The tremendous tragedy in Europe, now nearing the end of the second
act, had been slowly shaking the drowsy Western World out of its snug
slumber of complacency. Young America was already sitting up in bed,
awake, alert, listening. Older America, more difficult to convince,
rolled solemn and interrogative eyes toward Washington, where the
wooden gods still sat nodding in a row, smiling vacuously at destiny
out of carved and painted features. Eyes had they but they saw not,
ears but they heard not; neither spake they through their mouths.
Yet, they that made them were no longer like unto them, for many an
anxious idolater no longer trusted in them. For their old God's voice
was sounding in their ears.
The voice of a great ex-president, too, had been thundering from the
wilderness; lesser prophets, endowed, however, with intellect and
vision, had been warning the young West that the second advent of
Attila was at hand; an officer of the army, inspired of God, had
preached preparedness from the market places and had established for
its few disciples an habitation; and a great Admiral had died of a
broken heart because his lips had been officially sealed--the wisest
lips that ever told of those who go down to the sea in ships.
Plainer and plainer in American ears sounded the mounting surf of
that blood-red sea thundering against the frontiers of Democracy;
clearer and clearer came the discordant clamour of the barbaric
hordes; louder and more menacing the half-crazed blasphemies of their
chief, who had given the very name of the Scourge of God to one among
the degenerate litter he had sired.
* * * * *
Garret Barres had been educated like any American of modern New York
type. Harvard, then five years abroad, and a return to his native city
revealed him as an ambitious, receptive, intelligent young man, deeply
interested in himself and his own affairs, theoretically patriotic, a
good citizen by intention, an affectionate son and brother, and
already a pretty good painter of the saner species.
A modest income of his own enabled him to bide his time and decline
pot-boilers. A comparatively young father and an even more youthful
mother, both of sporting proclivities, together with a sister of the
same tastes, were his preferred companions when he had time to go home
to the family rooftree in northern New York. His lines, indeed, were
cast in pleasant places. Beside still waters in green pastures, he
could always restore his city-tarnished soul when he desired to retire
for a while from the battleground of endeavour.
The city, after all, offered him a world-wide battlefield; for Garret
Barres was by choice a painter of thoroughbred women, of cosmopolitan
men--a younger warrior of the brush imbued with the old traditions of
those great English captains of portraiture, who recorded for us the
more brilliant human truths of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
From their stately canvases aglow, the eyes of the lovely dead look
out at us; the eyes of ambition, of pride, of fatuous complacency;
the haunted eyes of sorrow; the clear eyes of faith. Out of the past
they gaze--those who once lived--deathlessly recorded by Van Dyck,
Lely, Kneller; by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hoppner, Lawrence, Raeburn;
or consigned to a dignified destiny by Stuart, Sully, Inman, and
Vanderlyn.
* * * * *
When Barres returned to New York after many years, he found that the
aspect of the city had not altered very greatly. The usual dirt,
disorder, and municipal confusion still reigned; subways were being
dug, but since the memory of man runneth, the streets of the
metropolis have been dug up, and its market places and byways have
been an abomination.
The only visible excitement, however, was in the war columns of the
newspapers, and, sometimes, around bulletin boards where wrangling
groups were no uncommon sight, citizens and aliens often coming into
verbal collision--sometimes physical--promptly suppressed by bored
policemen.
There was a "preparedness" parade; thousands of worthy citizens
marched in it, nervously aware, now, that the Great Republic's only
mobile military division was on the Mexican border, where also certain
Guard regiments were likely to be directed to reinforce the
regulars--pet regiments from the city, among whose corps of officers
and enlisted men everybody had some friend or relative.
But these regiments had not yet entrained. There were few soldiers to
be seen on the streets. Khaki began to be noticeable in New York only
when the Plattsburg camps opened. After that there was an interim of
the usual dull, unaccented civilian monotony, mitigated at rare
intervals by this dun-coloured ebb and flow from Plattsburg.
Like the first vague premonitions of a nightmare the first ominous
symptoms of depression were slowly possessing hearts already uneasy
under two years' burden of rumours unprintable, horrors incredible to
those aloof and pursuing the peaceful tenor of their ways.
