She learned from MacGregor what Atwood's modest "I paint" signified.
"He is an illustrator who illustrates," he told her their first
day, while they worked. "I mean--left arm a trifle higher, please;
you've shifted the pose--I mean he gets into the skin of a writer's
characters, when they have any. If they're mere abstractions, he
creates blood, bones, and epidermis for them outright. Rarer thing
than you imagine, I dare say, in spite of the newspaper jokes. You can
count the men on one hand who do it here in New York, and to my mind
Craig deserves the index finger. He'd find a soul for a rag doll. But
I'm only telling you what any top-notch magazine you pick up says more
forcibly."
Jean cloaked her ignorance in silence and put her trust in MacGregor's
enthusiasm for further light. After an industrious interval it came.
"But that isn't all," he added, tilting back to study his canvas
through half-shut eyes. "The public doesn't know Atwood's true
_metier_. He's bigger than they think. I'll show you something in a
minute. It's time for rest."
He lingered for a brush stroke, which at one sweep filled a languid
fold of drapery with action, and then crossed the studio to the stack
of unfinished work beside the wall.
"Wait," he warned, placing a canvas in the trial frame and wheeling an
easel tentatively. "It's in the rough, but we can give it light and a
setting. Now look. That's what I call portraiture."
Even her unschooled eye perceived its strength. It was MacGregor who
looked out at her, MacGregor as she herself had twice seen him that day
with his working fit upon him, New York forgotten, Africa filling every
thought.
"And Mr. Atwood did it?"
"Nobody else. He sat over there in that corner, while I worked in mine,
and painted what he saw."
"It's a wonderful likeness."
"Likeness!" MacGregor shook the poor word contemptuously. "Likeness!
Child, it's divination!"
He dismissed her early in the afternoon, for it was raining fitfully
and the light was uncertain, and on leaving she turned her steps
toward the Astor Library, intent on a purpose inspired by MacGregor's
talk. She had some acquaintance with the lending libraries, but none
with this sedate edifice whose size and gloom oppressed her as she
looked vainly about for her elderly fellow-boarder who spent his life
somewhere amidst its dinginess. In this quandary, she was spied by a
mannered attendant whose young face, framed in obsolete side-whiskers,
reminded her of certain middle-Victorian bucks of Thackeray's whom she
had come to know during spare moments at the dental parlors. This guide
led her into a large reading-room where he assured her ladies were
welcome, despite the frowns of the predominant sex whose peace they
ruffled, and found her the two or three illustrated periodicals she
named.
Without exception these contained Atwood's work, a fact which impressed
her tremendously; and without exception they bore testimony to his
superiority as emphatically as MacGregor. She pored over these drawings
one by one, weighing them much as she weighed his spoken thought,
and judging them, no less than his speech, most candid mirrors of
his personality. In what this personality's appeal consisted, she
had neither the detachment nor the wish to define; she could only
uncritically feel its sincerity, its romance, and its power.
She craved a fuller knowledge, however, than these mute witnesses could
give, and the desire presently drew her back into the high-vaulted
chamber where the library's activities seemed to focus; and here,
bewildered by the riches of the card catalogue, she was luckily seen by
the quiet old man who lent his dignity to the head of Mrs. St. Aubyn's
table. He smiled gently upon her over his spectacles, pondering the
motive behind her request as he had speculated about the motives of
thousands before her, and instantly, out of a head whose store she
felt that she had scantily appreciated, produced half a dozen likely
references which he straightway bade a precocious small boy to track
to their fastnesses in some mysterious region he called the stacks;
himself, meanwhile, with a faded gallantry, escorting her to a desk in
a scholarly retreat where only feminine glances questioned her coming.
So ensconced, she came upon the facts she sought in a bound volume
of a journal devoted chiefly to the fine arts. She learned here that
her knight errant's full name was Francis Craig Atwood, that New York
claimed the honor of his birthplace, and that he was a trifle less than
ten years older than herself. There followed a list of his schools,
which ended with Julien's Academy in Paris, where it appeared he had
gone the autumn after their meeting, and had exhibited canvases at the
Salons of two successive years. His return to America and his instant
recognition coincided closely with her own coming to New York. The
concluding analysis of his work bristled with technicalities, but she
read into it the qualities which she perceived or imagined in the man,
and, staring into the dusty alcove over against her seat, lost herself
in a brown study of what such success as this probably meant to him.
