The Pagans by Arlo Bates

A >> Arlo Bates >> The Pagans

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

"No," she answered, rising, "I do not want money."

She went slowly down the studio without further word, only turning back
as she passed Bently's picture for which she had posed, and which had
been brought for the meeting of the Pagans.

"You have seen," she said, "I am able to earn. I have learned much
while I was bringing you that letter. Across the world is a long way.
No; I have no need of money."

VII.

IN WAY OF TASTE.
Troilus and Cressida; iii.--3.

Grant Herman's studio, in which the Pagans met that night, was in
its way no less unique than the company there gathered. It was a
great, misshapen place, narrow, half a hundred feet long, and
disproportionately high, with undressed brick walls and cement floor.
The upper half of one of the end walls was taken up with large windows,
before which were drawn dingy curtains. Here and there about the place
were scattered modeling stands, water tanks mounted upon rude tripods,
casts, and the usual lumber of a sculptor's studio; while upon the
walls were stuck pictures, sketches, and reproductions in all sorts of
capricious groupings.

In one corner a flight of stairs led to a gallery high up against the
wall, over the rude railing of which looked the heads of a couple of
legless statues. From this gallery the stairs continued to ascend until
a door near the roof was reached, leading to unknown regions well up in
the building behind which the studio had been built as an afterthought.
On shelves were confusedly disposed dusty bits of bronze, plaster,
coarse pottery and rare glass; things valueless and things beyond price
standing in careless fellowship. A canvas of Corot looked down upon a
grotesque, grimacing Japanese idol, a beautiful bronze reproduction of
a vase by Michael Angelo stood shoulder to shoulder with a bean-pot
full of tobacco; a crumpled cravat was thrown carelessly over the arm
of a dancing faun, while a cluster of Barye's matchless animals were
apparently making their way with great difficulty through a collection
of pipes, broken modeling tools, faded flowers and loose papers. Every
where it was evident that the studio of Herman differed from heaven in
at least its first law.

Quite in keeping with the picturesque, richly stored room, was the
group of men walking about the place or seated near the rough table
upon which refreshments were placed. On this table were a couple of
splendid punch-bowls of antique cut glass, which, if not full now, had
unmistakable marks of having been so earlier in the evening. A coarse
dish of yellow earthen ware beside them held an ample supply of
biscuits, and was in turn flanked by a couple of plates of cheese.
Fruit, beer, and tobacco in various forms, with abundant glasses and
pipes, completed the furnishing of the board, upon which a newspaper
supplied the place of a cloth.

Tom Bently's long, shapely limbs were disposed in a big easy-chair by
the table, his tongue being just now employed in one of his not
infrequent harangues upon art, his remarks being plentifully spiced
with profanity.

"Whatever crazy ideas on art," Bently was saying, "aren't good for any
thing else have to be put into a book. The surest recommendation in art
circles is getting out a book or giving a rubbishy lecture. Every woman
who has painted a few bunches of flowers or daubed a little pottery,
writes a book to tell how she did it; as if it were the most
astonishing thing in the world."

"Women are very like hens," interpolated Fenton; "they always cackle
most over the smallest egg."

"If any one of the crew," continued Bently, "could appreciate a
fiftieth part of the suggestions in a single sketch of an old master,
she might have something to write about."

"But then she would know enough to keep still," said Rangely.

"Oh, a woman never knows enough to keep still," Bently retorted. "It is
damned amusing to hear the average American----"

A chorus of protestations arose.

"We'll have nothing about the 'Average American,' Bently!"

"Start somebody else on his hobby," suggested Ainsworth; "that's the
only way to choke Bently off. Where's Fenton? I never knew him quiet
for so long in my life."

Arthur had been watching his companions and smoking in silence. He
smiled brilliantly at Ainsworth's challenge.

"I'm overwhelmed by Bently's oaths," he said. "He outdoes himself
to-night."

"When it comes time for Tom's epitaph," observed Rangely, "I shall
suggest that it be a dash."

"Why do you swear so?" inquired Ainsworth. "Don't you think it in
execrable taste?"

"Taste?" laughed Bently. "Yes; it's so far above all taste as to be a--
sight higher and bigger."

"I make a distinction," Herman put in good naturedly, "between swearing
and blasphemy; and Tom never blasphemes. His cursing is all in the
interest of the highest virtues."