A growing restlessness, unbelief, the incapacity to
understand--selfishness, rapacity, self-righteousness, complacency,
cowardice, even stupidity itself were being jolted and shocked into
something resembling a glimmer of comprehension as the hunnish U-boats,
made ravenous by the taste of blood, steered into western shipping lanes
like a vast shoal of sharks.
And always thicker and thicker came the damning tales of rape
and murder, of cowardly savagery, brutal vileness, degenerate
bestiality--clearer, nearer, distinctly audible, the sigh of a
ravaged and expiring civilisation trampled to obliteration by the
slavering, ferocious swine of the north.
* * * * *
Fires among shipping, fires amid great stores of cotton and grain
destined for France or England, explosions of munitions of war ordered
by nations of the Entente, the clumsy propaganda or impudent sneers of
German and pro-German newspapers; reports of German meddling in
Mexico, in South America, in Japan; more sinister news concerning the
insolent activities of certain embassies--all these were beginning to
have their logical effect among a fat and prosperous people which
simply could not bear to be aroused from pleasant dreams of
brotherhood to face the raw and hellish truth.
* * * * *
"For fifty years," remarked Barres to his neighbour, Esme Trenor,
also a painter of somewhat eccentric portraits, "our national
characteristic has been a capacity for absorbing bunk and a fixed
determination to kid ourselves. There really is a war, Trenor, old
top, and we're going to get into it before very long."
Trenor, a tall, tired, exquisitely groomed young man, who once had
painted a superficially attractive portrait of a popular debutante,
and had been overwhelmed with fashionable orders ever since, was the
adored of women. He dropped one attenuated knee over the other and
lighted an attenuated cigarette.
"Fancy anybody bothering enough about anything to fight over it!" he
said languidly.
"We're going to _war_, Trenor," repeated Barres, jamming his brushes
into a bowl of black soap. "That's my positive conviction."
"Yours is so disturbingly positive a nature," remonstrated the other.
"Why ever raise a row? Nothing positive is of any real importance--not
even opinions."
Barres, vigorously cleaning his brushes in turpentine and black soap,
glanced around at Trenor, and in his quick smile there glimmered a
hint of good-natured malice. For Esme Trenor was notoriously anything
except positive in his painting, always enveloping a lack of technical
knowledge with a veil of camouflage. Behind this pretty veil hid many
defects, perhaps even deformities--protected by vague, indefinite
shadows and the effrontery of an adroit exploiter of the restless
sex.
But Esme Trenor was both clever and alert. He had not even missed that
slight and momentary glimmer of good-humoured malice in the pleasant
glance of Barres. But, like his more intelligent prototype, Whistler,
it was impossible to know whether or not discovery ever made any
particular difference to him. He tucked a lilac-bordered handkerchief
a little deeper into his cuff, glanced at his jewelled wrist-watch,
shook the long ash from his cigarette.
"To be positive in anything," he drawled, "is an effort; effort
entails exertion; exertion is merely a degree of violence; violence
engenders toxins; toxins dull the intellect. Quod erat, dear friend.
You see?"
"Oh, yes, I see," nodded Barres, always frankly amused at Trenor and
his ways.
"Well, then, if you see----" Trenor waved a long, bony, over-manicured
hand, expelled a ring or two of smoke, meditatively; then, in his
characteristically languid voice: "To be positive closes the door to
further observation and pulls down the window shades. Nothing remains
except to go to bed. Is there anything more uninteresting than to go
to bed? Is there anything more depressing than to know all about
something?"
"You do converse like an ass sometimes," remarked Barres.
"Yes--sometimes. Not now, Barres. I don't desire to know all about
anybody or anything. Fancy my knowing all about art, for example!"
"Yes, fancy!" repeated Barres, laughing.
"Or about anything specific--a woman, for example!" He shrugged
wearily.
"If you meet a woman and like her, don't you want to know all there is
to know about her?" inquired Barres.
"I should say not!" returned the other with languid contempt. "I don't
wish to know anything at all about her."
