The Pagans by Arlo Bates

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She reflected, too, of the men she had known, and especially of Arthur
Fenton. Her nature had need of some one upon whom to expend its
treasures, and she realized that had she not felt in the artist a
certain insincerity, he might have awakened her love. He had been
appreciative, sympathetic, brilliant; and, too, he had called largely
upon her patience and forbearance, than which there is no surer way to
win a generous woman's affection. Yet always some note rang false to
her fine ear, and to the weakness of his nature she had never been
wholly blind, although not until his marriage had given him a certain
distance had she realized how deep and unsparing her knowledge of him
really was.

Of Grant Herman she would not think. Thoughts of him arose again and
again in her mind, but she resolutely put them down. Some secret stir
of mingled pain and joy told her too well that the sculptor had
awakened the first love of her life. But at least with her husband,
however unloved, lying yet unburied, she would not dwell upon the
passion of another.

She took Edith's hand, and the two women sat down side by side,
shedding tears together, rather from a sense of the general woe and
bitterness of life than for poignant grief for the present calamity. It
was not much they said at first. Neither was of the talkative order of
women, finding comfort in the mere utterance of words. They grew
together, sustained by giving and receiving tenderness, and each
tacitly asking and according forgiveness for unfriendly feelings in the
past. It is probable, too, that Edith, heavy with the disappointments
of her married life, found relief in being able to weep unrestrainedly,
even though the true source of her tears was not the obvious one.

"I never loved him," Helen said of her husband. "After we separated we
became friends, rather because of a common past when we were both
strangers here, than from any fitness for each other. But he was once
my husband."

Her friend pressed her hand in silence.

"We had a child," Helen spoke again; "a little daughter. She only lived
one day. If she had not gone it might have been different. At least we
should have kept on together. My poor little baby!"

Edith's eyes were full of tears, as she answered softly:

"I hope you will let me say that I believe she is waiting for you some
where."

"She must be," the mother responded quickly. "Whatever one doubts, one
must surely believe that. I could not lose her! She is mine, wherever
in the universe she may be."

"Yes," was all Edith ventured in reply. "I am sure of it."

They gave no heed to the fading day, but sat with clasped hands until
twilight had gathered, and it occurred at last to Mrs. Fenton that her
husband and dinner must be awaiting her. Helen had been telling of her
plans.

"I shall go abroad," she said, "I want to study in Rome; I want to meet
great men; to be influenced by great works. I have been thinking of it
for a long time, and now it seems as if some ties that held me here are
broken, for we often obey claims which we yet deny. And besides," she
added, in a lower tone, "it is a flight from temptation. I am in danger
here."

"In danger?" Edith asked wonderingly.

"Only from myself," was the reply, "but that peril is sufficiently
imminent to make me afraid."

Edith questioned no further, and to the true import of these words she
had no clue. She looked at her friend a moment inquiringly and
musingly, but as Helen did not continue, she rose to go.

"I must get home now," she said, in a tone so tender that it seemed to
beg pardon for this abandonment. "Arthur is waiting for me and his
dinner; and if he doesn't get the latter at least, I won't answer for
the consequences. Mr. Calvin was with him when I came away."

"Mr. Peter Calvin!" exclaimed the other, in some surprise.

"Yes; he has bought one of Arthur's pictures, and he wants Arthur to
propose him at the St. Filipe Club, I believe."

She spoke in perfect ignorance of the tumult her words excited in her
hearer's mind. Long after Edith was gone Helen sat looking out into the
darkening sky and thinking of Arthur Fenton. She had heard him talk too
often about Mr. Peter Calvin not to know what was implied by this new
friendship. Mr. Peter Calvin had been for years the head and front of
Boston Philistinism in art. He had been the patron of subservient
artists; the chairman of committees for the purchase of public statues;
an elegant writer upon such live and timely topics as _Plaster
Casting among the Egyptians, Notes upon Abyssinian Statues_, while
his monograph upon the question, _What Was the Original Cost of the
Venus de Milo?_ had by his flatterers been pronounced the
masterpiece of all known art essays for power and critical research.
His was a prominent name upon the covers of dilettante art journals; it
was he who effectually crushed young and too daringly independent
artists; who repressed impertinent originality; who headed the hosts of
conventionality against individuality or genius which held itself above
the established canons of antiquated tradition. He was the High Priest
of Boston conservatism; the presiding genius of Philistia; and until
the St. Filipe Club entered a protest against him by refusing to admit
him to membership, his power had scarcely received a blow.

