"Life is real, life isearnest."
"Life is real, life isearnest."
She emphasized the quotation with solemnity: "We can't trifle with our lives; we can't play through them. We mustlivethem. We must make something of them."
"Each man after his own nature," I suggested, feebly, for I felt sure that "we can'tpaintthrough them" was implied, and wished to turn from that issue, with which I felt myself incapable of grappling.
But Miss Jones was not to be balked of her moral.
"We build our own characters," she said, and her look held kind warning. "We must not act after our own nature if that nature is base or trivial."
"I know," I murmured.
"It is only by holding firmly to an ideal that we rise, step by step, beyond our lower selves."
Beyond "Manon Lescaut" to "Faith Conquers Fear" this might mean.
"And ideals we must have," she pursued. Then rising, her little air of guide and counsellor touched with a smile: "But I must not preach too much, must I?"
It was comforting to dwell on the ludicrous aspects of this mentorship, for, when my thoughts led me to a contemplation of Miss Jones's ideals, I felt my position to be meanly hypocritical, if not "base." Manon was almost finished. Ah! it was superb!—but even my joy in Manon rankled and had lost its savour. Manon was there under false pretences, her presence a subtle insult to Miss Jones. Miss Jones in her flaming gown took on symbolical meanings. An unconscious martyr wearing, did she but know it, the veritable robe of Nessus! A sense of protectorship, tender in its self-reproach, grew upon me—a longing for atonement. I had sacrificed Miss Jones to my masterpiece, and its beauty was baleful, vampire-like.
It was indeed a small thing to take Miss Jones's homilies humbly. Indeed, for this humility I could claim no element of expiation, for I really liked to hear her; she looked so pretty when she talked. It was all so touching and so amusing.
I am not sure that she had read Dante, but if she had she no doubt saw herself something in the guise of a Beatrice stooping from heights of wisdom to support my straying, faltering footsteps. She brought me one day a feeble little volume of third-rate verse, with a page turned down at a passage she requested me to read. The badly constructed lines, their grandiloquent sentimentality, jarred on me; but in them I perceived a complimentary application that might imply much encouragement. Miss Jones evidently thought that I was rising step by step, and put this cordial to my lips. I thanked her very earnestly—feeling positively shrivelled—and then, turning from the subject with a haste I hoped she might impute to modesty—and indeed modesty of a certain humiliating kind did form part of it—I told her that Manon would only require another sitting after that day.
"Ah! is it finished, then?"
She went to look at it.
"Ismy left eye as indistinct as that?" she asked, playfully. "Can't you see my eyelashes? That is impressionism, I suppose." I felt my forehead growing hot.
"The left eye is in shadow," I observed.
"I am afraid shadows are convenient sometimes, aren't they? I like just a plain, straight-forward telling of the truth, with no green paint over it! You accept a little well-meant teasing, don't you?"
I accepted it as I had to accept her various revelations of stupefying obtuseness, and smiled over the sandy mouthful.
"Yes," she pursued, carefully looking up and down the canvas—certainly a new sign of interest in me and my work—"you will need quite two days to finish it; the hands especially, they are rather sketchy about the finger-tips." She might have been a genial old professor giving me advice mingled with the good-humoredraillerieof superiority. The hands were finished; but I kept a cowardly silence.
"And the dress must be a good bit more distinctly outlined; I can't seewhereit goes on this side; and then the details of the background—I can hardly tell what those dashes and splashes on the dressing-table are supposed to represent."
"I think you are standing a little too near the canvas," I said, in a voice which I strove to free from a tone of patient long-suffering. "If you go farther away, you will get the effect of theensemble."
"No, no!" she laughed; she evidently thought that her ethical relationship justified an equally frank æsthetic helpfulness, and her air of competence was bewildering. "No, we must not run away from the truth! A smudge is a smudge from whatever standpoint one looks at it, and a smear a smear."
The masterly treatment of porcelains, ivories, and silver on the dressing-table, glimmering and gleaming from the soft shadows, to be qualified in such terms!
"You are rather severe," I said. My discomfort was apparent, but she naturally took it to be on my own behalf, not, as it was, on hers.
"Oh! you mustn't thinkthat! I hope I am never unduly severe. You will easily mend matters to-day and to-morrow and polish over that rather careless look. And, as far as that goes, I am at your service as long as you need me."
"As modelandcritic," I observed, with a touch of bitterness.
"As modelandcritic," she repeated, brightly. "Do you know," she added, mounting the stand, "I found 'Manon Lescaut' on a bookshelf this morning. I didn't know that it was a French book. I am going to read it this evening."
I was struck dumb. This possibility had never presented itself to me.
"I shall find the scene you have painted," she continued, looking down at her gown and patting a fold into place; "I shall see whether you have illustrated it conscientiously."