"Well, we differ about that, old top."
"Religiously. A woman can be only an incidental amusement in one's
career. You don't go to a musical comedy twice, do you? And any woman
will reveal herself sufficiently in one evening."
"Nice, kindly domestic instincts you have, Trenor."
"I'm merely fastidious," returned the other, dropping his cigarette
out of the open window. He rose, yawned, took his hat, stick and
gloves.
"Bye," he said languidly. "I'm painting Elsena Helmund this morning."
Barres said, with good-humoured envy:
"I've neither commission nor sitter. If I had, you bet I'd not stand
there yawning at my luck."
"It is you who have the luck, not I," drawled Trenor. "I give a
portion of my spiritual and material self with every brush stroke,
while you remain at liberty to flourish and grow fat in idleness. I
perish as I create; my life exhausts itself to feed my art. What you
call my good luck is my martyrdom. You see, dear friend, how fortunate
you are?"
"I see," grinned Barres. "But will your spiritual nature stand such a
cruel drain? Aren't you afraid your morality may totter?"
"Morality," mused Esme, going; "that is one of those early Gothic
terms now obsolete, I believe----"
He sauntered out with his hat and gloves and stick, still murmuring:
"Morality? Gothic--very Gothic--"
Barres, still amused, sorted his wet brushes, dried them carefully one
by one on a handful of cotton waste, and laid them in a neat row
across the soapstone top of his palette-table.
"Hang it!" he muttered cheerfully. "I could paint like a streak this
morning if I had the chance--"
He threw himself back in his chair and sat there smoking for a while,
his narrowing eyes fixed on a great window which opened above the
court. Soft spring breezes stirred the curtains; sparrows were noisy
out there; a strip of cobalt sky smiled at him over the opposite
chimneys; an April cloud floated across it.
He rose, walked over to the window and glanced down into the court.
Several more hyacinths were now in blossom. The Prophet dozed
majestically, curled up on an Italian garden seat. Beside him sprawled
the snow white Houri, stretched out full length in the sun, her
wonderful blue eyes following the irrational gambols of the
tortoise-shell cat, Strindberg, who had gone loco, as usual, and was
tearing up and down trees, prancing sideways with flattened ears and
crooked tail, in terror at things invisible, or digging furiously
toward China amid the hyacinths.
Dulcie Soane came out into the court presently and expostulated with
Strindberg, who suffered herself to be removed from the hyacinth bed,
only to make a hysterical charge on her mistress's ankles.
"Stop it, you crazy thing!" insisted Dulcie, administering a gentle
slap which sent the cat bucketing and corvetting across the lawn,
where the eccentric course of a dead leaf, blown by the April wind,
instantly occupied its entire intellectual vacuum.
Barres, leaning on the window-sill, said, without raising his voice:
"Hello, Dulcie! How are you, after our party?"
The child looked up, smiled shyly her response through the pale glory
of the April sunshine.
"What are you doing to-day?" he inquired, with casual but friendly
interest.
"Nothing."
"Isn't there any school?"
"It's Saturday."
"That's so. Well, if you're doing nothing you're just as busy as I
am," he remarked, smiling down at her where she stood below his
window.
"Why don't you paint pictures?" ventured the girl diffidently.
"Because I haven't any orders. Isn't that sad?"
"Yes.... But you could paint a picture just to please yourself,
couldn't you?"
"I haven't anybody to paint from," he explained with amiable
indifference, lazily watching the effect of alternate shadow and
sunlight on her upturned face.
"Couldn't you find--somebody?" Her heart had suddenly begun to beat
very fast.
Barres laughed:
"Would you like to have your portrait painted?"
She could scarcely find voice to reply:
"Will you--let me?"
The slim young figure down there in the April sunshine had now
arrested his professional attention. With detached interest he
inspected her for a few moments; then:
"You'd make an interesting study, Dulcie. What do you say?"
"Do--do you mean that you _want_ me?"
"Why--yes! Would you like to pose for me? It's pin-money, anyway.
Would you like to try it?"
"Y-yes."
"Are you quite sure? It's hard work."
