Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  It was Saturday night when Cornelia arrived, and she spent Sunday writing home a full account of her adventures to her mother, whom she asked to give Mrs. Barton the note she enclosed, and in looking over her drawings, and trying to decide which she should take to the Synthesis with her. She had a good deal of tacit argument about them with Mr. Ludlow, who persisted in her thoughts after several definitive dismissals; and Monday morning she presented herself with some drawings she had chosen as less ridiculous than some of the others, and hovered with a haughty humility at the door of the little office till the janitor asked her if she would not come in and sit down. He had apparently had official experience of cases like hers; he refused without surprise the drawings which she offered him as her credentials, and said the secretary would be in directly. He did not go so far as to declare his own quality, but he hospitably did what he could to make her feel at home.

  Numbers of young people began to appear, singly and in twos and threes, and then go out again, and go on up the stairs which led crookedly to and from the corner the office was cramped into. Some of them went up stairs after merely glancing into the office, others found letters there, and staid chatting awhile. They looked at Cornelia with merely an identifying eye, at first, as if they perceived that she was a new girl, but as if new girls were such an old story that they could not linger long over one girl of the kind. Certain of the young ladies after they went up stairs came down in long, dismal calico aprons that covered them to the throat, and with an air of being so much absorbed in their work that they did not know what they had on. They looked at Cornelia again, those who had seen her before, and those who had not, made up for it by looking at her twice, and Cornelia began to wonder if there was anything peculiar about her, as she sat upright, stiffening with resentment and faintly flushing under their scrutiny. She wore her best dress, which was a street dress, as the best dress of a village girl usually is; her mother had fitted it, and they had made it themselves, and agreed that it was very becoming; Mrs. Burton had said so, too. The fashion of her hat she was not so sure about, but it was a pretty hat, and unless she had got it on skewy, and she did not believe she had, there was nothing about it to make people stare so. There was one of these girls, whom Cornelia felt to be as tall as herself, and of much her figure; she was as dark as Cornelia, but of a different darkness. Instead of the red that always lurked under the dusk in Cornelia’s cheeks, and that now burned richly through it, her face was of one olive pallor, except her crimson lips; her long eyes were black, with level brows, and with a heavy fringe of lucent black hair cut straight above them; her nose was straight, at first glance, but showed a slight arch in profile; her mouth was a little too full, and her chin slightly retreated. She came in late, and stopped at the door of the office, and bent upon Cornelia a look at once prehistoric and fin de siècle, which lighted up with astonishment, interest and sympathy, successively; then she went trailing herself on up stairs with her strange Sphinx-face over her shoulder, and turned upon Cornelia as long as she could see her.

  At last a gentleman came in and sat down behind the table in the corner, and Cornelia found a hoarse voice to ask him if he was the secretary. He answered in the friendly way that she afterwards found went all through the Synthesis, that he was, and she said, with her country bluntness, that she wished to study at the Synthesis, and she had brought some of her drawings with her, if he wanted to look at them. He took them, but either he did not want to look at them, or else it was not his affair to do so. He said she would have to fill out a form, and he gave her a blank which asked her in print a number of questions she had not thought of asking herself till then. It obliged her to confess that she had never studied under any one before, and to say which master in the Synthesis she would like to study under, now. She had to choose between life, and still-life, and the antique, and she chose the antique. She was not governed by any knowledge or desire in her choice more definite than such as come from her having read somewhere that the instructor in the antique was the severest of all the Synthesis instructors, and the most dreaded in his criticisms by the students. She did not forget, even in the presence of the secretary, and with that bewildering blank before her, that she wished to be treated with severity, and that the criticism she needed was the criticism that every one dreaded.

  When the secretary fastened her application to her drawings, she asked if she should wait to learn whether it was accepted or not; but he said that he would send her application to the Members’ Room, and the instructor would see it there in the morning. She would have liked to ask him if she should come back there to find out, but she was afraid to do it; he might say no, and then she should not know what to do. She determined to come without his leave, and the next morning she found that the master whom they had been submitted to had so far approved her drawings as to have scrawled upon her application, “Recommended to the Preparatory.” The secretary said the instructor in the Preparatory would tell her which grade to enter there.