Tom Bently always insisted, with much profanity, that Mr. Peter Calvin
was a joke.

"He writes with tremendous pomposity," Tom would say, "and he is in no
end of societies for molly-coddling art. He goes on, too, about the
plaster casts at that hospital for decrepit gods, the Art Museum, as if
his whole soul was in the plaster barrels of the Greeks. But bless your
soul! It's only his little joke. He doesn't really mean any thing by
it. He's only a stupendous joke himself."

The Pagans, so far as they were to be regarded as an entity,
represented the protest of the artistic soul against shams. They stood
for sincerity above everything; for utter honesty in art, in life, in
manners and morals alike. To them Philistinism was the substitution of
convention for conviction. For the spirit of imitation, of blind
subservience to authority, the Pagans had no tolerance. While they held
themselves always open to conviction, they refused assent to any thing
which was offered them _ex cathedra_; they devoted themselves to
art with a passion of enthusiasm which was in itself the highest
expression of their principles. That they seemed often iconoclastic was
in reality less the result of their hatred of authority than the
prevalence of unreasoning, and therefore by their standards necessarily
insincere, adherence to established formulae. Dogmas they hated, not
because they were popularly received, but because although they had
been vital realities to their originators, they had become in time mere
lifeless forms, held in reverence by blind devotees long after the soul
had gone out of them.

In art especially the Pagans demanded the most absolute surrender of
self to truth; and it should be added that they defined truth exactly
as Helen did, "that which one sincerely believes." They had no
condemnation too severe or sweeping for the artist who worshipped the
golden gods of Philistia by following popular conventions at the
expense of his honest art ideals. It is not impossible that they
carried this feeling to extremes sometimes, suspecting every thing
which was stamped with popular approval, but in the main at least their
standard was of the highest and their lives conformed well to it.
Measured by the creeds they rejected, they might often enough be found
wanting; tried by their own, there had never been an apostate among
them until the defection of Fenton.

No one had been more bitter and outspoken in his condemnation of Mr.
Calvin and of what he represented than Arthur Fenton. Many a time he
had entertained Helen with stories of the presumption and the ignorance
of this man whom now he was receiving into his friendship, or, more
properly, in whose train of sycophants he had taken his place.

Helen could not forgive him. Leaving dinner untasted, she sat with
burning cheeks in the darkness, mourning over the apostacy of the man
who had been her warmest friend.

XXXIII.

A MINT OF PHRASES IN HIS BRAIN.
Love's Labor's Lost; i.--1.

Dr. Ashton had been in his grave several weeks. Life had gone on much
as usual in Boston, with the bickerings of small souls the gaping
imitations of the mob, the carping of the self-appointed critics, and
the earnest endeavor of the honest and inspired workers, who leaven the
lump of modern civilization.

Among the Pagans the nomination of Mr. Calvin to the St. Filipe Club by
Arthur Fenton had been received with a bitterness born of a feeling of
outraged confidence. They were to-night to meet in Tom Bently's studio,
and Fenton, who had no intention of being present, was yet keenly
conscious of what the talk there concerning him would be. He was glum
and moody at dinner, and Edith, who knew that this was Pagan night,
watched him wistfully. She hoped to win him away from friends and
acquaintances who seemed to her dangerous. Perfectly honest and ready
to lay down her life for her husband, she was yet urging him into paths
which he felt it to be degradation to walk, since they led him away
from sincerity. She had no means of knowing how his sudden championship
of Mr. Calvin was regarded. Her own relations to art had been those of
pretty amateurishness. She had been bred to believe in conventionality,
and the flavor of Bohemianism alarmed and repelled her.

To-night she had put on her most becoming dress, she had ordered the
dinner with especial reference to her husband's tastes, and she exerted
herself to be as entertaining and attractive as lay in her power. She
even allowed herself the innocent ruse of delaying dinner a little,
that it might be later before Arthur could be ready to go out; and when
the answer to her timid hope that he was to be at home that evening,
was in the affirmative, her foolish, tender heart fluttered with
delighted hope that she was influencing him to shake off his irregular
associations.

