CHAPTER II
Thepungent Latin odours emanating from the wine-shops along the boulevards stirred Mrs. Wilbur’s memory caressingly. This was Paris,—she dwelt on the word fondly. How eloquent it had been of joy!
She had left the noisome American quarter around the Opera House, where Paris turns a pandering face to the tourist, and selected a little hotel on the Quai, opposite the great palace. Her business with the solemn old lawyer sent by her elder brother was quickly transacted, and at the close she let fall a few pungent sentences to be carried to her family. “My husband is welcome to my fortune. I am glad he is good enough to use it. Fortunately I have enough beside. My family must endeavour to bear the disgrace—I will help them by keeping out of sight.” The lawyer talked divorce, but when he found her dumb, departed. “Pretty Walter,” as Mrs. Wilbur named her brother, was not so easily disposed of. He had come all the way from the great novelist Maxwell’s place in Surrey to look into her situation.
Walter Anthon had had a good time, all these years of his sister’s experimentation; he had kept his family informed of the growing circle of celebrities whose finger-tips he was permitted to touch. He might have made abooklet of the dainty notes he had received from Maxwell, the sage novelist, from Sandy Short, the supercilious literary maid of all work, and from Henderson, the celebrated author of closet dramas. Even Gaston had condescended to invite him for a week to his lodge in Scotland. The crowning glory of his career, however, had been when the famous African poet had met in his rooms the great Maxwell. He described the encounter epically to his sister. “Maxwell was moody and sunk in gloom. The African was fierce and taciturn. I trembled. But I plied Maxwell with champagne—he never drinks, you know, but this night at my entreaty he consented to empty five bottles. Then at midnight, the poet laid himself down before the fire on my bearskin, and such talk—” The saga here stayed in mystery.
After entertaining his sister with a list of his conquests in letters, he came to personal affairs. “Are you quite alone?” he asked, glancing at the orderly hotel salon with the little bedroom at one side.
“Yes. I hate maids. It’s very jolly being alone.”
“You had better get one at once. You don’t want to identify yourself with the horrid women who run about alone and put up at hotels and drink whiskies and talk horse. There are some women of the nicest families in England who do that kind of thing now,—are very free. But we Americans cannot afford to go so far.”
“Couldn’t you join me this winter,” Mrs. Wilbur suggested mischievously, “and keep house in Florence? The proprieties would be appeased then.”
“No, no,—not possibly,ma sœur.” Walter Anthon twisted his moustache rapidly.
“Well, then, you mustn’t offer advice.”
“My dear sister,” Anthon seized his vanishing chance, “you will not be so distressingly vulgar as to put yourself in the way of further—relations with Erard, I—”
This iteration of Erard from one end of America to Europe stirred Mrs. Wilbur’s wrath. “I don’t know where Mr. Erard will be this winter. I am not in communication with him. But if he should care for my society, I should certainly see him.” After a moment she added maliciously, to throw oil on the fire, “And the considerations you mention would not prevent me from doing more.”
Walter Anthon rose majestically. “We should cut you, every one.”
“Remember that I am stillMrs.Wilbur, legally at least,” she retorted. Then forgetting her resentment, she continued in a friendly tone. “Walter, why shouldn’t we be frank with one another? I shall not spoil your little game in London. Yon won’t find me a social burden. I don’t give a penny for your prejudices, but it may comfort you to know that I am waiting for an old friend to join me. Now let us be good acquaintances. Don’t feel called upon to meddle with my leaving John. You will not have to suffer for that. And I don’t believe that you have any, even romantic grounds, for sorrowing over my morals. Your own will probably keep you busy. Come and see me when I am settled. If you don’t like the tone of my establishment,keep away. We really haven’t enough in common to quarrel about. Now take some tea.” She rang the bell and stood opposite him to laugh.
Walter Anthon took his tea amicably. “Who is the friend?”
“Molly. Perhaps you will look in on us occasionally.”
“Uncle Seb left her some money?”
“Lots,” Mrs. Wilbur exaggerated.
“I didn’t hear that,” he mused.
“But you needn’t bother about her now,” she smiled placidly at him. “Molly has developed; she won’t play with you now.”
Anthon left the subject. His appreciation of his sister rose in true British fashion in proportion to the snubbing she administered. He offered to present some of his set. But Mrs. Wilbur gaily declined the privilege.
“No, thank you! Celebrities bore me. I don’t care to dine with the title-page of a magazine.”
She gave him her hand, and he went away, feeling as if he had been treated like a small boy. Mrs. Wilbur laughed to herself that afternoon, while she ran about from shop to shop, or stopped to gaze in the windows, “like any vulgar American.”
Mrs. Wilbur decided to wait for Molly in Paris, where she had a number of small matters to attend to. When the sombre days of early November came on, she spent many hours at the Louvre. One morning she was standingin a small deserted room, before a Holbein portrait, marvelling at an art which seemed more irrevocably lost than most,—at the power of the sure hand that stiffly traced a human face, with the simplest detail, and left it there for centuries, a living criticism of character!
“Not an iota of power lost, is there?” She was hardly surprised on turning to find Erard in their old rendezvous.
“I saw you come in here from the Long Gallery,” he explained, “and I made a wager with myself that you were looking for this Holbein.”
“Yes,” she blushed in spite of herself. “I have seen certain pictures all these years, just as they hung on the walls, frames and all. But they have rehung so many of them, that I miss some old friends.”
“Oh, yes, the directors set the fashion in pictures. They have an attic full of canvases up stairs, and every now and then, when the fancy takes them, they whisk an old friend off the walls and replace him with some piece of rubbish they have discovered. Of course the big ones stay, like this fellow, only they have to walk about from room to room.”
