"I should be so glad to have you call." Mrs. Pence was peering about
among the lanterns and tapestries and the stirring throng with the idea
of picking up Clytie and taking leave. "My niece is staying with me just
now, and I'm sure she would be glad to see you again too."
Abner looked about to help her find her charge. Clytie had gone over to
the tea-table, where she was snapping vindictively at the half of a
ginger-wafer somebody else had left and was gesticulating in the face of
Medora Giles.
"I never met such a man in my life!" she was declaring. "I'll never speak
to him again as long as I live! He's a bear; he's a brute!"
Little O'Grady, bringing forward another sliced lemon, shook in his
shoes. "He'll have everybody scared away before long!" the poor fellow
thought.
Medora smiled on Clytie. "Oh, not so bad as that, I hope," she said
serenely. "Stephen, now, is beginning to have quite a liking for him. So
earnest; so well-intentioned...."
"And you yourself?" asked Clytie.
"I haven't met him yet. I'm only on probation. He has looked me
over--from afar, but has his doubts. I may get the benefit of them, or I
may not."
"What doubts?"
"Why, I'm a renegade, a European. I'm effete, contaminate, taboo."
"Has he said so?"
"Said so? Do I need to have things 'said'?"
"Well, if you really are all this, you'll find it out soon enough."
"He's a touchstone, then?"
"Yes. And I'm a nonentity, lightly concerning myself about light
nothings. He won't mince matters."
"Don't worry about me," said Medora confidently. "I shall know how to
handle him."
Mrs. Pence kept on peering. Dusk was upon the place, and the few dim
lights were more ineffectual than ever. "There she is," said Abner, with
a bob of the head.
"Good-bye, then," said Eudoxia, grasping his hand effusively, as she took
her first step toward Clytie. "Now, you _will_ come and see us, won't
you?"
"Thank you; but----"
Abner paused for the evocation of an instantaneous vision of the
household thus thrown open to him. Such opportunities for falsity,
artificiality, downright humbuggery, for plutocratic upholstery and
indecorous statues and light-minded paintings, for cynical and insolent
servants, for the deployment of vast gains got by methods that at best
were questionable! Could he accept such hospitality as this?
"Thank you. I might come, possibly, if I can find the time. But I warn
you I am very busy."
"Make time," said Eudoxia good-humouredly, and passed along.
Abner made a good deal of time for the Burrow, but it was long before he
brought himself to make any for Eudoxia Pence. He came to see a great
deal of the Bunnies; in a month or two he quite had the run of the place.
There were friendly fellows who heaved big lumps of clay upon huge
nail-studded scantlings, and nice little girls who designed book-plates,
and more mature ones who painted miniatures, and many earnest, earnest
persons of both sexes who were hurrying, hurrying ahead on their wet
canvases so that the next exhibition might not be incomplete by reason of
lacking a "Smith," a "Jones," a "Robinson." Abner gave each and every one
of these pleasant people his company and imparted to them his views on
the great principles that underlie all the arts in common.
"So that's what you call it--a marquise," Abner observed on a certain
occasion to one of the miniature painters. "This creature with a fluffy
white wig and a low-necked dress is a marquise, is she? Do you like that
sort of thing?"
"Why, yes,--rather," said the artist.
"Well,_I_ don't," declared Abner, returning the trifle to the girl's
hands.
"I'll paint my next sitter as a milkmaid--if she'll let me."
"_As_ a milkmaid? No; paint the milkmaid herself. Deal with the verities.
Like them before you paint them. Paint them _because_ you like them."
"I don't know whether I should like milkmaids or not. I've never seen
one."
"They don't exist," chimed in Adrian Bond, who was dawdling in the
background. "The milkmaids are all men. And as for the dairy-farms
themselves----!" He sank back among his cushions. "I visited one in the
suburbs last month--the same time when I was going round among the
markets. I have been of half a mind, lately," he said, more directly to
Abner, "to do a large, serious thing based on local actualities; _The
City's Maw_--something like that. My things so far, I know (none better)
_are_ slight, flimsy, exotic, factitious. The first-hand study of
actuality, thought I----But no, no, no! It was a place fit only for a
reporter in search of a--of a--I don't know what. I shall never drink
coffee again; while as for milk punch----"
"And what is the artist," asked Abner, "but the reporter sublimated? Why
must the artist go afield to dabble in far-fetched artificialities that
have nothing to do with his own proper time and place? Our people go
abroad for study, instead of staying at home and guarding their native
quality. They return affected, lackadaisical, self-conscious--they bring
the hothouse with them. Why, I have seen such a simple matter as the
pouring of a cup of tea turned into----"
"You can't mean Medora Giles," said the miniaturist quickly, pausing
amidst the laces of her bodice. "Don't make any mistake about Medora.
