AT MOREL’S STUDIO
“I’ve just had a telephone message from the Contessa,” Cousin Beth said
at breakfast Saturday morning. “She sends an invitation to us for this
afternoon, a private view of paintings and sculpture at Henri Morel’s
studio. She knew him in Italy and France, and he leaves for New York on
Monday. There will be a little reception and tea, nothing too formal for
you girls, so dress well, hold up your chins and turn out your toes, and
behave with credit to your chaperon. It is your debut.”
Carlota looked at her quite seriously, thinking she was in earnest, but
Jean always caught the flutter of fun in her eyes, and knew it would not
be as ceremonious as it sounded. When she was ready that afternoon she
slipped into Cousin Beth’s own little den at the south end of the house.
Here were three rooms, all so different, and each showing a distinct
phase of character. One was her winter studio. The summer one was built
out in the orchard. This was a large sunny room, panelled in soft toned
oak, with a wood brown rug on the floor, and all the treasures
accumulated abroad during her years there of study and travel. In this
room Jean used to find the girl Beth, who had ventured forth after the
laurels of genius, and found success waiting her with love, back in
little Weston.
The second room was a private sitting-room, all willow furniture, and
dainty chintz coverings, with Dutch tile window boxes filled with
blooming hyacinths, and feminine knick-knacks scattered about
helterskelter. Here were framed photographs of loved ones and friends, a
portrait of Elliott over the desk, his class colors on the wall, and
intimate little kodak snapshots he had sent her. This was the mother’s
and wife’s room. And the last was her bedroom. Here Jean found her
dressing. All in deep smoke gray velvet, with a bunch of single petaled
violets on her coat. She turned and looked at Jean critically.
“I only had this new serge suit,” said Jean. “I thought with a sort of
fluffy waist it would be right to wear.”
The waist was a soft crinkly crepe silk in dull old gold, with a low
collar of rose point, and just a touch of Byzantine embroidery down the
front. Above it, Jean’s eager face framed in her brown hair, her brown
eyes, small imperative chin with its deep cleft, and look of interest
that Kit called “questioning curiosity,” all seemed accentuated.
“It’s just right, dear,” said Cousin Beth. “Go get a yellow jonquil to
wear. Carlota will have violets, I think. She loves them best.”
There was a scent of coming spring in the air as they motored along the
country roads, just a delicate reddening of the maple twigs, and a mist
above the lush marshes down in the lower meadows. Once Carlota called
out joyously. A pair of nesting bluebirds teetered on a fence rail,
talking to each other of spring housekeeping.
“Ah, there they are,” she cried. “And in Italy now there will be spring
everywhere. My father told me of the bluebirds here. He said they were
bits of heaven’s own blue with wings on.”
“How queer it is,” Jean said, “I mean the way one remembers and loves
all the little things about one’s own country.”
“Not so much all the country. Just the spot of earth you spring from. He
loves this New England.”
“And I love Long Island. I was born there, not at the Cove, but farther
down the coast near Montauk Point, and the smell of salt water and the
marshes always stirs me. I love the long green rolling stretches, and
the little low hills in the background like you see in paintings of the
Channel Islands and some of the ones along the Scotch coast. Just a few
straggly scrub pines, you know, and the willows and wild cherry trees
and beach plums.”
“Somewhere I’ve read about that, girls; the old earth’s hold upon her
children. I’m afraid I only respond to gray rocks and all of this sort
of thing. I’ve been so homesick abroad just to look at a crooked apple
tree in bloom that I didn’t know what to do. Each man to his ‘ain acre.’
Where were you born, Carlota?”
“At the Villa Marina. Ah, but you should see it.” Carlota’s dark face
glowed with love and pride. “It is dull terra cotta color, and then dull
green too, the mold of ages, I think, like the under side of an olive
leaf, and flowers everywhere, and poplars in long avenues. My father
laughs at our love for it, and says it is just a mouldy old ruin, but
every summer we spend there. Some day perhaps you could come to see us,
Jean. Would they lend her to us for a while, do you think, Mrs. Newell?”
“After the sick soldiers have all been sent home well,” said Jean. “I
should love to. Isn’t it fun building air castles?”
“They are very substantial things,” Cousin Beth returned, whimsically.