"Profanity is like smoking," added Tom. "Every thing depends upon how
you do it. The English, for instance, smoke for the brutality of the
thing; they never have any of the French _finesse,_ and their
smoking is nothing less than a crime. But as the Arabs smoke it is one
of the loftiest virtues; there's something godlike about it.

"It is from smoking," Fenton chimed in, "that the Orientals learned how
to treat women; for a woman is like tobacco, the aroma should be
enjoyed and the ashes thrown away."

"By George!" exclaimed one of the Pagans, moved by some rare
compunction to remember that he had a wife at home, "that's infamous,
Arthur."

"It is my belief," observed Ainsworth deliberately, "that Fenton lies
awake nights to invent beastly things to say about women, and when he
gets something that he thinks is smart he throws it into the
conversation any where, without the slightest regard to whether it fits
or not."

"What makes you so bitter against women?" asked Bently.

"Yes," added Rangely, with mock deprecation. "Why do you want to
annihilate the sex? What harm have women ever done to you?"

"Oh," retorted the artist, "it is on theoretical principles, purely. I
adore that masculine ideal which man calls woman, but only finds in his
brain. The highest on earth is reached only by the absolute elimination
of the feminine. Ah! man is at his best in war," he went on, his
attitude becoming less studied and more forcible, as he allowed his
intellectual interest to overpower his vanity; "there he is all
masculine; man without the limitations that the presence of woman
imposes upon him. There woman is ignored, and even if she has been the
cause of the war--and to be the cause of war is woman's noblest
prerogative!--she is for the time being as completely forgotten as if
she had never existed. She slips into oblivion as does the horn of grog
which gives his courage."

Fenton was in a mood when he fancied he was talking well, a conviction
which was not always an accurate measure of the real worth of his
remarks. He delighted in presenting half truths in forcible
phraseology, relishing the taste of an epigram quite without reference
to its verity. He amused himself and his friends with talk more or less
brilliant, of which no one knew better than himself the fallacy, but
whose cleverness atoned with him for all defects. The intellectual
excitement of giving free rein to his fancy and his tongue was
dangerously pleasant to Arthur, who often more than half convinced
himself of the verity of his extravagant theories, and oftener still
involved himself in their defense by yielding to the mere whim of
phrasing them effectively.

"You are on your high horse to-night, Fenton," cried Rangely, "you make
no more of a metaphor than a racer of a hurdle."

"Don't stop him," Ainsworth said. "Let him run the course out now he's
on the track."

"When man comes into his kingdom," Fenton broke out again, too fully
aroused to mind the banter, yet with a sort of double consciousness
enjoying the absurdity of the whole conversation, "when man comes into
his kingdom, when we get to the perfection of the race, there will be
no women. The ultimate man will be masculine--men, only men; gloriously
and eternally masculine!" "But how will the race perpetuate itself?"
asked Tom in as matter of fact a tone as he might have inquired the
time of day.

"Perpetuate itself!" blazed the other. "The race will not need to
perpetuate itself. The world will be peopled with gods! When once women
are gone the race will have become immortal!"

A shout of mingled applause and derision greeted this outburst, amid
which Fenton threw himself back in a lounging chair and lighted a fresh
cigar. He was intoxicated with himself, and few draughts are more
dangerous.

"Take to the lecture platform, Fenton," jeered Ainsworth. "You'll make
your mark in the world yet."

"I wonder you stopped at immortality," remarked Fred Rangely. "You
usually go on to dispose of the future state."

"Impossible," retorted the artist, "for you never heard me say I
believed in one."

"That's a fact," confessed the other, "but you insist so emphatically
that women have no moral sense that your philosophy certainly would
dispose of them if it allow any future state."

"For my part," declared Herman, "I've heard Fenton talk nonsense as
long as I want to; let's look at the pictures."

An informal exhibition had been arranged, consisting of pictures loaned
by friends, and including several by members of the club. The most
important of the latter was a gypsy which Bently had just completed,
and which exhibited that artist's defects and excellences in the
emphatic manner usual with his productions. The _motif_ was better
than the _technique_, but Bently's splendid feeling for color
somehow carried him through, and made the picture not only striking but
rich and suggestive.

"If you could learn to draw, Tom," Fenton said, as they stood looking
at it, "you'd be the biggest man in America."

"Is that the new model you were talking about?" asked Rangely.

"Yes," Bently answered. "Isn't she a stunner?"