"The book wouldn't interest you at all! Not at all!" I burst out, conscious of a feverish intensity in the gaze I bent upon her. "It is—it is decidedlydull!"
"Is it?" said Miss Jones, indifferently. "Now I can't quite believe that. You evidently didn't think it too dull to illustrate. There must be some nice bits in it, and I mean to find the bit where the heroine, in a pink silk gown, looks at herself in a mirror."
"Well, you'll find no such bit. I haven't illustrated it!" I strove to keep my voice fairly cool. "I merely took the heroine's name as indicative of a class, and chose the epoch as characteristic. The book is dull, old-fashioned."
"Ah, but I might not agree with you there. Is it an historical novel? I like them, even if they are rather slow. One gets all sorts of ideas about people of another age."
"It isn't historical." Despite my efforts my voice was growing sharply anxious, and Miss Jones was beginning to notice my anxiety. "And the characters in it are not people you would care to have ideas about. It is merely one of the first attempts to write a psychological study, in the form of romance, made in France."
"Oh, but that is exceedingly interesting."
"You would only find the rather crude analysis of a—a disagreeable girl."
"You thinkIam like a disagreeable girl, then!" said Miss Jones, still laughing. "From the first I have had a bit of a grudge against you for finding me so suitable. I am sure I am not vain."
"Manon was more than vain. She was heartless, a liar." I felt myself stumbling from bad to worse. "Not in the least like you in anything, except that she was beautiful." My explanation, with this bald piece of tasteless flattery, had hardly helped matters. Indeed, Miss Jones became rather coldly silent. I painted on, my mind in a disturbing whirl of conjecture. I felt convinced that I had merely whetted her curiosity and that she would go straight home to the perusal of "Manon"; and to expect from her the faintest literary appreciation of the distinction and the delicacy of the book was hopeless. She would fasten with horror on the brazen immorality of a character she had been chosen to embody. The blood surged up to my head as I painted.
As Miss Jones was preparing to go, I held out my hand.
"Good-bye," I said, feeling very badly.
"Good-bye? Am I not coming to-morrow?" She had paused in the act of neatly folding her umbrella, which had been thoughtfully left open to dry while she posed. It had now stopped raining.
"Yes—yes, of course," I stammered.
She secured the elastic band, and then looked at me.
"Miss Jones," I blurted out, abruptly, "don't read 'Manon Lescaut'; please don't."
Her glance became severely penetrating:
"I really don't understand you," she said, and then added: "I most certainly shall read it."
"Well, if you do"—my urgent tone delayed her going—"try to judge it from an artistic standpoint, you know. A study—a type. Don't apply—ah—modernstandards."
"I shall applymystandards. I know no other method of judging a book."
"Well, then,"—my manner was becoming pitiful—"remember that the physical resemblance between you was merely in my imagination."
"I have always believed the face indicative of the character, and I'm sorry that mine should have suggested to you the character of a liar," said Miss Jones. It was evident that already she was hurt and, disregarding my reiterated "It did not! It did not! upon my honour," she opened the door to go. I still detained her.
"Miss Jones," I said, standing before her, "I know that you are going to misjudge me, and that, because you see certain things from an ethical and I from a purely æsthetic point of view."
"I can't admit the division. But no; I hope I shall nevermisjudgeyou." She gave me a brief little smile and walked quickly away.
Carrington did not come in that evening, and I was glad that my mental anguish had no observer.
The next afternoon at two I awaited Miss Jones. My picture, virtually finished, stood regally dominant in the centre of the studio.
I hated and I adored it. I saw it with Miss Jones's eyes and I saw it with my own; but her crude ethics had, on the whole, poisoned my æsthetic triumph.
At two there came the familiar rap. Miss Jones entered. I was sitting before the picture and rose to meet her. Her face was very white and very cold, and from under the tipped brim of the little hat her eyes looked sternly at me. I looked back at her silently.
"I have read 'Manon Lescaut,'" said Miss Jones. I found nothing to say.
"You will understand that I cannot sit to-day. You will understand that I never should have sat for you at all had Iknown," Miss Jones pursued.
I said that I understood.
"I have come to-day to bring you back the money that I have earned under false pretences."
She laid the little packet down upon the table. I turned white. "And to ask you"—here Miss Jones observed me steadily—"whether you do not feel that you owe me apologies."
"Miss Jones," I said, "I have unwittingly, unintentionally, given you great pain; that, with my present knowledge of your exceptional character, I now see to have been inevitable. I humbly beg your pardon for it, but I also beg you to believe that from the first I never thought of you but with respect and admiration."
Miss Jones's face took on quite a terrible look.
"Respect! Admiration! While you were looking from me tothat!" She pointed to Manon. "While I was clothing your imagination, personifying to you that vile creature!"
