A PICTURE
Escaping from the ballroom, where, in spite of all possible care,
the hothouse heat and heavy odour of flowers, together with the mild
afternoon, made the air stifling, Brooke was guided by instinct toward
the picture gallery. In the reception hall back of the stairs, concealed
by a rose-covered screen, a Russian orchestra, the latest novelty, was
playing; but as the first strains of the concert floated from the music
room, the intended effect was lost and became wholly discordant and
bewildering.
Once inside the doors, for the picture gallery was separated from the
house itself not only by a short passageway, curtained at both ends, but
by doors of richly carved antique oak, Brooke found herself in another
world, in which two more of the liveried regiment and she herself were
the only inhabitants. One of the men took from a Japanese stand of
bronze, by which he was stationed, a long satin-covered book, that proved
to be a catalogue of the paintings in the gallery. A photogravure of each
one filled the left-hand page, a few words relating to the artist facing
it.
Mind and body were at once refreshed. The air itself was pure and
invigorating in the gallery, for the only floral decorations were
conventionally trimmed bushes of box, European laurel in pots, and
some pointed holly trees red with their Christmas offering of berries.
Whatever there was of lavish overdisplay in the other parts of this new
palace stopped outside of these doors. Ceiling and panelled wainscoting
that ran below the picture line were of the same carved oak, the inlaid
floor matching it in tone, while all else, wall hangings, divans, and
rugs, were blended of soft greens, as harmonious and restful to the
senses as the vines, ferns, and moss that drape and floor the forest.
The lights adjusted above the paintings, with due regard to individual
effect, were hidden from the eye by screens of coloured glass, in which
design of flowers and leaf were so well mingled that they formed a part
of the general whole.
As to the pictures themselves—not too many, all in a way masterpieces
carefully hung—they seemed vistas opening through the greenery, carrying
the vision at once into the scene or among the people represented. Only
art could so feel for art, and the fact that the seeming simplicity was
the result of much detailed thought and expense was nowhere apparent.
Brooke walked slowly to the upper end of the room, and seated herself in
one of the recesses of an oddly divided settee, high of back and arm,
that gave to each occupant complete seclusion. For a few minutes she
leaned back against the soft velvet, letting the quiet atmosphere envelop
her, and then raised her eyes to the two pictures that chanced to face
her, peering at them in her seclusion, from under her wide hat, with a
sidewise expression of eyes and lips slightly parted that reminded one of
Mme. le Brun’s portrait of the charming Mme. Crussal.
The nearer picture was a marine, in which the Irish coast and waters of
the Channel were revealed by light of the full moon, and between the
headland and the foreground the white gulls were bedding themselves
so closely that they made a second moon path on the water. Back flew
Brooke’s thoughts across the sea,—England and Holland held her for a
moment, then she slipped on to France, to Paris, where for a year she
had worked in Ridgeway’s studio in the Rue Malesherbes and out at Passy,
had been oftentimes elated and finally cast down. How a past mood can
dominate the present as well as all surroundings! The next painting was
of a stretch of low country threaded by a canal, cattle in the distance,
and shivering poplars bending to the wind that scudded across the sky in
threatening clouds, while in the foreground a flock of geese were looking
about and pluming themselves against the coming storm.
Where had that scene passed before her? “The Coming Storm near The
Hague—E. Oliver (Salon, 1900),” said the catalogue.
“Ah!” Brooke exclaimed, half aloud. She remembered her first visit to
the Salon, of standing before this same picture with Marte Lorenz,
“the big hybrid English-Dutch-French artist,” Lucy Dean called him,
and laughing at the solemn, stupid geese, while he had told her in his
perfect, slow English that he had often driven flocks of geese to pasture
in his boyhood, also that sometimes he had found them to be no laughing
matter,—a trifling incident at the time, but now a sort of landmark in
the receding journey.
She had met this Lorenz (Marte his intimates called him) often that
winter and spring on the easy impersonal footing that prevails between
the well-bred American woman and the art students of all countries. He
had been presented to her mother most regularly at a fête in Ridgeway’s
garden the autumn of their arrival, and from that moment until their
parting, a year later, one thing had set him apart from all the score of
men with whom she had come in close contact, men who blindly flattered,
evaded, or temporized. He had always told her the truth about her work.
If she had not realized it at the time, the conviction had always come to
her sooner or later.