"Quite--sure----" she stammered. The little flushed face was lifted
very earnestly to his now, almost beseechingly. "I am quite sure," she
repeated breathlessly.
"So you'd really like to pose for me?" he insisted in smiling surprise
at the girl's visible excitement. Then he added abruptly: "I've half a
mind to give you a job as my private model!"
Through the rosy confusion of her face her grey eyes were fixed on him
with a wistful intensity, almost painful. For into her empty heart and
starved mind had suddenly flashed a dazzling revelation. Opportunity
was knocking at her door. Her chance had come! Perhaps it had been
inherited from her mother--God knows!--this deep, deep hunger for
things beautiful--this passionate longing for light and knowledge.
Mere contact with such a man as Barres had already made endurable a
solitary servitude which had been subtly destroying her child's
spirit, and slowly dulling the hunger in her famished mind. And now to
aid him--to feel that he was using her--was to arise from her rags of
ignorance and emerge upright into the light which filled that
wonder-house wherein he dwelt, and on the dark threshold of which her
lonely little soul had crouched so long in silence.
* * * * *
She looked up almost blindly at the man who, in careless friendliness,
had already opened his door to her, had permitted her to read his
wonder-books, had allowed her to sit unreproved and silent from sheer
happiness, and gaze unsatiated upon the wondrous things within the
magic mansion where he dwelt.
And now to serve this man; to aid him, to creep into the light in
which he stood and strive to learn and see!--the thought already had
produced a delicate intoxication in the child, and she gazed up at
Barres from the sunny garden with her naked soul in her eyes. Which
confused, perplexed, and embarrassed him.
"Come on up," he said briefly. "I'll tell your father over the
'phone."
* * * * *
She entered without a sound, closed the door which he had left open
for her, advanced across the thick-meshed rug. She still wore her blue
gingham apron; her bobbed hair, full of ruddy lights, intensified the
whiteness of her throat. In her arms she cradled the Prophet, who
stared solemnly at Barres out of depthless green eyes.
"Upon my word," thought Barres to himself, "I believe I have found a
model and an uncommon one!"
Dulcie, watching his expression, smiled slightly and stroked the
Prophet.
"I'll paint you that way! Don't stir," said the young fellow
pleasantly. "Just stand where you are, Dulcie. You're quite all right
as you are----" He lifted a half-length canvas, placed it on his heavy
easel and clamped it.
"I feel exactly like painting," he continued, busy with his brushes
and colours. "I'm full of it to-day. It's in me. It's got to come
out.... And you certainly are an interesting subject--with your big
grey eyes and bobbed red hair--oh, quite interesting constructively,
too--as well as from the colour point."
He finished setting his palette, gathered up a handful of brushes:
"I won't bother to draw you except with a brush----"
He looked across at her, remained looking, the pleasantly detached
expression of his features gradually changing to curiosity, to the
severity of increasing interest, to concentrated and silent
absorption.
"Dulcie," he presently concluded, "you are so unusually interesting
and paintable that you make me think very seriously.... And I'm hanged
if I'm going to waste you by slapping a technically adequate sketch of
you onto this nice new canvas ... which might give me pleasure while
I'm doing it ... and might even tickle my vanity for a week ... and
then be laid away to gather dust ... and be covered over next year and
used for another sketch.... No.... _No_!... You're worth more than
that!"
He began to pace the place to and fro, thinking very hard, glancing
around at her from moment to moment, where she stood, obediently
immovable on the blue meshed rug, clasping the Prophet to her breast.
"Do you want to become my private model?" he demanded abruptly. "I
mean seriously. Do you?"
"Yes."
"I mean a real model, from whom I can ask anything?"
"Oh, yes, please," pleaded the girl, trembling a little.
"Do you understand what it means?"
"Yes."
"Sometimes you'll be required to wear few clothes. Sometimes none. Did
you know that?"
"Yes. Mr. Westmore asked me once."
"You didn't care to?"
"Not for him."
"You don't mind doing it for me?"
"I'll do anything you ask me," she said, trying to smile and shivering
with excitement.