He was rather gloomy and silent all the evening, brooding of the
Pagans, from whose meetings he had never before been absent, and of
Helen, and what she would think. Edith tried all her arts and wiles to
make him forget the pleasure he was losing, and she partly succeeded,
since her attentions and endearments chimed in with the train of
thought by which he was endeavoring to prove to his own satisfaction
that he was the most virtuous of men, and that his swearing allegiance
to Philistinism, was a noble example of a transgressor willing to
confess and abjure his faults. He accepted his wife's attentions as
eminently fitting under the circumstances, and could he have forgotten
the Pagans and Helen, he might almost have been comfortable. More than
once in the old days he had found it hard to face Mrs. Greyson's clear
eyes, which saw so readily through shams, and now while he was able to
work himself into a defensive attitude towards all others of his old
friends, he felt a horrible humiliation in the consciousness that Helen
was sure to know of his course and to understand all its weakness.

It occurred to him, too, that Helen had avoided him of late. Since the
death of Dr. Ashton, he had scarcely seen her, although she was often
with his wife. He knew from Edith that she was soon to go abroad, and
he wondered if the wish to escape him had any share in bringing her to
this decision.

He tormented himself with speculations and memories until he could
endure it no longer. He must have comfort; his wounded self-sufficiency
craved the balm of approval, and although he was contemptuously
conscious of his own weakness, he turned to Edith to seek admiration
and praise.

"So you are glad that I am not going to the Pagans to-night," he said
to her, as they sat before the fire, for the evening was damp and
chilly.

"Very glad," she answered, leaving her chair to come and sit upon a low
hassock by his knee. "It was so good of you."

She made a beautiful picture as she sat there, her long dress of
cardinal and stone gray silk gathered in waves about her, the
Elizabethan ruffle setting off her shapely head and slender neck, while
the soft, yellow old lace showed how clear was the tone of her skin.
Her pure, sweet face, with its appealing dark eyes, was turned upward
to her husband's, in an expression at once wistful and full of love.
Edith had always a highbred air, and to-night her attitude and
expression added the one charm of warmth and softness needed to make
her most lovely and moving.

"You doubtless have some excellent reason," remarked Arthur smiling
down on her.

"I am afraid of them; they are in arms against every thing that is
acknowledged to be good."

"And yet they are the most honest men I ever knew," he returned, half
musing, and with a little pleased sense of his magnanimity in saying
this at a moment when they were probably abusing him.

"I don't know, Arthur. Perhaps they may be honest, but I am sure it is
not good for you to be with them. They are so sure that their false
views of life are true."

The little sting in the implication that he was not able to resist the
influence which had surrounded him was forgotten in the satisfactory
view which his wife took of the real value of the judgments of the
Pagans. He knew how little she understood them. With every premise upon
which her conclusions were founded he disagreed, yet he said to himself
that Edith was right; that the Pagans were quite too infallible about
every thing. They would have him grope along poor and unknown, he
argued with himself, simply for the sake of standing in the position of
chronic rebuke to established authorities; with only now and then a
chance to get a hearing upon what they assumed to be the true theory of
art. What they believed--ah! there after all was the weakness of the
whole. What ground had they for their belief? Did he himself really
believe any thing, or had he a right to assert in any matter a positive
conviction? And even if they or he asserted never so strongly, what
sort of a test of truth was that? After all the Philistines, the
Calvins, were as likely to be right as were a set of discontented if
not disappointed artists; men whose natures would never allow them to
be satisfied with any existing state of things, since it would
inevitably differ from their dreamy ideals. And it was certainly true
that the weight of authority and of numbers was with the Philistines.

"Perhaps you are right, Edith," he said aloud. "I hope so at least, for
they are probably indignant enough with me."

"With you? Why?"

"Oh, they choose to think I went over to Philistia when I proposed Mr.
Calvin for the St. Filipe. I'm sure I don't see why I haven't a right
to propose whom I please."

"But Mr. Calvin, Arthur," responded Edith, who regarded that gentleman
as one of the art gods of Boston. "I should think any body would be
proud to propose him. Why, he is one of the most distinguished men in
the city."

