CHAPTER VIII
Miss Molly Parkerwas a unifying force in the Anthon family. Mrs. Anthon and Molly had discovered two common passions, dress and food. They would spend long mornings driving about to shops, discussing bargains and prices and subtleties of style. And they had tested and classified a long list of restaurants. Molly was a gourmand; Mrs. Anthon called herself “a hearty eater.” Whatever was amiable and warm-hearted in Mrs. Anthon, the enthusiastic young woman brought out. “Molly really likes her,” Miss Anthon admitted gratefully, “and mamma behaves better when she is about.”
Sebastian Anthon, also, in his quiet fashion, paid tribute to the new friend. He took her on long walks, and frequently of a Sunday morning he appeared in Passy with large boxes of chocolate from theCoupe d’Or. The two roamed over old Paris, followed the shop windows, and knew the recesses of many a print-shop. “Your dear old uncle has walked his feet off,” Miss Parker would exclaim on their return. “He’s such a dear!”
Molly Parker knew all about Erard and Wilbur, about the Water-Hoister and the new company. Miss Anthon spent many a morning, these early spring days,in the little garden behind the Passy house, finding there a peaceful atmosphere of rest and naturalness. The studio had grown loathsome since Erard had delivered his opinion on her case. A few days after the family conference Miss Anthon brought out with her Wilbur’s first report of affairs in Chicago. It was buoyant. Miss Parker sighed a little enviously.
“How nice it must be to be rich!”
“What would you do if you were rich?”
Miss Parker opened her eyes enthusiastically.
“I’d buy trunkfuls of these fascinating things,” she held up a chemise they had been examining. “And some dresses, I suppose, though I don’t care for dresses so much as all the white things, with lace and embroidery.” Then her eyes grew thoughtful as she contemplated more permanent acquisitions. “I would have a cottage in the country, somewhere in the woods, and I would have pigs and horses and cows and chickens and roses and dogs. And have all white dimity, you know. Coffee in bed and nothing to do all the morning but putter around.”
Adela Anthon laughed. “Wouldn’t you like to be a man?”
Miss Parker opened a pair of astonished eyes. “Why? I should have to work, and I couldn’t wear dresses. Do you know the story about the monkeys? If they showed they could work they would have to do something. See? So they have never let on what they could do. Terrible wise, the monkeys.”
“Well, I suppose you will marry.”
“I suppose so,” she sighed. “Mrs. Dexter thinks I am hard to suit. They say I am flirtatious and not serious; but I have to let the men talk. I can’t tell whether a man will bethe right oneuntil he has made love to me. You see when a nice young man comes along I think he may bethe one, and he interests me terribly. I let him talk and talk, and then when he proposes he scares me, for I find I don’t want him. It’s so hard to get rid of them nicely without hurting their pride too much. Mrs. Dexter says I shall be an old maid, and it will all be my own fault. I haven’t any money, she says, and only enough good looks to carry me a little way, and no accomplishments. I shouldn’t be so stuck on myself. But I can’t help it, and I suppose I may be an old maid. Wouldn’t it be awful, though, not to be married in the end, and not to have any kids?”
Miss Anthon kissed her laughingly. “No danger! What did you do with Walter? Did he propose this time?”
Miss Parker looked at her friend slyly, until the two laughed again nervously. “He doesn’t really want to do anything so rash. It would be nice to be your sister. Not if you should marry Erard, though.”
Miss Anthon moved nervously. “There’s little danger! He has dismissed me from serious consideration, told me I was an idiot.”
“But you couldn’t anyway,” Miss Parker protested. “He is soqueer.”
“It would be worth doing to see how Walter wouldtake it. But the family have banished him somehow; or, perhaps, he has become tired of my crudity.”
The spring sunshine tempted her to stroll homewards through the Bois, which was deserted at this hour except by a few waddling children with their nurses, or an occasional bicyclist on his way to the country. The ground steaming in the midday warmth gave out enticing suggestions of woodland things, of wild fields and rocks, with deep pastures between. For the moment Paris was quite intolerable, and the life of “hanging on the outskirts of art” (as Erard had described her existence) too mortifying to endure. She was almost at the point when it would be more tolerable to return to America, to “become interested in church-work,” or to accept any form of the inevitable commonplace. There was but one distinctly agreeable sensation, beyond the comfort of the day and the pleasure of a cool shirtwaist and rough skirt, and that was in the shape of a letter from Wilbur which sent an invigorating thrill over her egotistical musings. It was an exuberant, yet curt, business letter, written on a broad sheet of paper with an elaborate lithograph head, representing curious machines; a letter dashed off in the sweat and hurly-burly of success when actions were so full that words seemed colourless counters. The initial moves had been properly played. Wilbur had arrived in time.