"I thought that shoulder was something new," put in Fenton. "The girl
poses well; trust a woman with shoulders like that to know how to
display them."

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Grant Herman in sudden and rare irritation,
"can you never have done slurring at women? Didn't you have a mother?
In heaven's name let some woman escape your tongue for her sake!"

Such an outburst from their host produced a profound sensation upon the
Pagans. The most tolerant of men, he was accustomed to listen to their
wholesale denunciations of all things with a good natured smile,
contenting himself with a calm contradiction now and then. Proverbial
for his patience and good temper, he produced the greater sensation now
when he gave vent to his anger upon a subject which not only Fenton but
every guest present usually considered fair game.

"I'm sorry I vexed you, Herman," Fenton said, turning to him after a
moment's silence, "but however much I've abused women, you never heard
me blackguard a woman in your life."

"You are right," the sculptor replied, catching the other's slender
hand in his stalwart grasp. "I beg your pardon. I'm out of sorts, I
suppose, or I shouldn't be quarreling like a Christian. Let's brew a
new bowl and drink to Pagan harmony."

VIII.

THE INLY TOUCH OF LOVE.
Two Gentlemen of Verona; ii.--7.

After the Pagans had separated that night Fred Rangely lingered in
Herman's studio.

The sculptor somehow found it possible to be more frank with Rangely
than with any other of his companions, and although there was a
difference of some half a dozen in the count of their years, and
perhaps more in their ages as measured by experiences, Herman's strong
but naturally stormy nature found much pleasure in the calm philosophy
of his friend.

Scarcely were the two men alone, when Rangely turned to his host and
demanded abruptly:

"Now, I want to know, Grant, what in the devil is the matter with you
to-night? What set you out to pitch into Fenton so?"

Herman poured out a glass of wine and swallowed it before replying.

"Because I am a damned idiot!" he retorted savagely. "I'm all shaken
up, Fred; and the worst of it is that I don't see any way out of the
snare I'm in."

"It isn't real trouble, I hope."

"Isn't it! By Jove!" cried the sculptor, "the more honest a man is in
this world the worse off he is. If I hadn't had a conscience when I was
a young fellow, I should be all right now. Who is it--Fenton?--that is
always saying that he asks forgiveness for his virtues and thanks the
gods for every vice he can cultivate?"

"Well," Rangely remarked, filling a pipe, and curiously surveying his
companion, who was raging up and down the studio, "you don't seem to be
in an especially cheerful and enlivening frame of mind; that's a fact.
If a fellow can be of any help, call on; if not, at least try to take
it a little more gently for the sake of your friends."

"Do any thing?" retorted the other. "No; there's nothing to be done.
I'm a fool."

"Even that disease has been remedied before now," Rangely said coolly;"
though usually experience and time are necessary to the cure."

"I'll tell you the whole story," Herman exclaimed, flinging himself
into a chair. "It is all simple enough. It is always simple enough to
tangle things up so that Lucifer himself cannot unsnarl them. When I
was in Rome I was in love--crazily, gushingly in love, you understand,
like a big schoolboy--with a girl I found in Capri. She was a good
little thing, with a figure like Helen's; that's what did the business
for me. I coaxed her to Rome to be my model, and then that infernal
conscience of mine made me ask her to marry me. I could have done any
thing I liked with her; I knew that; she had nobody to look after her
but a half sister who paid about as much attention to her as if she had
been a grasshopper. But the infernal New England Puritanism in my blood
wouldn't let me hurt her."

"And somebody else wasn't so scrupulous?" asked the listener as his
friend paused in his story.

"You think so?" returned Herman eagerly. "Then I wasn't so unutterably
a scoundrel for thinking so, too, was I? I did doubt her; I had reason
to. She posed for a friend of mine, a painter; you know, of course--
Hang it! What's the use of going into all the details. I was poor as a
church mouse or she shouldn't have done it at all, even for him. The
gist of the story is that I was jealous and flew out at both of them,
and left Rome in a rage!"

The two men sat in silence for some moments. Rangely puffed vigorously
at his pipe, while his companion stared savagely into the shadows in
the further end of the studio. Neither looked at the other; the hearer
appreciated too well the shame-facedness by which these unusual
confidences must be accompanied. From some distant steeple a clock was
faintly heard striking two.

