The studio door bell rang while Barres was at breakfast one morning
late in June. Aristocrates leisurely answered the door, but shut it
again immediately and walked out into the kitchenette without any
explanation.
Selinda removed the breakfast cover and fetched the newspaper. Later,
Aristocrates, having washed his master's brushes, brought them into
the studio mincingly, upon a silver service-salver.
"No letters?" inquired Barres, glancing up over the morning paper and
laying aside his cigarette.
"No letters, suh. No co'espondence in any shape, fo'm or manner,
suh."
"Anybody to see me?" inquired Barres, always amused at Aristocrates'
flights of verbiage.
"Nobody, suh, excusin' a persistless 'viduality inquihin' fo' you,
suh."
"What persistless individuality was that?" asked Barres.
"A ve'y or-nary human objec', suh, pahshially afflicted with one bad
eye."
"That one-eyed man? He's been here several times, hasn't he? Why does
he come?"
"Fo' commercial puhposes, suh."
"Oh, a pedlar?"
"He mentions a desiah, suh, to dispose, commercially, of vahious
impo'ted materials requiahed by ahtists."
"Didn't you show him the sign in the hall, 'No pedlars allowed'?"
"Yaas, suh."
"What did he say?"
"I would not demean myse'f to repeat what this human objec' said,
suh."
"And what did you do then?"
"Mistuh Barres, suh, I totally igno'hed that man," replied Aristocrates
languidly.
"Quite right. But you tell Soane to enforce the rule against pedlars.
Every day there are two or three of them ringing at the studio, trying
to sell colours, laces, or fake oriental rugs. It annoys me. Selinda
can't hear the bell and I have to leave my work and open the door.
Tell that persistless one-eyed man to keep away. Tell Soane to bounce
him next time he enters Dragon Court. Do you understand?"
"Yaas, suh. But Soane, suh, he's a might friendly Irish. He's spo'tin'
'round Grogan's nights, 'longa this here one-eyed 'viduality. Yaas,
suh. I done seen 'em co-gatherin' on vahious occasionalities."
"Oho!" commented Barres. "It's graft, is it? This one-eyed pedlar
meets Soane at Grogan's and bribes him with a few drinks to let him
peddle colours in Dragon Court! That's the Irish of it, Aristocrates.
I began to suspect something like that. All right. I'll speak to Soane
myself.... Leave the studio door open; it's warm in here."
* * * * *
The month of May was now turning somewhat sultry as it melted into
June. Every pivot-pane in the big studio window had been swung wide
open. The sun had already clothed every courtyard tree with dense and
tender foliage; hyacinth and tulip were gone and Soane's subscription
geraniums blazed in their place like beds of coals heaped up on the
grass plot of Dragon Court.
But blue sky, sunshine of approaching summer, gentle winds and
freshening rains brought only restlessness to New Yorkers that month
of May.
Like the first two years of the war, the present year seemed strange,
unreal; its vernal breezes brought no balm, its blue skies no content.
The early summer sunlight seemed almost uncanny in a world where,
beyond the sea, millions of men at arms swayed ceaselessly under sun
and moon alike, interlocked in one gigantic death grip!--a horrible
and blood-drenched human chain of butchery stretching half around the
earth.
Into every Western human eye had come strange and subtle shadows which
did not depart with moments of forgetful mirth, intervals of
self-absorption, hours filled with familiar interests--the passions,
hopes, perplexities of those years which were now no more.
Those years of yesterdays! A vast and depthless cleft already divided
them from to-day. They seemed as remote as dusty centuries--those days
of an ordered and tranquil world--those days of little obvious faiths
unshattered--even those days of little wars, of petty local strifes,
of an almost universal calm and peace and trust in brotherhood and in
the obligations of civilisation.
Familiar yesterday had vanished, its creeds forgotten. It was already
decades away, and fading like a legend in the ever-increasing glare of
the red and present moment.
And the month of May seemed strange, and its soft skies and sun seemed
out of place in a world full of dying--a world heavy with death--a
western world aloof from the raging hell beyond the seas, yet already
tense under the distant threat of three continents in flames--and all
aquiver before the deathly menace of that horde of blood-crazed demons
still at large, still unsubdued, still ranging the ruins of the planet
which they had so insanely set on fire.
Entire nations were still burning beyond the ocean; other nations had
sunk into cinders. Over the Eastern seas the furnace breath began to
be felt along the out-thrust coast lines of the Western World. Inland,
not yet; but every seaward city became now conscious of that first
faint warning wave of heat from hell. Millions of ears strained to
catch the first hushed whisper of the tumult. Silent in its suspense
the Great Republic listened. Only the priesthood of the deaf and
wooden gods continued voluble. But Israel had already begun to lift up
its million eyes; and its ancient faith began to glow again; and its
trust was becoming once more a living thing--the half-forgotten trust
of Israel in that half-forgotten Lord, who, in the beginning, had been
their helper and their shield.