Newspaper paragraphs about his comings and goings, she supposed, many
sketches like this under her hand, social opportunities of course, the
flattery of women, friendships with the clever and the rich. It rather
daunted her to find him a celebrity, and at this pass nothing could
have so routed her self-possession as to discover that a man, of whose
nearness at an adjacent bookcase she had been vaguely aware, was no
other than Atwood himself.
"Thank you," he laughed, with a wave of the hand toward the telltale
page. "But there's better reading in the library."
Jean clapped to the offending volume and blushed her guiltiest.
"You must think me very silly," she stammered. "Mr. MacGregor praised
your work, showed me the portrait--"
"Of course he did. You have discovered Mac's weakness and his dangerous
charm. He believes all his friends are geniuses. You'll grow as
conceited as the rest of us in time."
"And have the other conceited friends done work like yours and said
nothing about it?" she asked.
"A thousand times better. You've no idea what a clever lot of men and
women Mac knows." He rapidly instanced several artists, sculptors,
and writers of prominence, adding: "But you will see them all at The
Oasis sooner or later. You've probably noticed that Mac is one of those
rareties who can talk while they work. What would hinder most people,
only stimulates him. And it stimulates the other fellow, too. I always
drop in on him for a tonic when my own stuff lags. I was there this
afternoon, in fact, though for another reason. I wanted to see you. It
must have been telepathy that brought me down here; I thought it was
'The Gadzooks'!"
"'The Gadzooks,'" she puzzled.
"Merely my slang for the Revolutionary romance," he explained. "I'm
illustrating still another one, and ran in here to resolve my doubts
about bag-wigs. My novelist seems to have invented a new variety. But
about you: if you don't mind the weather, and have nothing better to
do, I should like to take you over to a Fifth Avenue picture dealer's
to see a so-called Velasquez that's come into the market."
Jean absorbed more than the true rank and value of Velasquez's
portraiture. Wet or dry, the weather was irreproachable. Did it rain,
there were yet other picture dealers' secluded galleries where one
might loiter luxuriously; while for the intervals of sunshine the
no less fascinating shop-windows awaited, each a glimpse into the
wonderland of Europe, which her guide seemed to know so well. They
even discussed going on to the Metropolitan to look in at a Frans Hals
and a Rembrandt, which the talk of Velasquez suggested, but Atwood's
absurd watch, corroborated by several equally ridiculous clocks of the
neighborhood, said plainly that it was well past closing time at the
museum and indeed quite the day's end here among the shops.
He was loath to let her go.
"It's been like a too short trip abroad," he said. "I hate to book for
home just yet. Why can't we dine as we did last night?"
She shook her head.
"Yesterday was an occasion."
"Say Italy?" he persisted. "We've skimmed England, France, the Low
Countries; why not Italy? I know a little place that's as Italian as
Naples. You would never guess its existence. It looks like every other
brownstone horror outside, with not a hint of its real business, for
they say old Gaetano Sanfratello has no license. He looks you over
through the basement grating, and, if you're found worthy, leads you
through a tunnel of a hallway into the most wonderful kitchen you ever
saw. It's as clean as clean and is a regular treasure-house of shining
copper. Then you'll find yourself out in what prosaic New York calls
a back yard, but which, in fact, is a trattoria in the kingdom of
Victor Emmanuel, whose lithograph you will see above the door. There
are clusters of ripening grapes in the trellis overhead, and Chianti
or Capri antico--real Capri--on the cloth below; and they'll serve
you such artichoke soups, cheese soufflés, and reincarnations of the
chestnut, as the gods eat! And Gaetano's pretty daughter will wait upon
us and sing 'Bella Napoli,' and perhaps, if we're in great luck, she'll
let us have a peep at her bambino which she keeps swaddled precisely
like the one in that copy of Luca della Robbia you are staring at this
minute. Aren't you tempted?"
