"THE WOMAN IN BLACK"
In the doorway, immediately behind Bianchi and looking over the little
man's head, stood a woman of perhaps forty years of age in full evening
toilet. About her head was wound a black lace scarf, and hanging from
her beautiful shoulders, half-concealing a figure of marvellous
symmetry, was a long black cloak, open at the throat, trimmed with fur,
and lined with watermelon pink silk. Tucked in her hair was a red
japonica. She was courtesying to the room with all the poise and
graciousness of a prima donna saluting an audience.
Oliver sprang for his coat and was about to cram his arms into the
sleeves, when she cried:
"Oh, please don't! I wish I could wear a coat myself, so that I could
take it off and paint. Oh! the smell of the lovely pipes! It's
heavenly, and it's so like home. Really," and she looked about her,
"this is the only place I have seen in America that I can breathe in.
I've heard of you all winter and I so wanted to come. I would not give
dear Bianchi any rest till he brought me. Oh! I'm so glad to be here."
Oliver and the others were still standing, looking in amazement at the
new-corner. One of the unwritten laws of the club was that no woman
should ever enter its doors, a law that until this moment had never
been broken.
While she was speaking Bianchi stepped back, and took the tips of the
woman's fingers within his own. When she had finished he thrust out one
foot and, with the bow of an impresario introducing a new songstress,
said:
"Gentlemen of the Stone Mugs, I have the honor of presenting you to the
Countess Kovalski."
Again the woman courtesied, sweeping the floor with her black velvet
skirt, broke out into a laugh, handed her cloak and scarf to Bianchi,
who threw them over the shoulders of the lay figure, and moved toward
the table, Fred, as host, drawing out a chair for her.
"Oh!--what lovely beginnings--" she continued, examining the sketches
with her lorgnette, after the members had made their salutations, "Let
me make one. I studied two years with Achenbach. You did not know that
Bianchi, did you? There are so many things you do not know, you lovely
man." She was as much at home as if she had been there every evening of
her life.
Still, with the same joyous self-contained air she settled herself in
Fred's proffered chair, picked up one of Jack's brushes, reached over
his shoulder, and with a "please-hold-still, thank you," scooped up a
little yellow ochre from his palette, and unloaded it on a corner of a
tile. Then, stripping off her bracelets, she piled them in a heap
before her, selected a Greek coin dangling from the end of one of them,
propped it up on the table and began to paint; the men, all of whom
were too astonished to resume their work, crowding about her, watching
the play of her brush; a brush so masterful in its technique that
before the picture was finished the room broke out in unrestrained
applause.
During all this time she was talking in German to Crug, or in French to
Waller, only stopping to light a fresh cigarette which she took from a
jewelled case and laid beside her. She could, no doubt, have as easily
lapsed into Russian, Choctaw, or Chinese had there been any such
strange people about.
When the men had resumed their customary seats and the room had once
more settled to work--it had only been a question of sex that had
destroyed the equilibrium, a question no longer of value now that the
fair intruder could really PAINT--Oliver bent over her and said in his
most gallant manner:
"If the Countess Kovalski will be gracious enough to excuse Bianchi (he
had never left her elbow) I will try and make a burgomaster of him.
Perhaps you will help me tie this around his neck," and he held out the
white ruff. He had put on his coat despite her protest.
"What, dear Bianchi in a ruff! Oh! how perfectly charming! That's
really just what he looks like. I've always told him that Rembrandt
ought to have seen him. Come, you sweet man, hold up your beautiful
Dutch face."
As she spoke she caught the ruff from Oliver's hand and stretched out
her bare arms toward Blanch.
"No, I'm not going to pose now," protested the Pole, pushing back her
hands. "You can get me any time. Take the Countess, Horn. She'd make a
stunner."
"Yes! Yes! Please do," she laughed, springing from her seat and
clapping her hands with all the gayety and joyousness of a child over
some expected pleasure.
Oliver hesitated for an instant, as he looked down into her eyes,
wondering whether his brush could do justice to their depth. Then he
glanced at her supple figure and white skin in contrast to the black
velvet, its edge softened by the fall of lace, the dominant, insistent
note of the red japonica in her blue-black hair, the flesh tones
brilliant under the gas-jets. The color scheme was exactly what he had
been looking for all winter--black, white, and a touch of red.
"I have never been so honored, Madame. Nothing could give me greater
pleasure," he answered, with a dry smile. "May I escort your ladyship
to the platform?" And he held out his hand and conducted her to the
stand facing the big easel.
Then there followed a scene such as many of the Stone Mugs had not
shared in since they left the Latin Quarter.