As to Lorenz himself, once a pupil of the Beaux Arts, his nationality
prevented his striving for the Prix-de-Rome, and he had turned his work
toward less classic lines; landscapes were his forte, the figure coming
second, and yet he oftenest worked at figure-painting and conventional
portraiture also, for he must have money for the pot-boiling, much as he
disliked the necessity.
Farther away slipt the Whirlpool city and its surroundings. Once more
was Brooke sketching in oils, with some friends who often went to the
Carlo Rossi garden to pose for each other. Her subject was a girl of the
Boulevards, nominally a flower seller. Successful in the drawing and
colour, try as she might Brooke could not give the touch that should
bring the lifelike expression to the face. With knit brows she looked up
to see whose was the shadow cast on the grass before her. It was Lorenz,
big, honest fellow, his hands clasped upon the back of the garden seat,
his thatch of dark hair sticking out over his deep-set blue eyes, while
a questioning expression involved in its uncertainty his straight nose,
his deeply cleft chin, and the sensitive yet strong mouth that separated
them. Even his short-cut mustache, which accentuated rather than
concealed his lips, expressed doubt.
“What is it, M. Lorenz?” Brooke had asked, smiling at his serious air;
“no one ever tells me anything definite but you. The master says, ‘Good!
keep on!’ One friend only grunts; some one else says ‘_Pas mal_.’ I know
that I must work, work, work, but what do I most lack?”
Lowering his eyes almost to the grass itself, he spoke rapidly, as if the
telling was a pain to him: “You have not yet had the awakening; for it
you must wait; it is the same with me, but I may not dry my brushes to
wait for the day, only work, and destroy, and work again, come good, come
ill. It is not enough to block the form and lay on the colours truly.
Unless you can interpret your vision and see its shadow on the canvas,
watch it draw breath, move, and speak to you, you can never create. But
first of all you must know and feel, even if you suffer. How can you
interpret this woman before you? Never could you paint for what she
stands. Try children, animals, anything else—or better, dry your brush
and wait!”
Brooke had flushed angrily and answered curtly; even now the memory
brought colour to her cheeks. Only once again had she seen Lorenz before
leaving, and now two years had passed. What had become of him? There were
depths in this woman’s nature that her parents, all devotion in their
different ways, had never fathomed, of which her friends of every day
had never dreamed; and in one of these secret places, all unconscious to
herself, this man had gained sufficient place at least to bar all others.
While she was thus dreaming away the afternoon, the concert being ended,
the throng pressed toward the gallery, and the confusion of voices, high
in key and surging on, brought Brooke quickly to herself. Rising, she
turned over the pages of the catalogue, reading the artists’ names, and
sauntered down the line to where the numbers began, nodding occasionally,
or saying a few words to friends that came up; some of whom were stopping
to see the pictures, others merely noting the scenic effect of the whole.
Suddenly she halted so abruptly, her fingers gripping the page between
them with noticeable tension, that a man behind nearly fell over her,
while her eyes fastened on the letters that said, “24: Eucharistia. M.
Lorenz. 1901.” Before she could read the details opposite, the man whom
she had stopped, Charlie Ashton (now Carolus, cousin to Lucy Dean and a
courtesy artist possessed of a popular studio for concerts) looked over
her shoulder and said:—
“Ah, Miss Lawton, looking for the picture the Senator’s gone daft about,
because he thinks the woman in it looks like his wife when he first saw
her as a girl out in the California wine country? It’s over this way,
that one with the long palm over the frame. I’ve just come from there;
everybody’s crowding round, guessing what the name means. I suggested
making up a guessing pool on it at five a head, and letting the winner
choose the charity; the Bishop is having a shy at it now.”
Brooke steadied herself, and crossing the room joined the group,
catching at first but a partial glimpse of the picture.
“Step back here by this holly tree; this distance is needed to preserve
the atmosphere,” said Ashton, guiding her by the sleeve into an alcove
formed of holly and laurel bushes arranged to shelter an exquisite ivory
statuette of Diana, the crescent, fillet, and bow being of rich gold.
“I have never before seen pictures so well hung,” said Brooke, glancing
about as they waited for the crowd to move on, as it soon inevitably
would, toward the banquet hall.
“A well-placed remark, Miss Brooke, sent straight home,” gurgled Ashton,
plucking at his collar, which was too tight for his short neck. “I may
say that I virtually hung these pictures, for I sent the Senator the
man who did, you know. Before I forget it, the Bagby girls and the rest
asked me to see you about arranging a benefit concert for that pretty
little Julia Garth,—used to give such stunning musicales a year ago,—now
old Garth is dead, and they’ve gone to no-put-together smash! Yes, not a
cent! I’ve offered my studio for it, and they thought perhaps you’d give
a picture to raffle,—just any little thing you’ve thrown off in a hurry
will do.”