“I stopped in Boston and saw the Rantoul man on my way out. So I arrived primed. Dinsmore smiled when he saw I had the drop on him and wanted to knowhow. Then I smiled....” There was a paragraph of hastilysketched plans, a few words about the headquarters in Chicago already started, possible immediate extension into new industrial fields, etc. He was about to start for Kansas. At the close came, “Stock is selling at 50; I bought yours at 30.” Nothing but that scrap of justification tucked in, which he knew would delight her, not for the money gained, but for the justification itself,—the pleasure of triumphing over Mrs. Anthon and Sebastian Anthon. Here in the dainty solitude of the play-wood, it was delightful to follow the details of this man’s rapid, virile action: the conferences, the skilful guidance, the quick judgment, the importance of making a right decision on the moment. Confidence in one’s powers was life, freedom. She breathed more rapidly as her imagination filled in the scant letter. Then she sighed unconsciously.
For she was tied. She was merely a distant spectator at the commercial game. From envy of the male part in it, she began to speculate on this man Wilbur, imaginatively accrediting him with great qualities. Yet, clearly, it was not the moneymaking that she cared for, but the drama,—where dollars were the figures of speech.
“Anyhow,that,” she spoke aloud, meaning the partnership with Wilbur, “has been thoroughly worth while.”
With this consoling reflection she picked up her first business letter, and turned towards the nearest city gate, choosing the least sophisticated paths. As she neared the Porte Maillot, at a bend in the woodpath, she came upon Erard walking slowly, seemingly still on tiptoe, as if eyeing through his little glasses somebelle œuvreofnature, yet in puzzlement, tugging thoughtfully at his beard. Her first impulse to wait until Erard had passed on around the next curve, gave way to a quick resolution. If she was to leave Paris in a few days she would want to write or say farewell: why not here, without incurring a further outbreak from her mother? There had been no sentimental flutters in her relations with Erard; indeed, in all she had not seen him so very many times, although each interview had seemed to her to mark a little epoch in her intellectual life. So she kept up her pace and overtook him.
“It is a good place to say good-by in,” she remarked carelessly, as he raised his hat in his awkward schoolboy fashion. “You know my mother has coerced us, Uncle Sebastian and me. We are to be carried to Rome and then to some dreadful baths.”
Erard smiled maliciously. “Mrs. Anthon and I are of the same opinion.”
Miss Anthon laughed pleasantly at the idea of her mother agreeing with any belief advanced by Simeon Erard.
“Matrimony,” he added with a slight sneer, “not art, will be your fittest medium of expression.”
Miss Anthon’s face twitched nervously. “I am really too happy this morning to reprove you, over good news.” She explained her letter.
“And I am sad, over news of my immediate bankruptcy!” Erard responded gaily.
Although nothing explicit had been said to her by her mother or uncle, Miss Anthon had gathered from broadhints that Mrs. Anthon had brought about some kind of a catastrophe in Erard’s affairs.
“Why don’t you take your own advice?” Miss Anthon hazarded, assuming his tone of hilarity.
“Matrimony! Passing over the insult you have deftly insinuated, I should say merely that the solution of a rich wife would offer too many difficulties. Of course I have entertained the idea several times, and each time I have definitely put it aside. Between the two evils of a patron and a wife, the first is less limiting. Marriage with the ordinary woman of fortune would spoil my work; it would demand time,—beyond the mere emotional adjustment which might disturb my intellectual processes. I cannot afford to marry even the ideal heiress. If I could find a partner who would be of substantial assistance at the plough as well as provide pottage—like these French women—ah! that would be another thing. But that kind of arrangement, you may conceive, is hard to make.”
“I admire your frankness and your method!” the young woman exclaimed.
“I am not stupid—over stupid, Miss Anthon,” Erard went on coolly. “I understand exactly the contempt a woman like your mother has for me, also the gossip my way of life furnishes my good friends. I am an adventurer. I came from a nasty back street of Jersey City, and according to report, I have managed to make the world support me in luxurious idleness. Why, only last week your uncle, that dear, gentle, old Mr. Anthon, said: ‘See here, my boy, I can’t conscientiously go onsupporting you over here and lending my reputation towards getting you patrons. You are enjoying the cream,—just the kind of life dozens of young men, sons of my acquaintances, are sighing for.’ ‘And,’ he implied, ‘you have nothing to show for it. If you were doing like the others, now, something Bohemian, and bringing out results’—you know the story.”