She was, but resisted successfully; and when he saw that she was
inflexible, he walked with her to her own street, planning other
holidays of a future which should know no shadows.
"You must forget that gray time you've left behind you," he declared.
"Call this your real beginning--your rebirth, your renaissance."
So in truth it was. The weeks following were weeks of rapid growth
and ripening, which, Atwood's influence admitted, yet found their
compelling force in the girl's own will. The ambition to do her utmost
for MacGregor, to learn what books could teach of the life he knew by
living, took her back repeatedly to the library; then other suggestions
of the studio, which, even at its narrowest, was a school of curious
knowledge about common things that few, save the artist, seemed to
see as they were. Who but he, for instance, stopped to consider that
sunlight filtering through leaves fell in circles; that shadows were
violet, not black; that tobacco smoke from the mouth was of another
color than the graceful spiral which rose from the tip of a cigarette?
But this field opened into innumerable others in the wide domain where
her two friends plied their differing talents; while these, in turn,
marched with the boundaries of others still, whose only limits were
Humanity's. Life itself set the true horizon to MacGregor's Oasis.
Among MacGregor's intimates who shared the secret of a knock which
admitted them at all hours, but who, busy men themselves, came oftenest
after the north light failed, was a sculptor named Karl Richter. This
man's specialty was the American Indian, but he also had known the
Arab at first-hand, and Africa in one or another of its myriad phases
was ever the topic when he and MacGregor foregathered. Listening to
their talk, Jean came to visualize the bronze-skinned folk, the vivid
market-places, the wild music of hautboys and tom-toms, the gardens
of fig and olive and orange and palm, the waysides thicketed with
bamboo, tamarisk, or scarlet geranium, and the desert,--above all, the
mysterious, terrible, beautiful desert,--as things which her own senses
had known. It chanced one day that they spoke of camels and, as often,
began to argue; and that Richter, to prove his point, whipped from his
pocket a lump of modeling wax, which, under his wonderful fingers,
became in a twinkling a striking counterfeit of the beast itself. It
could not have been more than an inch in height, but it was a very
camel, stubborn, complaining, alive. MacGregor confuted, the sculptor
annihilated the little animal with a careless pinch, tossed the wax
aside, and soon after went his way.
Dissatisfied with his work, MacGregor presently caught his canvas from
the easel, and, laying it prone upon the floor, began by shifting
strips of card-board to hunt the truer composition. Jean, left to
herself, took up the discarded wax, tried vainly to coax back the
vanished camel, and then amused herself with a conception of her own.
So absorbed did she become that MacGregor finished his experiments
unheeded, and, receiving no answer to a question, still unregarded came
and peered over her shoulder.
"Great Jupiter Pluvius!" he exclaimed.
Jean whirled about.
"How you startled me!" she said.
"It's nothing to the way you've startled me. Where did you see that
head you've modeled?"
"Oh, this?" She tried to put the wax away. "It's nothing--only a baby
in our block."
MacGregor pounced upon the model and bore it to the light.
"Nothing! Merely a study from life, that's all! Just a trifle thrown
off in your odd moments!" He turned the little head round and round,
showering exclamations. "Who taught you?" he demanded, striding back.
"Somebody had a finger in it besides you. There are lines here that
can't be purely intuitive."
"I used to watch my father."
"Was he a sculptor?"
"He might have been, if he'd had the chance. But he had to work at
other things, and he married--"
"I know, I know," MacGregor groaned. "Love in a cottage and to hell
with art! But he couldn't keep his thoughts or his hands from it. He
modeled when he could?"
Jean nodded dreamily.
"Sundays, mainly," she answered. "We used to go into the country
together. He found a bed of good clay near a creek where the mint grew.
I can never smell mint without remembering. I couldn't go back there
after he died."
MacGregor gave her a sidelong glance, hemmed, made an unnecessary trip
across the studio, and kicked a fallen burnous violently.
"But you went on modeling?" he asked, returning.
"Yes--by and by. Then, later, I stopped."
"Why?"
"I--I hadn't the clay?" she evaded.
MacGregor brooded over her handiwork a moment longer, then squared his
jaw.
"You'll have the 'clay' hereafter," he said.