Her husband did not answer for a moment. He looked into the fire and
watched his inner consciousness adapt itself to this view of the case,
which than himself no one had condemned more bitterly. Yet it was the
theory upon which it was necessary to rest did he expect to arrive at
any comfort in the course of supporting Mr. Calvin, which he had
already pursued so far that retreat was impossible. Yes, he assured
himself, he could even accept this. And why not? Did not common opinion
confirm it; and however much common opinion might be sneered at, it was
surely the voice of the common sense of the world.

He looked down at his wife, who looked back smiling proudly. He
realized how pure, how tender, how true she was. He knew, too, that she
was daily and hourly weaving about him bands which held him captive to
beliefs which though true to her were the veriest falsehoods to him;
and that only his love of ease, his fatal complaisance, prevented his
rending these cords as did Samson the new ropes of the Philistines. He
realized that he was sacrificing his manhood, that he was bartering his
convictions for flattery and ease by allying himself to Calvin and his
following. He recalled Helen's remark that what is called being honest
with one's self is often the subtlest form of hypocrisy, and he did not
spare himself a single pang of self-humiliation and contempt; and then,
when he was full to the throat with self-loathing, he let his sensuous,
self-loving nature devise excuse and soothe his wounded vanity.

He looked into the fire with a smile of mingled bitterness and
complacency, half ashamed, half amused at the view which introspection
gave him.

But whenever into his musings came the thought of Helen it rankled like
a poisoned barb. For he secretly believed that Helen loved him, and
although if a man humiliates himself in the eyes of the woman he loves
it is as bitter as death; yet to prove unworthy in the sight of her who
hopelessly loves him, contains a more subtly envenomed shaft, which
wounds that most sensitive spot in a sensuous man's nature--his vanity.

XXXIV.

HEART-BURNING HEAT OF DUTY.
Love's Labor's Lost; i.--I.

That evening Helen too sat at home, alone and full of resistless
thoughts.

She had put the finishing touches to the _Flight of the Months_,
completing the work with scarcely less success than at first, and in
three days she was to sail for Europe. She had not allowed Dr. Ashton's
death to interrupt her work, the necessity of avoiding unpleasant
gossip which would be provoked by the disclosure of her relations with
the dead man, being sufficient reason why she should not change her
outward life. She quietly and rapidly completed the preparations for
departure, and already the feeling of severance from familiar scenes
cast its sadness over her.

Leaving the studio to-day, she had gone down to speak with Herman, whom
she wished to take the responsibility of the firing of the bas-relief.
When she had finished this errand she turned to a figure in terra-cotta
whose freshness showed that it had but recently come from the kiln.

"What is this?" she asked. "I have never seen it."

"It is a Pasht," the sculptor returned. "I modeled it as a wedding
present for Arthur Fenton, but luckily I did not get it done in time."

"Why 'luckily?'"

"Because I should be sorry to have given him any thing so closely
connected with the Pagans, as things have turned out."

Helen did not need to ask explanations of these words, although she did
not know how complete the breach between Fenton and his former friends
had become.

"I am glad I am going away," she exclaimed with a sigh.

"Going away?" he echoed, dropping his modeling tools.

"Yes, I sail Saturday."

She spoke with perfect composure, yet her glance was averted. She was
painfully conscious of having concealed the fact from him until this
moment.

He came towards her, his eyes fixed upon her face.

"What does this mean?" he demanded, almost fiercely. "Why do you go?"

"I mean to study in Rome," she replied faintly. "I always told you that
I hoped to go some day."

"But why do you go now? Why have you concealed it from me? Are you
afraid of my--of my love? If any one must go it should be I; I have no
right to drive you away."

"You are not driving me away; I--it is better that I should go."

"But why go now? Now you are free, and I have a right to claim you."

"No," Helen said in a voice suddenly firm, but which yet showed her
inward agitation, "no; there is Ninitta. I have suffered too much
myself to be willing to try to come to happiness over any woman's
heart. It is better that I should go."

"Ninitta!" Herman burst out. "She has no claim; she will not even care;
she--"

"No," interrupted Helen, laying her hand upon his arm. "You cannot say
that; you know it is not true. You can see as well as I that Ninitta is
pining her life out over your neglect. We are not free to break her
heart when you yourself taught her to love."