The Countess stood erect on the raised platform, with head up and
slightly turned, the full glare of the gas-jets falling upon her neck
and throat, made all the more brilliant by reason of the dark green
walls of Fred's studio, which formed the background behind her. One arm
was partly raised, a lighted cigarette between her fingers; the other
was lost in the folds of the velvet gown. She posed as naturally and as
easily as if she had done nothing else all her life, and with a certain
bravado and swing that enchanted everybody in the room.
One talent demanded of the artist members of the club when they sought
admission, and insisted upon by the Committee, was the ability,
possessed in a marked degree by Oliver, of making a rapid, telling
sketch from life, and at night. So expert had most of the members
become that many of their pictures made under the gas-light were as
correct in their color-values as those done in the day-time. In this
Oliver was past-master. Most of his own work had to be done under
artificial light during the long years of his struggle.
The men--they were again on their feet--crowded closer, forming a
circle about the easel. They saw that the subject appealed to Oliver,
and they knew how much better he could paint when his heart was in his
work. His picture of Margaret Grant in the Tam-o'-Shanter cap, the best
portrait at the last exhibition, had proved that.
Oliver saw the interest shown in his work and put himself on his
mettle. He felt that not only his own reputation, but the honor of the
Stone Mugs, was at stake. He felt, too, a certain pride and confidence
in the sureness of his touch--a touch that the woman he loved believed
in--one she had really taught him herself, He began by blocking in with
a bit of charcoal the salient points of the composition. Fred stood on
his left hand holding a cigar-box filled with tubes of color, ready to
unscrew their tops and pass them to Oliver as he needed them.
As the dark background of greenish black, under the vigorous strokes of
his brush, began to relieve the flesh tones, and the coloring of the
lips and the japonica in the hair took their places in the
color-scheme, a murmur of applause ran through the room. No such piece
of night-work had ever been painted since the club had come together,
and certainly not before.
"A Fortuny, by thunder!" burst out Waller. He had been the first man to
recognize Oliver's talent in the old days and had always felt proud of
his foresight.
For two hours Oliver stood before his canvas, the Countess resting now
and then, floating over to the piano, as Simmons had done, running her
fingers over its keys, or breaking out into Polish, Hungarian, or
French songs at the pleasure of the room. During these rests Oliver
turned the picture to the wall. He did not wish her to see it until it
was finished. He was trying some brush tricks that Madge loved, some
that she had learned in Couture's atelier, and whose full effect could
only be recognized in the finished work.
When the last touches of Oliver's brush had been laid on the canvas,
and the modest signature, O. H., as was the custom, had been affixed to
its lower left-hand corner, he made a low salaam to the model and
whirled the easel in front of her.
The cry of delight that escaped her lips was not only an expression of
her pleasure, but it convinced every man in the club that the
Countess's technical knowledge of what constituted a work of art
equalled her many other accomplishments. She sat looking at it with
thoughtful, grave face, and her whole manner changed. She was no longer
the woman who had so charmed the room. She was the connoisseur, the
expert, the jury of last resort. Oliver watched her with absorbing
interest as he sat wiping his forehead with his handkerchief.
"Monsieur Horn," she said, slowly, as if weighing each word, "if you
come to my country they will cover you all over with medals. I had no
idea anyone in this new land could paint as you do. You are a master.
Permit me, Monsieur, to make you my obeisance--" and she dipped back on
one foot and swept the floor with her skirts.
Oliver laughed, returned the bow with a mock flourish, and began
rolling down his shirt-cuffs; a thrill quivering through him--that
thrill only felt by a painter when he is conscious that some work of
his brush has reached the high-water mark of his abilities. For only
the artist in him had been at work. What stirred him was not the
personality of the Countess--not her charm nor beauty but the harmony
of the colors playing about her figure: the reflected lights in the
blue-black of her hair; the soft tones of the velvet lost in the
shadows of the floor, and melting into the walls behind her; the high
lights on the bare shoulder and arms divided by the severe band of
black; the subdued grays in the fall of lace uniting the flesh tones
and the bodice; and, more than all, the ringing note of red sung by the
japonica tucked in her hair and which found its only echo in the red of
her lips--red as a slashed pomegranate with the white seed-teeth
showing through. The other side of her beautiful self--the side that
lay hidden under her soft lashes and velvet touch, the side that could
blaze and scorch and burn to cinders--that side Oliver had never once
seen nor thought of.
This may have been because, while his fingers worked on, his thoughts
were somewhere else, and that he saw another face as he mixed his
colors, and not that of the siren before him. Or it may have been that,
as he looked into the eyes of the Countess, he saw too deeply into the
whirlpool of passion and pain which made up the undercurrent in this
beautiful woman's strange life.