"And to-day," Herman at length began again in an altered voice, "to-day
she came here. She has followed me all these years, going through
heaven knows what experiences and hardships, to bring me the proof that
I was a madman blinded by groundless jealousy, and that instead of
being wronged I cursedly abused both her and poor dead old Hoffmeir."

Again there came an interval of silence. A lamp flickered and went out
with a muffled sound. The thoughts of both men were of that formless
character scarcely to be distinguished from emotions; on the one hand
sad and remorseful, on the other sympathetic and pitiful.

"Well?" Rangely ventured after a time.

"But what shall I do?" demanded Herman. "I cannot marry her."

"No, of course not. She cannot expect it after banging about the
world."

"Oh, it isn't that," the other said hastily. "She is as good and as
pure as when I left her; at least I believe so. And she does expect
it."

"She does expect it!" echoed his friend. "Ah!"

The reception of a confidence is a most delicate ordeal through which
few people come unscathed. Rare individuals are born with the ready
sympathies, quick apprehension, and exquisite tact needful; but the
vast majority are sure to wound their friends if the latter ever
venture to approach with their armor of reticence laid wholly aside.

Although perhaps not the ideal confidant, Rangely was sympathetic and
possessed of at least sufficient discretion to avoid comment until he
knew the whole situation and was sure that his opinion was desired. He
was still unable fully to understand his friend's agitation, the task
of disposing of an old sweetheart in so inferior a position not
appearing to his easy-going nature a matter sufficiently difficult to
warrant so deep disquiet.

Precisely the clew that he needed the sculptor had not given, but he
was endeavoring to overcome his repugnance to disclosing his most
secret feelings. Every word cost him an effort, but he went on with a
savage sense of doing penance by the self-inflicted torture.

"Yes," he repeated, "she expects it. Why shouldn't she, poor thing? She
has not changed, and she does not understand that I may have altered."

"And you have?"

Grant Herman looked up and down the great studio, now growing dusky
from the burning out of candles here and there. An antique lamp which
was lighted only on special occasions stood where the breeze came to it
from the high window, and the flame, wind-swept, smoked and flared.
Through the silence the listener's ear could detect a faint sound of
the tide washing against the piles of the wharf outside.

The sculptor started up suddenly and stood firmly, throwing back his
splendid head and shoulders, and looking straight into the eyes of his
friend.

"Yes," he said in a clear, low voice. "I have changed. I---There is
some one else."

"Life," remarked Rangely, with seeming irrelevancy, "life is a
fallacy."

"I'd like to be honorable," Herman continued, "but how can I? It is
impossible to be honest to both her and myself. If I hadn't had any
scruples, then---Bah! What a beast I am! Poor Ninitta."

Still Rangely smoked in silence, and the sculptor went on again.

"It has always been my creed that when a man has allowed a woman to
love him--much more, made her love him, as I did--he is a black-hearted
knave to let a change in himself wreck her happiness. Now I am put to
the test."

"And the other one?" asked Rangely. "Does she know that you care for
her?"

"I have never said so to her. Heaven only knows how much she feels by
intuition. A man always fancies that the woman he loves can tell."

"That may depend something on how often you see her." "I see her
nearly every day. She is my pupil."

"Mrs. Greyson?"

"Yes," Herman said, a little defiantly, as if now the secret was told
he challenged the right of another man to share it.

"Is she a widow?"

"Yes," the other answered, with no perceptible pause, and yet between
the question and his reply had come to him the swift remembrance that
he really knew nothing of his pupil's life or history, and had simply
taken it for granted that her husband was not living. "Arthur Fenton
brought her here," he added, rather thinking aloud than answering any
point of Rangely's query. "He was an old friend of her husband."

"But what will you do with the other?"

Instead of replying Herman got up from the seat into which he had flung
himself, and went about the studio putting out the lights.

"Go home," he said with a whimsical smile. "I'm sure I don't know what
we are talking about at this time of the morning. As for what I shall
do--Well, time will show; I am as ignorant as yourself on the subject."

IX.

VOLUBLE AND SHARP DISCOURSE.
Comedy of Errors; ii.--i.

It suited Fenton's whim next morning to dine with Mrs. Greyson. He had
established the habit of dropping in when he chose, always sure of a
welcome, and always sure, too, of a listener to the tirades in which he
was fond of indulging. If Helen did not always accord him agreement,
she at least gave attention, and he cared rather to talk than to
convince.

