to her objection; "it's not quite as bad as that."
"They make me perfectly miserable."
He whipped the canvas off the easel, saying dryly:
"Don't think of them again!"
It looked like impatience. With hands thrust in his pockets he took a
purposeless half-turn in the room, then came back to her side.
"If you totally detest them, I am sorry," he said mildly. "I had wanted
to offer you one, a little, unobtrusive one to stick in some corner, a
token of the artist's regard."
"Oh, do! do!" she grasped at his friendly tender. "Find a little
cheerful one, if you can. I shall love to have it."
He selected a small panel of a single tall, palely expanding garden
poppy, more gray than violet, against a background of shade. Flower
though it was, it still affected one like the portrait of a lady wronged
and suffering.
In the drawing-room to which they returned Giovanna had lighted a lamp.
The fire had properly caught and was burning more brightly; the place
looked rosy and warm, after the winter twilight filling the other room
and the chill that reigned there.
Aurora returned to the tea-table; with a disengaged air she reached for
plum-cake. She ascertained with comfort that Mrs. Foss did not look sad
or Estelle ill used; that the abbe was as serene as ever and Miss
Seymour, after her talk with Mrs. Foss, rather serener than usual.
Gerald was far jollier than any of his portraits. To make sure that she
was no depressing object herself, she smiled the warmest, sunniest smile
she was capable of.
"Do come and talk a little bit with me, before I have to go home!" she
unexpectedly called out to the abbe.
When at the end of the long evening spent together smoking and talking
the two friends separated for the night, Gerald went to his room as did
Vincent to his. But Gerald had no more than pulled off his necktie when
he changed his mind, went back to the drawing-room, crossed the
tobacco-scented space where something seemed to linger of the warmth of
goodfellowship, and entered the farther room.
A doubt had risen in his mind. He could not wait till morning to see his
work with a fresh eye, an eye as fresh as Mrs. Hawthorne's, and satisfy
himself as to whether he, so careful of truth, had unconsciously come to
exaggerating, falsifying his impressions, grown guilty of hollow
mannerisms.
Whatever he had said, he had been stung by Mrs. Hawthorne's liking his
paintings so little. It was easy to console oneself remembering the poor
lady's ignorance of art. The truth might be that something was wrong
with the pictures, which suspicion had driven the artist to go and have
a dispassionate look at them in the frigid hour between twelve and one
of the night. If a person is on the way to becoming a morbid ass he
cannot find it out too soon.
Gerald's dogma was that the first duty of a picture is to be beautiful.
His critics did not give sufficient attention to that aspect of his
work, he privately thought; they were put off by what they mistakenly
called its queerness, its mere difference from the academic, the
conventional. This was bitter, because he had always so loved beautiful
lines, beautiful tints, had insisted that the very texture, of his
painting should have the beauty of fine-grained skin.
He was no conspicuous colorist, of course, he did not by temperament
revel in the glow of rich, bold, endlessly varied tints. It was a
limitation, which his work naturally reflected. This was marked in fact
by modesty and melancholy of color-scheme. But that did not interfere
with beauty, he maintained. He had been thrilled by the discovery in the
Siena gallery of an old master with the same predilections as he, an
antipathy apparently to the vivid, crying, self-assertive colors, which
he accordingly with admirable simplicity left out, and interpreted the
world all in blues and greens, grays and violets, whites of many degrees
and tones and meanings.
"They're so sad that it's cruel!" Mrs. Hawthorne had voiced the
instinctive objection of her earth-loving, life-praising disposition to
the view he took of people and things. But what was there to do about
it? When he looked at a sitter to render his personality sincerely, that
was the way he saw him. If he had been limited to rendering a human
being in the single aspect he wore while walking from the drawing-room
to the dinner-table with a lady on his arm and a rich meal in prospect,
he would have given up painting, it interested him so little. Most of
the portrait-painters in vogue did thus paint the surface and nothing
besides. Gerald had no envy of their large fees at the price of such
boredom as he would have suffered in their place.
He held a canvas to the light of his candle. It was an old one of
Amabel. She had not been sitting for him, he had made this sketch from a
distance while she worked on her side. It was easy to see that the room
was cold, that the woman with the pinched aristocratic nose, the little
shawl over her shoulders, was poor, determined and anxious. If Mrs. Foss
had said, "But Amabel never was as hollow-cheeked as that, nor ever
looked pathetic in the least," Gerald could only have answered, "I swear
to you this is how she looked to me on that day."
He studied the portrait of his mother, one of his earliest, bad in a
way, but excellent in the matter of likeness. His mother no more than
Amabel had been a pathetic person, Mrs. Foss would certainly have said.
To which Gerald might have answered that she was not so during an
afternoon call; but that the most characteristic thing about that gentle
and delicate woman had been the fact of her living so much in the life
of others and being open to endless sorrows through them. The dim
affectionate eyes, the deprecating half-smile of his mother, engaged
sympathy for the unfair plight.
Last, he took up a portrait of Violet. She had been in the perfection of
young beauty; she had had no capacity for deep feeling, really,--why did
an aroma of sadness escape from that dainty colored shadow of her? Why,
but because of the artist's yearning sense that beauty is transitory,
and the loveliest girl subject to destiny, and the future full of
pitfalls for the fragility of all flesh!
"Imagine a barnyard fowl, a common white hen pecking among the gravel,"
Gerald once illustrated his view-point, "and imagine hovering over it a
hawk, which it hasn't seen. Does it make no difference in your sense of
the hen that _you_ see the hawk?"
"It comes to this," Leslie on a certain occasion summed up Gerald's
case: "Gerald isn't satisfied to paint the thing that's before him. All
he cares to paint is the soul of things, and what you finally see
expressed on the canvas is his pity for everything that has the
misfortune to be born into an unsatisfactory world. Gerald can't see a
thing as being common: the moment he narrows his eyes to look for
purposes of art, it becomes to him exceptional, unique. I asked him
once, as a joke, to paint me a simple, large, bright orange squash, in a
field. And he did. A masterpiece. One can't say that the squash isn't
large, orange, and true to life. But what a squash! It has an amount of
personal distinction, an air of rarity and remoteness, that would make
you think twice, nay, three times, before making such a precious product
of the sacred earth into pies!"
When he was chilled through and his hands were numb, Gerald remembered
to pick up his candle and go to bed. No change of opinion, it is
needless to say, had resulted from his midnight inquiry.
A point of natural spite made him say that he did not ask people to like
his pictures. All he asked was permission to go on painting as he
pleased, obscure and independent, the sincere apostle of a peculiar
creed, working out his problems with conscience and fidelity. If fate
might send him critics whose opinion he valued he would be properly
grateful. He felt the need of criticism and companionship, in his work,
but had no regard for his fellow artists in Florence. His thoughts
turned sometimes with envy toward Paris, where modern art had some
vitality, and artist life the advantage of stimulating associations.
There was a good deal of talk at the time, and some derision, of a new
phase called impressionism, whose chief seat was Paris.
As for the opinion of such a person as Mrs. Hawthorne, it obviously had
no value. But while the artist could brush her aside in the character of
critic, it remained a little galling to the man to know he figured in
her mind as a painter who did not know how to paint.
"Can't paint for sour apples!" he seemed to hear her reporting to
Estelle, and got in his mouth the taste of the apples.