When she goes in for all that sort of thing, she's merely 'creating
atmosphere,' as we say,--she's simply after the 'envelopment,' in fact."
"She is just getting into tone," Bond re-enforced, "with the
candle-shades and the peppermints."
"Medora," declared the painter, "is as sensible and capable a girl as I
know. Why, the very dress she wore that afternoon----You noticed it?"
"I--I----" began Abner.
"No, you didn't--of course you didn't. Well, she made every stitch of it
with her own hands."
"And those tea-cakes, that afternoon," supplemented Bond. "She made every
stitch of _them_ with her own hands. She told me so herself, when I
stayed afterward, to help wash things up."
"I may have done her an injustice," Abner acknowledged. "Perhaps I might
like to know her, after all."
"You might be proud to," said Bond.
"And the favour would be the other way round," declared the painter
stoutly.
Abner passed over any such possibility as this. "How long was she
abroad?" he asked Bond.
"Let's see. She studied music in Leipsic two years; she plays the violin
like an angel--up to a certain point. Then she was in Paris for another
year. She paints a little--not enough to hurt."
"Leipsic? Two years?" pondered Abner. It seemed more staid, less vicious,
after all, than if the whole time had been spent in Paris. The violin;
painting. Both required technique; each art demanded long, close
application. "Well, I dare say she is excusable." But here, he thought,
was just where the other arts were at a disadvantage compared with
literature: you might stay at home wherever you were, if a writer, and
get your own technique.
"And you have done it," said Bond. "I admire some of your things so much.
Your instinct for realities, your sturdy central grasp--"
"What man has done, man may do," rejoined Abner. "Yet what is technique,
after all? There remains, as ever, the problem, the great Social Problem,
to be solved."
"You think so?" queried Bond.
"Think that there is a social problem?"
"Think that it can be solved. I have my own idea there. It is a secret. I
am willing to tell it to one person, but not to more,--I couldn't answer
for the consequences. If Miss Wilbur will just stop her ears----"
The miniaturist laughed and laid her palms against her cheeks.
"You are sure you can't hear?" asked Bond, with his eye on her spreading
fingers. "Well, then"--to Abner--"there _is_ the great Human Problem, but
it is not to be solved, nor was it designed that it should be. The world
is only a big coral for us to cut our teeth upon, a proving-ground, a
hotbed from which we shall presently be transplanted according to our
several deserts. No power can solve the puzzle save the power that cut it
up into pieces to start with. Try as we may, the blanket will always be
just a little too small for the bedstead. Meanwhile, the thing for us to
do is to go right along figuring, figuring, figuring on our little
slates,--but rather for the sake of keeping busy than from any hope of
reaching the 'answer' set down in the Great Book above."
"But----" began Abner; his orthodox sensibilities were somewhat offended.
Miss Wilbur, who had heard every word, laughed outright.
"I beg," Bond hurried on, "that you won't communicate this to a living
soul. I am the only one who suspects the real truth. If it came to be
generally known all human motives would be lacking, all human activities
would be paralyzed--the whole world would come to a standstill. Mum's the
word. For if the problem is insoluble and meant to be, just as sure is it
that we were not intended to suspect the truth."
Abner gasped--dredging the air for a word. "Of course," Bond went ahead,
less fantastically, "I know I ought to shut my eyes to all this and start
in to accomplish something more vital, more indigenous--less of the
marquise and more of the milkmaid, in fact----"
"Write about the things you know and like," said Abner curtly.
His tone acknowledged his inability to keep pace with such whimsicalities
or to sympathize with them.
"If to know and to like were one with me, as they appear to be with you!
A boyhood in the country--what a grand beginning! But the things I know
are the things I don't like, and the things I like are not always the
things I know--oftener the things I feel." Bond was speaking with a
greater sincerity than he usually permitted himself. The right touch just
then might have determined his future: he was quite as willing to become
a Veritist as to remain a mere Dilettante.
Abner tossed his head with a suppressed snort; he felt but little
inclined to give encouragement to this manikin, this tidier-up after
studio teas, this futile spinner of sophistications. No, the curse of a
city boyhood was upon the fellow. Why look for anything great or vital
from one born and bred in the vitiated air of the town?
"Oh, well," he said, half-contemptuously, and not half trying to hide his
contempt, "you are doing very well as it is. Some of your work is not
without traces of style; and I suppose style is what you are after. But
meat for _me_!"
Bond lapsed back into his cushions, feeling a little hurt and very feeble
and unimportant. Clearly the big thing, the sincere thing, the
significant thing was beyond his reach. _The City's Maw_ must remain
unwritten.