His aesthetic taste, moreover, was gratified by the pretty breakfast
table; and he was not without a subtle sense of pleasure in the beauty
and harmonious dress of his hostess, who possessed the rare charm of
contriving to be always well attired. This morning she wore a gown of
russet cashmere with here and there knots of dull gold ribbon, which
tint formed a pleasing link between the stuff and the color of her
clear skin.

"It is good of you to come," she said, as she poured his coffee. "There
are so few days left before you will have married a wife and cannot
come. I shall miss you very much."

"Why do you persist in talking in that way?"

Fenton returned. "I'm not going out of the country or out of the world.
You could not take a more absolute farewell if I were about to be
cremated."

"You do not know," replied she, smiling. "However, I am glad you are to
be married. It will do you good. You need a wife, if you do dread
matrimony so much."

"It is abominable," he observed deliberately, "to talk as I do. Of
course I do not mind what you choose to think of me; or rather I am
sure you will not misunderstand."

"I do not," Mrs. Greyson interpolated significantly.

"But it seems a reflection upon Miss Caldwell," he continued,
answering her interruption only by a grimace, "for me to discourse of
marriage just as I do. It isn't because I'm not fond of her. It is my
protest against the absurd and false way in which society regards
marriage; in a word against marriage itself."

Mrs. Greyson understood Arthur Fenton as well as any woman can
understand a man who is her friend. Her friendship softened the
harshness of her judgments, but she could not be blind to his vanity,
his constant efforts at self-deception, and so far as she was in
possession of the facts, she reasoned correctly in regard to his
approaching marriage.

"No," she said calmly, "it isn't even that. You talk partly for the
sake of saying things that sound effective, and partly because you are
morbid from over introspection. If you were vicious, I should say you
did it as an atonement. Many people would not understand you, but as
I do, it is harmless for you to talk to me."

"Introspective? Of course. Can any body help being that in this age?
And as for being morbid--it all depends upon definitions. I try to be
honest with myself."

"The subtlest form of hypocrisy," she answered, "often consists in what
we call being honest with ourselves. I gave that up long ago. You are
not honest with yourself about this marriage. If you don't wish to
marry Miss Caldwell, who forces you to do so?"

"Forces me to? Good heavens! I do wish to marry her. Of course I don't
ever expect to be perfectly happy. In this inexplicable world natures
that demand that every thing shall be explained must necessarily remain
unsatisfied. Still, I'd take a little more coffee as a palliation of my
lot, if you please."

"It is well you are to marry," observed Helen, refilling his cup.
"You've concentrated your attention upon yourself too long."

"But I am afraid of poverty. If I find some old Boston duffer with a
lot of money, and can fool him into admiring the frame of one of my
pictures, he may buy it, and I can pay the butcher, the baker and the
gas man for a week. If I can't, I must daub the canvas a little higher
and try the same game in New York, and--"

"Rubbish!" she interrupted. "The difficulty is, you are too
self-indulgent. You are too much afraid of the little discomforts."

"No," he answered; "men--at least sensitive men--do not suffer so much
from the discomforts of poverty as from its indignities."

"If--" began Helen; but without finishing, she rose from the table,
went to the window and stood looking out.

Fenton watched her idly, knowing perfectly that the woman before him
was capable of sacrificing for him all the little income which was
her's; and he wondered, as men will, how deep her feeling for him had
really become, and whether it had ever passed that mysterious and
undefinable line which separates love from friendship.

Helen had often endeavored to assist the artist out of some financial
difficulty by buying one of his unsellable pictures, a pretext which he
had the grace to put aside by refusing to sell, sometimes sending her
as a gift precisely the work for which he could most easily find a
purchaser. There was continually a silent struggle, more or less
consciously carried on between the two, although seldom appearing upon
the surface. Too much Fenton's friend not to be pained by his
weaknesses, Helen was stung to the quick by a certain insincerity
which she often detected alike beneath his raillery and his cynicism.
Too noble to yield to any belief in a friend's unworthiness without
resistance, she suffered anew whenever his words seemed to ring false,
and now there were tears in her eyes as she looked out into the sunny
street. She pressed them firmly back, however, and turned a calm face
towards her guest, who sat playing with his spoon and watching her with
a half troubled, half amused expression.

"I've composed my epitaph," he said irrelevantly. "Will you please
compose my monument."

"Oh, willingly. But it will be necessary to know the epitaph, so that
the monument may express the same sentiment."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14