"I have never been unkind to her," he said, a little defiantly; "except
perhaps when she acted like a mad woman and broke your figures."

"In love," returned Helen, smiling faintly, and glad to take refuge in
generalities, "sins of commission, as compared with the deadly sin of
omission, are mere venial offenses. It is not what you have done, but
what you have left undone."

"But what can I do? I cannot force myself to love her?"

"You have made her love you."

"But I outgrew her centuries ago."

"The price of growth is always to outgrow," replied Helen.

She was struggling hard to keep the conversation away from dangerous
levels. She felt that she must seem heartless, but none the less she
went on bravely.

"And after all what is outgrowing? It is a question of moods, of--"

But her courage failed her. Her voice trembled, she turned away from
him and walked down the studio, stopping here and there as if to
examine a cast or a figure, invisible through the tears which welled up
in her eyes. The sculptor followed close behind her, until she put her
hand upon the great Oran rug which hung before the door.

"Then you leave me," he broke out bitterly. "You make Ninitta a pretext
for escaping me. You might have told me that you did not care for me. I
would not have molested you."

She turned to him suddenly, and he was startled by the whiteness of her
face, for she was pale to the very lips.

"Do you think it is easy for me to go," she cried passionately, "to
give you up when I love you! You should help me, not make it harder.
Isn't it better to part now while we have nothing to regret than to
live with a wrong between us?"

"But what wrong will be between us? Surely that boyish mistake need not
blight both our lives."

"Can we help it?" she asked sadly.

"We will help it! Are we merely puppets then, to be bandied about
helplessly? I told her I loved her; it is no longer true, and why is
the pledge that followed binding?"

"It is not simply that you gave her your word," Helen returned,
struggling bravely with herself; "it is that you made her love you, and
that obligation you can never shake off. Oh, it is because you are too
noble to take a woman's love and then trample upon it, that I love
you--that you fill my heart."

She poured out the words, her eyes blazing, her splendid form dilated,
her arms involuntarily extended towards him. He took her into his
embrace; not hastily, not wildly; but with a slow, irresistible movement
that had in it something of solemnity. He showered kisses upon her
hair, her forehead, her lips; he pressed her to his bosom as if he
would absorb her into himself.

"My darling, my darling," he said, in a hoarse, fiery whisper, "I
cannot give you up! Think how lonely I am; how I love you!"

She put up her face and kissed him with a long, clinging kiss; then she
freed herself from his arms. They stood face to face, her eyes
appealing, until his glance fell before hers.

"Yes," he said in a voice so low that she bent forward to listen, "yes;
you must be right."

"I am right," she responded sadly, "I have fought against it too much
not to be sure of that."

"It is an odd way of proving my love for you to give you up," continued
Herman, with a new accent of bitterness in his voice. "Oh, the folly of
that boyish passion!"

He strode away from her, as she leaned panting against a modeling
stand. The darkness was gathering so rapidly that when he turned back
his face came out of the gloom like a surprise.

"My reward," he said, "must be that you love me; but that very reward
makes it harder to deserve it. I am sure that we would be wiser and
happier if we had no scruples to hamper us."

"But we have," was her response; "to take your own words, we are not
mere puppets."

Again he walked away from her, and for a few moments there was no sound
but that of his heavy footsteps, which seemed to make the silence more
solemn and penetrating.

"I will do whatever you ask," he burst out suddenly. "I will even marry
her if you wish."

"I ask nothing. It is not I but your convictions you should follow. I
am not even able to advise. Your own instincts are better and nobler
than any thing I can say to you." She stopped and choked back a sob.
"Oh, Grant, it is so hard!" she cried.

She had never used that name before, and it so thrilled him with joy
and pain that he made an impulsive movement as if once more to take her
in his arms; but she lifted her hand with a gesture of negation.

"I have been tempted as well as you," she continued, "I have said to
myself a thousand times that love justified all, and that these
theories were too fine spun. I could not keep the thought of you down
even when I first knew I was a widow, and I said over and over to
myself that now no one stood between us. I knew it was no use, but I
lay awake in the night and tried to prove to myself that Ninitta had no
claim,--but, oh! you are too much to me for me to be willing that you
should do what we both know is wrong and cruel. I can endure anything
better than that you should not always be my ideal; and I should hate
myself if I tempted you to wrong."

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