His words passed almost unheard, for while he was speaking the crowd
parted and the entire painting became visible. Brooke, leaning forward,
at first flushed, then grew white to the lips. The scene set before her
was a bit in the depths of the park at Fontainebleau. A grassy path
melted away in the distance between great sombre oaks that strengthened
as they reached the foreground. At the foot of one of these sat a man,
an artist, who had been sketching, for his implements lay on the sward
before him. His whole position was of dejection, except the head, which
was raised in a startled attitude. A little behind him stood a young
woman, clad in the dainty summer dress of every day, ash-brown hair
loosely caught up beneath a simple hat, paint box and luncheon basket
slung from her shoulder. One hand rested on the gnarled oak trunk,
the other, reaching across his shoulder, dropped into the man’s idle,
listless hands a bunch of golden grapes, that in their ripeness carried
sunlight with them. Graceful and charming as was the composition, it was
the handling of the light wherein the magic lay. Sifting down between
the leaves, the glow of early afternoon hovered about the girl’s bent
head like a halo, and passing behind, fell upon the man’s upturned face,
transfiguring it with a sort of holy joy, then focussed and was swallowed
in the bunch of grapes.
A voice seemed calling in Brooke’s ears: “The last afternoon, when you
all went sketching with the master, and after lunching in the woods you
overtook the brotherhood of Clichy (as Lorenz’s coterie was called).
Farther on and apart you found him alone, with head bent. You thought he
was asleep and dropped the cool grapes in his hands, half as a trick,
darting away again. Then good Madame Druz, the chaperon of the day,
coming up, scolded you for ‘American imprudence,’ and finally that night
you cried, half at her vulgar interpretation of a harmless act, and half
because Lorenz never gave word or sign before your leaving. And because
not a single flower of the mass that filled your railway carriage was
from him, you let Lucy amuse herself all the way to Cherbourg by pelting
officials with them at each station passed. He has painted you as you
were!” cried the voice; “his face is as he might wish it to be.”
It required an effort on Brooke’s part not to cry out, “Hush! speak
lower!” so real did the words seem.
“Good work, isn’t it?—though half a dozen of us here at home could do as
well, if we had the atmosphere, you know,” said Ashton’s voice, sounding
through the rush of waters that filled her ears. “The Senator boasts that
he was the first to recognize the artist whom every one now applauds, and
he paid a cool ten thousand for it, the man’s first important picture at
that! The old man saw it in the new Salon, but it wasn’t for sale. ‘No,
no, no,’ said the artist,—‘he had a superstition, a sentiment, a desire
to keep it,’—but the Senator thought ‘Yes, yes, yes, the desire will
decrease with time and—money,’ and so it did, for this fall, just as the
Parkses were on the verge of leaving, the Senator doubled the first offer
and Lorenz capitulated. Then, before the ‘brotherhood’ could borrow his
‘luck penny’ he disappeared somewhere in Normandy, they say, to study,
out of the depressing sound of the pot-boiling of the Quarter. Half his
friends were glad, Ridgeway wrote me, and the other half, being jealous,
shrugged their shoulders and raised their eyes, groaning, ‘Another mad
American!’
“I have it all down fine, you see, for the papers to-morrow,—great
scheme! I had a Harvard chum that was, Tom Brownell, who won’t go the
respectable pace his father set for him in finance, and has turned
reporter, work it up. He wants news, and, plague it, it must be _true_ or
he won’t touch it. Of course I don’t appear in it, but all the credit is
socially mine, you see.
“Why, come to think of it, Miss Brooke, I believe the girl looks a bit
like you! Did you ever chance to see this man? But then, of course, so
many charming women look alike in those stunning shirt-waist things, you
know. What do you make of the name?”
Brooke wished that he might babble on as long as possible, that she
might learn the painting by heart and try to fathom the peculiarity of
the shaft of light, but as he stopped she said, almost without thought,
“Eucharistia! why may it not be the girl’s name?”
“By Jove! of course, we never thought of it!” said Ashton. “You’re
growing quite pale from standing so long. You must have some punch. Do
let me take you to the banquet hall; it’s jolly nice there—all small
tables and souvenir menus in silver frames. I planned them, too, though
Tiffany’s name _is_ on them. There’s Cousin Lucy, and the Bagby girls are
waving to you now.” (“Yes, we’re under way, hold a table,” he signalled.)