“Hopes to me are so tangible. We just set ahead of us the big hope, and
the very thought gives us incentive and endeavor and what Elliott calls
in his boy fashion, ‘punch.’ Plan from now on, Jean, for one spring in
Italy. I’m scheming deeply, you know, or perhaps you haven’t even
guessed yet, to get you a couple of years’ study here, then at least one
abroad, and after that, you shall try your own strength.”
“Wouldn’t it be awful if I turned out just ordinary!” Jean said with her
characteristic truthfulness. “I remember one girl down at the Cove, Len
Marden. We went through school together, and her people said she was a
musical genius. She studied all the time, really and truly. She was just
a martyr, and she liked it. They had plenty of means to give her every
chance, and she studied harmony in one city abroad, and then something
in another city, and something else in another. We always used to wonder
where Len was trying her scales. Her name was Leonora, and she used to
dread it. Why, her father even retired from business, just to give his
time up to watching over Len, and her mother was like a Plymouth Rock
hen, brooding over her. Well, she came back last fall, and just ran away
and married one of the boys from the Cove, and she says she doesn’t give
a rap for a career.”
Cousin Beth and Carlota both laughed heartily at Jean’s seriousness.
“She has all of my sympathy,” the former declared. “I don’t think a
woman is able to give her greatest powers to the world if she is gifted
unusually, until she has known love and motherhood. I hope Leonora finds
her way back to the temple of genius with twins clinging to her wing
tips.”
It was just a little bit late when they arrived at the Morel studio.
Jean had expected it to be more of the usual workshop, like Daddy
Higginson’s for instance, where canvases heaped against the walls seemed
to have collected the dust of ages, and a broom would have been a
desecration. Here, you ascended in an elevator, from an entrance hall
that Cousin Beth declared always made her think of the tomb of the
Pharoahs in “Aida.”
“All it needs is a nice view of the Nile by moonlight, and some tall
lilies in full bloom, and someone singing ‘Celeste Aida,’” she told the
girls when they alighted at the ninth floor, and found themselves in the
long vestibule of the Morel studio. Jean had rather a confused idea of
what followed. There was the meeting with Morel himself. Stoop
shouldered and thin, with his vivid foreign face, half closed eyes, and
odd moustache like a mandarin’s. And near him Madame Morel, with a
wealth of auburn hair and big dark eyes. She heard Carlota say just
before they were separated,
“He loves to paint red hair, and Aunt Signa says she has the most
wonderful hair you ever saw, like Melisande.”
Cousin Beth had been taken possession of by a stout smiling young man
with eyeglasses and was already the center of a little group. Jean heard
his name, and recognized it as that of a famous illustrator. Carlota
introduced her to a tall girl in brown whom she had met in Italy, and
then somehow, Jean could not have told how it happened, they drifted
apart. Not but what she was glad of a breathing spell, just a chance as
Shad would have said, to get her bearings. Morel was showing some recent
canvases, still unframed, at the end of the studio, and everyone seemed
to gravitate that way.
Jean found a quiet corner near a tall Chinese screen. Somebody handed
her fragrant tea in a little red and gold cup, and she was free to look
around her. A beautiful woman had just arrived. She was tall and past
first youth, but Jean leaned forward expectantly. This must be the
Contessa. Her gown seemed as indefinite and elusive in detail as a
cloud. It was dull violet color, with a gleam of gold here and there as
she moved slowly towards Morel’s group. Under a wide brimmed hat of
violet, you saw the lifted face, with tired lovely eyes, and close waves
of pale golden hair. And this was not all. Oh, if only Helen could have
seen her, thought Jean, with a funny little reversion to the home
circle. She had wanted a princess from real life, or a contessa,
anything that was tangibly romantic and noble, and here was the very
pattern of a princess, even to a splendid white stag hound which
followed her with docile eyes and drooping long nose.
“My dear, would you mind coaxing that absent-minded girl at the tea
table to part with some lemon for my tea? And the Roquefort sandwiches
are excellent too.”