* * * * *
Through the open studio door came Dulcie Soane. The Prophet followed
at her slender heels, gently waving an urbane tail.
* * * * *
After his first smiling greeting--he always rose, advanced, and took
her hand with that pleasant appearance of formality so adored by
femininity, youthful or mature--he resumed his seat and continued to
write his letters.
These finished, he stamped them, rang for Aristocrates, picked up his
palette and brushes, and pulled out the easel upon which was the
canvas for the morning.
Dulcie, still in the hands of Selinda, had not yet emerged. The
Prophet sat upright on the carved table, motionless as a cat of ebony
with green-jewelled eyes.
"Well, old sport," said Barres, stepping across the rug to caress the
cat, "you and your pretty mistress begin to look very interesting on
my canvas."
The Prophet received the blandishments with dignified gratitude. A
discreet and feathery purring filled the room as Barres stroked the
jet black, silky fur.
"Fine cat, you are," commented the young man, turning as Dulcie
entered.
She laid one hand on his extended arm and sprang lightly to the model
stand. And the next moment she was seated--a slim, gemmed thing
glimmering with imperial jade from top to toe.
Barres laid the Prophet in her arms, stepped back while Dulcie
arranged the docile cat, then retreated to his canvas.
"All right, Sweetness?"
"All right," replied the child happily. And the morning seance was
on.
Barres was usually inclined to ramble along conversationally in his
pleasant, detached way while at work, particularly if work went well.
"Where were we yesterday, Dulcie? Oh, yes; we were talking about the
Victorian era and its art; and we decided that it was not the barren
desert that the ultra-moderns would have us believe. That's what we
decided, wasn't it?"
"_You_ decided," she said.
"So did you, Dulcie. It was a unanimous decision. Because we both
concluded that some among the Victorians were full of that sweet,
clean sanity which alone endures. You recollect how our decision
started?"
"Yes. It was about my new pleasure in Tennyson, Browning, Morris,
Arnold, and Swinburne."
"Exactly. Victorian poets, if sometimes a trifle stilted and
self-conscious, wrote nobly; makers of Victorian prose displayed
qualities of breadth, imagination and vision and a technical
cultivation unsurpassed. The musical compositions of that epoch were
melodious and sometimes truly inspired; never brutal, never vulgar,
never degenerate. And the Victorian sculptors and painters--at first
perhaps austerely pedantic--became, as they should be, recorders of
the times and customs of thought, bringing the end of the reign of a
great Queen to an admirable renaissance."
Dulcie's grey eyes never left his. And if she did not quite understand
every word, already the dawning familiarity with his vocabulary and a
general comprehension of his modes of self-expansion permitted her to
follow him.
"A great Queen, a great reign, a great people," he rambled on,
painting away all the while. "And if in that era architecture declined
toward its lowest level of stupidity, and if taste in furniture and in
the plastic, decorative, and textile arts was steadily sinking toward
its lowest ebb, and if Mrs. Grundy trudged the Empire, paramount, dull
and smugly ferocious, while all snobbery saluted her and the humble
grovelled before her dusty brogans, yet, Dulcie, it was a great era.
"It was great because its faith had not been radically impaired; it
was sane because Germany had not yet inoculated the human race with
its porcine political vulgarities, its bestial degeneracy in art....
And if, perhaps, the sentimental in British art and literature
predominated, thank God it had not yet been tainted with the stark
ugliness, the swinish nakedness, the ferocious leer of things
Teutonic!"
He continued to paint in silence for a while. Presently the Prophet
yawned on Dulcie's knees, displaying a pink cavern.
"Better rest," he said, nodding smilingly at Dulcie. She released the
cat, who stretched, arched his back, yawned again gravely, and stalked
away over the velvety Eastern carpet.
Dulcie got up lithely and followed him on little jade-encrusted, naked
feet.
A box of bon-bons lay on the sofa; she picked up Rossetti's poems,
turned the leaves with jewel-laden fingers, while with the other hand
she groped for a bon-bon, her grey eyes riveted on the pages before
her.
During these intervals between poses it was the young man's custom to
make chalk sketches of the girl, recording swiftly any unstudied
attitude, any unconscious phase of youthful grace that interested
him.
Dulcie, in the beginning, diffidently aware of this, had now become
entirely accustomed to it, and no longer felt any responsibility to
remain motionless while he was busy with red chalk or charcoal.
When she had rested sufficiently, she laid aside her book, hunted up
the Prophet, who lazily endured the gentle tyranny, and resumed her
place on the model stand.
And so they worked away all the morning, until luncheon was served in
the studio by Aristocrates; and Barres in his blouse, and Dulcie in
her peacock silk, her jade, and naked feet, gravely or lightly as
their moods dictated, discussed an omelette and a pot of tea or
chocolate, and the ways and manners and customs of a world which
Dulcie now was discovering as a brand new and most enchanting planet.