"All right. It's a bargain. You're my model, Dulcie. When do you
graduate from school?"
"In June."
"Two months! Well--all right. Until then it will be a half day through
the week, and all day Saturdays and Sundays, if I require you. You'll
have a weekly salary----" He smiled and mentioned the figure, and the
girl blushed vividly. She had, it appeared, expected nothing.
"Why, Dulcie!" he exclaimed, immensely amused. "You didn't intend to
come here and give me all your time for nothing, did you?"
"Yes."
"But why on earth should you do such a thing for me?"
She found no words to explain why.
"Nonsense," he continued; "you're a business woman now. Your father
will have to find somebody to cook for him and take the desk when he's
out at Grogan's. Don't worry; I'll fix it with him.... By the way,
Dulcie, supposing you sit down."
She found a chair and took the Prophet onto her lap.
"Now, this will be very convenient for me," he went on, inspecting her
with increasing satisfaction. "If I ever have any orders--any
sitters--you can have a vacation, of course. Otherwise, I'll always
have an interesting model at hand--I've got chests full of wonderful
costumes--genuine ones----" He fell silent, his eyes studying her.
Already he was planning half a dozen pictures, for he was just
beginning to perceive how adaptable the girl might be. And there was
about her that indefinable something which, when a painter discovers
it, interests him and arouses his intense artistic curiosity.
"You know," he said musingly, "you are something more than pretty,
Dulcie.... I could put you in eighteenth century clothes and you'd
look logical. Yes, and in seventeenth century clothes, too.... I could
do some amusing things with you in oriental garments.... A young
Herodiade ... Calypso ... Theodora.... She was a child, too, you know.
There's a portrait with bobbed hair--a young girl by Van Dyck.... You
know you are quite stimulating to me, Dulcie. You excite a painter's
imagination. It's rather odd," he added naively, "that I never
discovered you before; and I've known you over two years."
He had seated himself on the sofa while discoursing. Now he got up,
touched a bell twice. The Finnish maid, Selinda, with her high
cheek-bones, frosty blue eyes and colourless hair, appeared in cap and
apron.
"Selinda," he said, "take Miss Dulcie into my room. In a long, leather
Turkish box on the third shelf of my clothes closet is a silk and gold
costume and a lot of jade jewelry. Please put her into it."
So Dulcie Soane went away with her cat in her arms, beside the neat
and frosty-eyed Selinda; and Barres opened a portfolio of engravings,
where were gathered the lovely aristocrats of Van Dyck and Rubens and
Gainsborough and his contemporaries--a charmingly mixed company,
separated by centuries and frontiers, yet all characterised by a
common _something_--some inexplicable similarity which Barres
recognised without defining.
"It's rather amusing," he murmured, "but that kid, Dulcie, seems to
remind me of these people--somehow or other.... One scarcely looks for
qualities in the child of an Irish janitor.... I wonder who her mother
was...."
* * * * *
When he looked up again Dulcie was standing there on the thick rug. On
her naked feet were jade bracelets, jade-set rings on her little toes;
a cascade of jade and gold falling over her breasts to the straight,
narrow breadth of peacock hue which fell to her ankles. And on her
childish head, clasping the ruddy bobbed hair, glittered the
jade-incrusted diadem of a fairy princess of Cathay.
[Illustration: "YOU LITTLE MIRACLE!"]
The Prophet, gathered close to her breast, stared back at Barres with
eyes that dimmed the splendid jade about him.
"That settles it," he said, the tint of excitement rising in his
cheeks. "I _have_ discovered a model and a wonder! And right here is
where I paint my winter Academy--right here and right now!... And I
call it 'The Prophets.' Climb up on that model stand and squat there
cross-legged, and stare at me--straight at me--the way your cat
stares!... There you are. That's right! Don't move. Stay put or I'll
come over and bow-string you!--you little miracle!"
"Do--you mean me?" faltered Dulcie.
"You bet, Sweetness! Do you know how beautiful you are? Well, never
mind----" He had begun already to draw with a wet brush, and now he
relapsed into absorbed silence.
The Prophet watched him steadily. The studio became intensely still.