Not so the others. Many of whom were the most serious-minded of men
where women were concerned. Crug--who, to quote Waller, had drifted
into a state of mind bordering on lunacy--was so completely taken off
his feet that he again led her ladyship by her finger-tips to the
piano, and, with his hand on his heart, and his eyes upraised, begged
her to sing for him some of the songs of her native land and in the
tongue of her own people; the Countess complying so graciously and
singing with such consummate taste and skill, throwing her soul into
every line, that the men soon broke out in rounds of applause, crowding
about her with the eagerness of bees around a hive--all except Waller
and Oliver, who sat apart, quietly watching her out of the corners of
their eyes.
The portrait was forgotten now; so were the sketches and tiles, and the
work of the evening. So was everything else but the woman who dominated
the room. She kept her seat on the piano-stool, the centre of the
group, as a queen of the ballet sits on a painted throne, flashing her
eyes from one to the other, wheeling about to dash off an air from some
unknown opera--unknown to those who listened--laying her lighted
cigarette on the music-rack as she played, and whirling back again to
tell some anecdote of the composer who wrote it, or some incident
connected with its production in Vienna or Warsaw or St.
Petersburg--the club echoing her every whim.
It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that the staid and sober-minded
Stone Mugs, under these conditions, completely lost their heads, and
that when Oliver picked up an empty beer-mug, the symbol of the club
used in all ceremonies, and began filling it with the names of the
members which he had written on slips of paper, preparatory to the
drawing of the lottery for the picture which he had just
finished--every meeting-night a lottery was drawn, the lucky winner
possessing the picture of the evening--Crug and Munson should have
simultaneously sprung to their feet, and, waving their hands over their
heads, have proposed, in one and the same breath, that "Our
distinguished visitor" should have the privilege of adding her own name
to those in Oliver's mug--the picture to be her own individual property
should her patronymic be the first to be drawn from its open mouth.
Waller started to his feet to object, and the words of protest were
half out of his mouth when Oliver stopped him. A woman was always a
woman to Oliver, no matter what her past or present station in life
might be. It was her sex that kept him loyal when any discourtesy was
involved.
"Keep still, old man," he whispered. "They've gone crazy, but we can't
help it. Get on your feet and vote."
When the sound of the "ayes" adopting Crug and Munson's motion had died
away, Oliver inscribed her initials upon a small piece of paper,
dropped it in the mug, held it high above the lady's head, and asked
her to reach up her dainty fingers and pick out the name of the lucky
possessor of "The Woman in Black," as the picture had now been
christened. The white arm went up, the jewelled fingers felt about
nervously among the little ballots, and then the Countess held up a
twisted bit of paper.
A burst of applause filled the room. The scrap of paper bore the
initials of the Countess! "The Woman in Black" was her property.
But the most extraordinary part by far of the evening's performance was
still to come.
When the hour of midnight had arrived--the hour of dispersal, a rule
rarely broken--the Countess called to Bianchi and directed him to go
out into the hall and bring in her long black stockings and stout
shoes, which she had taken off outside Fred's door, and which she had
left hanging on a nail.
I can see her now--for I, too, was leaning over the same table, Oliver
beside me, watching this most extraordinary woman of another world, a
woman who had been the idol of almost every capital in Europe, and whom
I knew (although Oliver did not) had been quietly conducted out of some
of them between dark and daylight--I can see her now, I say, sitting on
the piano-stool, facing the group, the long, black silk stockings that
Bianchi had brought her in her hands. I remember just the way in which,
after loosening her dainty, red-heeled slippers, she swept aside her
skirts, unfastened her garters, and, with the same unconsciousness and
ease with which she would have slipped a pair of rubbers over a pair of
shoes, drew the long black stockings over her flesh-colored ones,
refastening the garters again, talking all the time, first to one and
then the other; pausing only to accentuate some sentence with a wave of
her shoe or stocking or cigarette, as the action suited the words.
That the group about her was composed solely of men made not the
slightest difference. She was only trying to save those precious,
flesh-colored silk stockings that concealed her white skin from the
slush and snow of the streets. As to turning her back to her hosts
during this little change of toilet--that was the last thing that
entered her head. She would as soon have stepped into a closet to put
on her gloves.
And then again, why should she be ashamed of her ankles and her
well-turned instep and dainty toes, as compact in their silk covering
as peas in a pod! She might have been, perhaps, in some one of the
satin-lined drawing-rooms around Madison Square or Irving Place, but
not here, breathing the blue smoke of a dozen pipes and among her own
kind--the kind she had known and loved and charmed all her life.
After all it was but a question of economy. Broadway was a slough of
mud and slush, and neither she nor Bianchi had the price of a carriage
to spare.
Oliver watched her until the whole comedy was complete; then, picking
up his wet sketch and handing it with the greatest care to Bianchi, who
was to conduct her ladyship to her lodgings, he placed the long black
cloak with the fur-trimming and watermelon-colored silk lining about
her beautiful, bare shoulders, and, with the whole club following and
waving their hands good-night, our young gentleman bowed her out and
downstairs with all the deference and respect he would have shown the
highest lady in the land.