Then they were silent, each at a loss how to take up the conversation. Erard had met her as if it were the most natural thing in the world to find her here. At last he said brusquely,—“So you found your way back again.”
“Yes,” she replied weakly, wondering what he knew of the intermediate processes; what gossip he had heard. His next remark was made as much to the portraitbefore them, into which he suddenly plunged his face, as to herself.
“You concluded that we are right,—we who care solely for sensations and ideas.”
Mrs. Wilbur felt chill at this summary of her emotions. “Ah, well,” he continued, using his glasses on the ruff of the Holbein man, “it was just as well to make the experiment, even if it wasted four years. Having satisfied yourself that the duties and privileges of normal society don’t amuse you, you will never be bothered again. You’ve gotthatbehind you.”
The woman in Mrs. Wilbur suddenly realized how actually she was cut off from the “duties and privileges of normal society,” and was not altogether so complacent in the thought as Erard assumed. “I am not planning a future,” she replied with an attempt at lightness. Erard turned from the picture and looked at her deliberately, as if to say, “You are inmyhands now, my lady.” His manner was placid; he was enjoying the pleasure of a successful solution to an intricate problem. He repeated the resulting proposition again with greater emphasis for her benefit.
“I mean that if you could content yourself with mere activity, with bringing children into the world, and conducting charities and clubs, it would be foolish to attempt anything else. But having tried,—”
“And failed,” Mrs. Wilbur interrupted sombrely.
“Having tried that so-called moral existence,” Erard’s voice was domineeringly emphatic, as if drilling a refractory pupil, “and found it incomplete, you will neverhave doubts about the other occupation of cultivating and enjoying your wits.”
Thus she had enrolled herself under his banner. There need be no further talk about the matter. They sauntered away from the Holbein room into the Long Gallery. In the dim distance where the perspective lines of the picture-covered walls converge, the usual conglomerate public was passing to and fro. A party of Americans was being “put through the Louvre in three hours.” As Erard and his companion skirted the huddling mob of apathetic men and disturbed women, they could hear the cicerone shouting: “Ladies and shentlemen, this is a Teetian, one of the ten greatest pictures in the world. It is valued at one hundred fifty tousand dollar.” Thereupon the mob swayed, from the common impulse to look in one direction; then the voice of the conductor shouted again: “This is by Rubens, the great Flemish painter; the third lady at the right is a picture of his wife.” The bit of personality seemed also to arouse the languor of the herd; but in a moment the set look of vacant wonder settled over the faces once more.
“Thus,” commented Erard, “the run of the world take life. They hear a collection of names and a piece of gossip; and they look and pass on.”
Mrs. Wilbur thought that something might be said on the other side, at least for the intermediate people, but she accepted easily once more Erard’s oracular position. He had not forced her to join the connoisseurs of life; indeed, four years ago, he had advised her to become one of the herd.
They looked casually at one or two more pictures, Erard, to his disciple’s surprise, delivering new opinions quite contrary to those she had imbibed four years ago. All his criticism tended now towards psychology; it was a process of explainingwhythe human animal enjoyed, not a means of making him enjoy more completely with sympathetic enthusiasm. She reflected that Erard had been writing and publishing and had theories to maintain. In a general way she felt that he was less the artist, the sympathizer and creator, and more the pedant. He laughed at her tremulous excitement over pictures, and in a few minutes the ecstasy she had felt more or less ever since that first morning by the Arno evaporated. She saw that her talk was gush, and was ashamed. He made her feel that fine-art was only a wonderful trick, like the conjurer’s devices, to be cleverly detected and classified. He pawed a picture, figuratively, as M. Berthelot might paw a human animal in measuring its abnormality.
“Well,” he said at last, “it must be time for déjeuner. I have to look over some pictures at three. I have a commission to execute for a Chicago family. Don’t you want to see some fine Monets?”
She felt humiliated in his eyes when she said, “Yes, but I can’t ask you to lunch with me. I am alone at my hotel.”
He shot a quick glance at her. She hadn’t sloughed off the small prejudices yet. “We can go to a restaurant on the rue de Rivoli—that will be on the way.”
As they left the Salon Carré he pointed out a Frenchwoman who was passing on the arm of an elderly man.“That is the famous Claire Desmond. She was for years Dampière’s mistress. He picked her up in Brittany and used her as his model until she grew to be impossible. She is a character in theQuartier.” He went on to relate one or two anecdotes of the picturesque Claire.
Though Mrs. Wilbur thought herself far from prudish, her notions of good breeding were evidently out of place in the new life her companion was showing her. Erard was not coarse by nature, but in themilieuhe had cultivated, the amatory passages of his neighbours had their passing interest. Art was intimately influenced by sex: indeed, in his extravagant moods, Erard was inclined to attribute all art effort to the sexual instincts. He suspected Mrs. Wilbur of having provincial prejudices about naked speech that needed correction; for he did not propose to change his habitual expression to suit the squeamishness of a constant companion.
They gained the hall, and paused before the Botticelli frescoes. Then Mrs. Wilbur turned and swept haughtily down the stone stairs, lingering for a minute before the rushing Victory. Such art was naked as men were naked in the childhood of the race. That state of simplicity could never come again. The nakedness of Erard seemed to her like impotent curiosity.
She might come to accept this attitude, also, and see no mystery in man and woman more than the mystery of two sensual animals. But she shuddered at the idea. That would strip the world of one necessary covering for its sordidness. She looked up at the noble Victory, feeling theform of the goddess through the garment of stone. Then she glanced at Erard, who was waiting for her at the end of the staircase. She was not willing thatthatmale, with his little unshapen body, should discuss sex,—a part of her which she shared with the goddess above,—in his disillusioned manner.