Jean turned at the sound of the new voice beside her. There on the same
settee sat a robust, middle-aged late comer. Her satin coat was worn and
frayed, her hat altogether too youthful with its pink and mauve
butterflies veiled in net. It did make one think of poor Cynthy and her
yearnings towards roses. Jean saw, too, that there was a button missing
from her gown, and her collar was pinned at a wrong angle, but the
collar was real lace and the pin was of old pearls. It was her face that
charmed. Framed in an indistinct mass of fluffy hair, gray and blonde
mixed, with a turned up, winning mouth, and delightfully expressive
eyes, it was impossible not to feel immediately interested and
acquainted.
Before they had sat there long, Jean found herself indulging in all
sorts of confidences. They seemed united by a common feeling of, not
isolation exactly, but newness to this circle.
“I enjoy it so much more sitting over here and looking on,” Jean said.
“Cousin Beth knows everyone, of course, but it is like a painting. You
close one eye, and get the group effect. And I must remember everything
to write it home to the girls.”
“Tell me about these girls. Who are they that you love them so?” asked
her new friend. “I, too, like the bird’s eye view best. I told Morel I
did not come to see anything but his pictures, and now I am ready for
tea and talk.”
So Jean told all about Greenacres and the girls there and before she
knew it, she had disclosed too, her own hopes and ambitions, and perhaps
a glimpse of what it might mean to the others still in the nest if she,
the first to fly, could only make good. And her companion told her, in
return, of how sure one must be that the spark of inspiration is really
a divine one and worthy of sacrifice, before one gives up all to it.
“Yonder in France, and in Italy too, but mostly in France,” she said, “I
have found girls like you, my child, from your splendid homeland, living
on little but hopes, wasting their time and what money could be spared
them from some home over here, following false hopes, and sometimes
starving. It is but a will-o’-the-wisp, this success in art, a sort of
pitiful madness that takes possession of our brains and hearts and makes
us forget the daily road of gold that lies before us.”
“But how can you tell for sure?” asked Jean, leaning forward anxiously.
“Who can answer that? I have only pitied the ones who could not see they
had no genius. Ah, my dear, when you meet real genius, then you know the
difference instantly. It is like the real gems and the paste. There is
consecration and no thought of gain. The work is done irresistibly,
spontaneously, because they cannot help it. They do not think of so
called success, it is only the fulfilment of their own visions that they
love. You like to draw and paint, you say, and you have studied some in
New York. What then?”
Jean pushed back her hair impulsively.
“Do you know, I think you are a little bit wrong. You won’t mind my
saying that, will you, please? It is only this. Suppose we are not
geniuses, we who see pictures in our minds and long to paint them. I
think that is the gift too, quite as much as the other, as the power to
execute. Think how many go through life with eyes blind to all beauty
and color! Surely it must be something to have the power of seeing it
all, and of knowing what you want to paint. My Cousin Roxy says it’s
better to aim at the stars and hit the bar post, than to aim at the bar
post and hit the ground.”
“Ah, so. And one of your English poets says too, ‘A man’s aim should
outreach his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ Maybe, you are quite right.
The vision is the gift.” She turned and laid her hand on Jean’s
shoulder, her eyes beaming with enjoyment of their talk. “I shall
remember you, Brown Eyes.”
And just at this point Cousin Beth and Carlota came towards them, the
former smiling at Jean.
“Don’t you think you’ve monopolized the Contessa long enough, young
woman?” she asked. Jean could not answer. The Contessa, this whimsical,
oddly gowned woman, who had sat and talked with her over their tea in
the friendliest sort of way, all the time that Jean had thought the
Contessa was the tall lady in the temperamental gown with the stag hound
at her heels.
“But this is delightful,” exclaimed the Contessa, happily. “We have met
incognito. I thought she was some demure little art student who knew no
one here, and she has been so kind to me, who also seemed lonely. Come
now, we will meet with the celebrities.”
With her arm around Jean’s waist, she led her over to the group around
Morel, and told them in her charming way of how they had discovered each
other.
“And she has taught me a lesson that you, Morel, with all your art, do
not know, I am sure. It is not the execution that is the crown of
ambition and aspiration, it is the vision itself. For the vision is
divine inspiration, but the execution is the groping of the human hand.”
“Oh, but I never could say it so beautifully,” exclaimed Jean, pink
cheeked and embarrassed, as Morel laid his hand over hers.
“Nevertheless,” he said, gently, “success to thy finger-tips,
Mademoiselle.”