“We can cook up the concert while we feed,” and offering his arm, upon
which Brooke laid her hand gratefully, for she felt a sudden weariness,
he led her through the maze of skirts and furniture as skilfully and
rapidly as if he had been her partner in the cotillon, and seated her at
one of the little tables amid a bevy of her friends, who were discussing
the house, the hostess, the flowers, the menus, and the fallen fortunes
of poor Julia Garth in a most impartial way, and at the top of their
voices.
“Of course it’s awful to suddenly drop from having your gowns from Paris,
a maid, a private turnout, and keeping open house—or rather houses—and
all that, to a flat somewhere in Brooklyn, with a sick mother, and trying
to work off your music for a living,” said one shrill voice; “but then it
is an awful bore, too, for us to have her on our minds. This concert is
only the beginning, I suppose.”
“Julia plays delightfully, and we all have more or less chamber music
during the winter, and one of us might take her to Lenox or Newport this
summer,” said another, in a reproving tone; “and then among us all there
are plenty of children for her to teach.”
“If she plays and sings for us all winter, that is sufficient reason why
we shall be sick of her next summer,” said the first voice. “You know how
it was with Mrs. Darcey Binks and her Creole songs. We thought we could
not get enough of her. She thought she was settled here for life, and
biff! the Spanish mandolin players knocked her out the second season. As
for lessons, if you take up some one half out of charity, and then go
South in the middle of a term, they will always whine about it, and you
feel mean; a professional can take care of herself and always gets even,
but doesn’t let you know it.”
“I wish we could think of something newer than a concert, that would make
a hit and a pot of money,” said Lucy Dean, not bragging of the fact that
she had already asked Julia Garth to come and live with her, and been
refused kindly but firmly. “What can you suggest, Brooke? you are always
overflowing with ideas, even if some of them are too good for this world.”
Brooke, thus challenged, half rose in her chair so that she faced both
tables, and said: “I do not believe in offering Julia what she would
accept as work and you consider as charity; it is false pretence on both
sides! We can easily make up a Christmas purse for her among ourselves,
without giving her the pain of the advertising of a benefit concert,
and all the talk of it. Then when she has a chance to know where she
stands,—her father only died a month ago, poor child,—I will get my
father or yours” (motioning to Lucy) “to give her _real_ work for _real_
pay, and with no charitable tag hanging to it. She has kept household
accounts and sometimes been her father’s private secretary. I saw her
last week, and what she wants and is able to do is real work and plenty
of it to make her forget, not charity coddling to make her remember.”
“Mercy on me! don’t cut us up like cheese sandwiches, with your sarcasm!”
ejaculated Lucy, “and clutch that chair so, as if you had claws. Your
eyes remind me of a hawk that perches in a cage over in the park opposite
my window, and glares all day long at the silly sparrows outside!”
Brooke laughed, and the dangerous flash in her eyes dying out again, she
turned to her plate of salad and the general gossip of the day, but a red
spot still glowed in the middle of each cheek. A few minutes later she
might have been seen driving down the avenue in her mother’s brougham,
trying to decipher, by the light of the electric street lamps, some
printing in the silk-covered catalogue.
This is what she read: “Marte Lorenz, born at his uncle’s tulip farm
near Haarlem, in 1872. Educated in England, where his father had been a
merchant. Studied at the Amsterdam Art School, going afterward to Paris,
where his countryman, Israels, befriended him. A hard student, but the
picture ‘Eucharistia’ is his first important work, while European critics
and his masters believe it is the beginning of a great career. At present
he is living in seclusion in Normandy, following his art.”
Ashton, the useful, had patched up the biographies in the little book,
helter-skelter, but Brooke did not know it, and tucking the catalogue
carefully into her great muff, she leaned back and closed her eyes.
It was her portrait that Lorenz had painted, together with his own,
whatever the mystic word “Eucharistia” might mean. He had not forgotten
her, then, and he was loath to part with the picture. She did not
formulate the pleasure the thought gave her,—it was enough in itself.
Then the brougham stopped before the blazing lights of the St. Hilaire,
where the Lawtons were making a temporary home, a sort of bridge, that
both mother and daughter had long wearied of, between the simpler
past and the long-delayed, complex future, when in the new house, now
building, her father promised once and for all to drop the reins of tape
and wire, cease from hurrying, and take rest.