“Well, why not?” Miss Anthon stopped her leisurely pace. “What’s your passport?”
“You, too, can take that tone?” he glanced at her searchingly. “My passport ishere,” he tapped himself, half ironically, “which, by the way, is the same passport that carried your young friend Wilbur through his difficulties. Don’t you suppose that I realize all this suspicion and contempt? that I know well enough that the kicking is waiting for me if I fail in the end?
“But there will be no failure,” he continued, impressively. “I have taken the right road. I haven’t any time for silly scruples—for money-getting. That faculty of scraping up dollars is an inferior one, and those who have it must contribute tome. The worldshallsupport me; it shall give me my time—that’s the great luxury—and my peace, too, until in my own way I have completed my work. Some century hence your uncle will be known by a footnote in my biography. And one should not grudge a heavy payment for fame, however it may come or however modest it may be.”
Miss Anthon was impressed by the fervour of the man’s passion for his own life, by his unbounding egotism, by his force. It excited her in much the same way thatWilbur’s little epic had excited her; only, with this difference: here was a creed, a consistent valuation of facts. And this creed seemed grander, vaguer, with limitless ends. It demanded more faith from its believers, but for that reason it was not unacceptable to a woman.
“The world must believe in you, like a prophet without works, at present. Success is its own justification. Yet that is a brutal doctrine,” the girl mused.
“It is a great law of life,” Erard asserted, “both for the despot and the stock-broker.”
“I believe it,” she assented. “I believe you. Of course accidents may come, such as disease or death, leaving you a wreck with a broken reputation. But that is the risk you take voluntarily, as well as the pain of always being a dependent. You have no time to make compromises with life, to spend your strong, creative years earning your freedom. You are right!”
Her sympathy, always so ready to go out to anything which promised relief from triviality, invested Erard with the interest of a hero. What he might accomplish ultimately, its value to himself, to others, intrinsically, was a small matter. He despised the world, treated it haughtily, and that was enough for her. It was pleasant, too, to know that she might possibly have a share in this large venture, just as she had taken part in Wilbur’s crisis. Erard was still within her range.
And Erard, himself, was the most interesting man she had ever known. Her pride was exquisitely flattered at the thought of her own emancipation in sympathizing with him thus instead of despising him. She couldhold him, as it were, aloof, and judge him as the others, morally, according to the old code; and then accept him when he tickled her intellect.
Erard took her into his confidence as one who was liberal enough to understand his case. He took pains to explain his reasons for drawing away from painting and enlarging his critical field—some of the reasons. He talked freely, without irony now, partly from a natural yearning to justify and magnify his sinuous existence, and partly because this eager-minded woman was the much-beloved niece of Sebastian Anthon. He charmed her with intimate confessions.
“The thing that must stand out from me embodied—mine, yet not mine,—cannot be born from nothing, from unconscious nature. Into me must enter a knowledge of past experiments ... man cannot cut himself off from the tradition; he can only push on a step beyond.”
To her excited imagination this vague doctrine implied a new great art. He described his manner of approach in large phrases, and with bravado told how he had “cultivated his receptive powers as delicately as a French market-garden. To have a most finely sensitive sensorium—that is the first necessity. Now I am schooled,” he ended cynically, “they tell me, ‘Use yourself in teaching or painting portraits of corpses like Mrs. Warmister. Turn your nicely sharpened sword to whittling wood.’ Never!”
“Cutting beefsteaks would be a truer figure,” Miss Anthon suggested, with a laugh to lower the tension.
“You have let me make a fool of myself!”
“No—I have almost made a fool ofmyself.” She quickened her pace; both speculated for a silent minute on what she meant. She felt that she was dangerously near another explosion, and she was struggling for time to take a calm look.
“But one doesn’t mind playing the fool before you, for you are so superbly tolerant,” Erard ventured.
She flushed. “Horribly crude, though, you told me the other day.”
“To set you on the right road,” he answered quickly, “and not let you run to waste.”
“Then I am some good?” she stopped and faced him nervously.
“You have the great rebellion,” he answered impressively.
“Yes,” she exclaimed, surprised at his divination. “Something makes me sympathetic with any rebellion. I feel as if I wanted to take the present in my hands and crush it. And you are responsible for unchaining the animal in me, for rousing an appetite. I shall die if I can’t feed the animal somehow!”
He looked at her quietly, reassuringly. Then they continued on their way to the Porte Maillot. Erard had added another member to his chorus.