I tried to stop her with an exclamation of shocked denial, but she went on, with fierce dignity:
"Exceptional! You call it exceptional to feel debased by that association? Can I ever look at my face again without thinking: 'The face of Manon Lescaut?' Can I ever forget that we were thought of as one? No"—she held up her hand—"let me speak. Do you suppose I cannot see now the cleverness, yes, the diabolical cleverness, of your picture of me there? The likeness is horrible; and there I shall stand for the world to gaze at as long as the canvas lasts and as long as people look at any pictures. ThereIshall be, gibbeted in that woman's smile! No, I have not done! There will be no escape possible. Somewhere—I shall always feel it like a hot iron searing me—somewhere that other I will be all my life long, and when I am dead, and for centuries perhaps, she will smile on, and my image will be looked at as a type of vice! I see it now," and with a sort of grandeur of revelation she turned upon Manon, "I see that it is a masterpiece!"
I placed myself between her and it.
"Miss Jones," I said, "this is rather a supreme moment for me, more supreme than you will ever understand. I forgot you for my picture; I will not forget my picture for you." The icy fire of her eyes followed me while I went to the table and took up a sharp, long dagger which lay beside the little packet of money. I returned to the picture and, giving it one long look, I ripped the canvas from top to bottom. Miss Jones made neither sound nor sign. With dogged despair I pierced the smiling face, I hacked and rent the exquisite thing. The rose-coloured tatters fell forward; in five minutes "Manon Lescaut" was dead, utterly annihilated, and Miss Jones surveyed the place where she had been. I turned to her, and I have no doubt that my face expressed my exultant misery.
"And now!" I exclaimed.
"Now," said Miss Jones, looking solemnly at me, "you have done right, you have donenobly, and you will be the happier for it."
"Shall I?" I said, approaching her. "Shall I?"
"Yes. I can confidently say it. That bad thing would have poisoned your life as it would have poisoned mine." I ignored the misstatement.
"Miss Jones," I said, "for your sake I have destroyed the best thing in my life; may I hope for a better? I love you."
Her pale and beautiful face looked very little less calm, but certainly a little dismayed, certainly a little sorry.
"The best thing has been this act of sacrifice," she said; "don't spoil that by any weak regret. You have gained my admiration and my respect; but for better things, if better there are, I accepted Mr. Carrington last night."
Perhaps I don't regret. Though she was a prig, I had loved her in the half hour's exaltation. I am certainly not sorry that she married Carrington. They seem to be very happy. But the chivalrous moment was worth while—perhaps. However that may be, since then I have never painted anything as good as Manon Lescaut.
A masterpiece of character creation and delineation, the fascinating story of a woman of genius, whose genius is matched only by her wayward temperament.
A masterpiece of character creation and delineation, the fascinating story of a woman of genius, whose genius is matched only by her wayward temperament.
The story, exquisitely told, of two men and two women, and of the unraveling of their strangely tangled love-affairs.
The story, exquisitely told, of two men and two women, and of the unraveling of their strangely tangled love-affairs.
"For poignancy of emotional effect few love romances equal this drama, wherein the love of mother and son is raised to its height of heroic possibility."
"For poignancy of emotional effect few love romances equal this drama, wherein the love of mother and son is raised to its height of heroic possibility."
"To have known and loved Valerie Upton, even in a book, is to have added a new store of sweetness to one's life. In the wide range of modern fiction, one cannot recall a feminine figure of such immense attractiveness."—Manchester Guardian.
"To have known and loved Valerie Upton, even in a book, is to have added a new store of sweetness to one's life. In the wide range of modern fiction, one cannot recall a feminine figure of such immense attractiveness."—Manchester Guardian.
A study of love's psychology, with, in the beginning, a most exquisite picturing of two children—later lovers—and their life in the Scottish open.
A study of love's psychology, with, in the beginning, a most exquisite picturing of two children—later lovers—and their life in the Scottish open.
As unusual as all of Anne Douglas Sedgwick's novels, notable for its penetrating and beautiful character portrayal.
As unusual as all of Anne Douglas Sedgwick's novels, notable for its penetrating and beautiful character portrayal.
The plot turns upon the question of heredity. "It is a long time since a story of character so distinct, so searching, and so convincing has appeared."
The plot turns upon the question of heredity. "It is a long time since a story of character so distinct, so searching, and so convincing has appeared."
A modern "Taming of the Shrew."
A modern "Taming of the Shrew."
"Anne Douglas Sedgwick is a finished writer. Her work is as characteristic of people, places, and things of to-day as is Jane Austen's of her day."
"Anne Douglas Sedgwick is a finished writer. Her work is as characteristic of people, places, and things of to-day as is Jane Austen's of her day."