  Cornelia’s heart danced, but she governed herself outwardly, and asked through her set teeth, “Can I begin at once?” She had lost one day already, and she was not going to lose another if she could help it.

  The secretary smiled. “If the instructor in the Preparatory will place you.”

  Before noon she had passed the criticism needed for this, and was in the lowest grade of the Preparatory. But she was a student at the Synthesis, and she was there to work in the way that those who knew best bade her. She wished to endure hardness, and the more hardness the better.

  XIII.

  Cornelia found herself in the last of a long line of sections or stalls which flanked a narrow corridor dividing the girl students from the young men, who were often indeed hardly more than boys. There was a table stretching from this corridor to a window looking down on the roofs of some carpenter shops and stables; on the board before her lay the elementary shape of a hand in plaster, which she was trying to draw. At her side that odd-looking girl, who had stared so at her on the stairs the day before, was working at a block foot, and not getting it very well. She had in fact given it up for the present and was watching Cornelia’s work and watching her face, and talking to her.

  “What is your name?” she broke off to ask, in the midst of a monologue upon the social customs and characteristics of the Synthesis.

  Cornelia always frowned, and drew her breath in long sibilations, when she was trying hard to get a thing right. She now turned a knotted forehead on her companion, but stopped her hissing to ask, “What?” Then she came to herself and said, “Oh! Saunders.”

  “I don’t mean your last name,” said the other, “I mean your first name.”

  “Cornelia,” said the owner of it, as briefly as before.

  “I should have thought it would have been Gladys,” the other suggested.

  Cornelia looked up in astonishment and some resentment. “Why in the world should my name be Gladys?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know,” the other explained. “But the first moment I saw you in the office, I said to myself, ‘Of course her name is Gladys.’ Mine is Charmian.”

  “Is it?” said Cornelia, not so much with preoccupation, perhaps, as with indifference. She thought it rather a nice name, but she did not know what she had to do with it.

  “Yes,” the other said, as if she had somehow expected to be doubted. “My last name’s Maybough.” Cornelia kept on at her work without remark, and Miss Maybough pursued, as if it were a branch of autobiography, “I’m going to have lunch; aren’t you?”

  Cornelia sighed dreamily, as she drew back for an effect of her drawing, which she held up on the table before her, “Is it time?”

  “Do you suppose they would be letting me talk so to you if it weren’t? The monitor would have been down on me long ago.”

  Cornelia had noticed a girl who seemed to be in authority, and who sat where she could oversee and overhear all that went on.

  “Is she one of the students?” she aske
d.

  Miss Maybough nodded. “Elected every month. She’s awful. You can’t do anything with her when she’s on duty, but she’s a little dear when she isn’t. You’ll like her.” Miss Maybough leaned toward her, and joined Cornelia in a study of her drawing. “How splendidly you’re getting it. It’s very chic. Oh, anybody can see that you’ve got genius!”

  Her admiration made no visible impression upon Cornelia, and for a moment she looked a little disappointed; then she took a basket from under the table, and drew from it a bottle of some yellowish liquid, an orange and a bit of sponge cake. “Are you going to have yours here?” she asked, as Cornelia opened a paper with the modest sandwich in it which she had made at breakfast, and fetched from her boarding-house. “Oh, I’m so glad you haven’t brought anything to drink with you! I felt almost sure you hadn’t, and now you’ve got to share mine.” She took a cup from her basket, and in spite of Cornelia’s protest that she never drank anything but water at dinner, she poured it full of tea for her. “I’ll drink out of the bottle,” she said. “I like to. Some of the girls bring chocolate, but I think there’s nothing like cold tea for the brain. Chocolate’s so clogging; so’s milk; but sometimes I bring that; it’s glorious, drinking it out of the can.” She tilted the bottle to her lips, and half drained it at a draught. “I always feel that I’m working with inspiration after I’ve had my cold tea. Of course they won’t let you stay here long,” she added.

  “Why?” Cornelia fluttered back in alarm.

  “When they see your work they’ll see that you’re fit for still-life, at least.”

  “Oh!” said Cornelia, vexed at having been scared for nothing. “I guess they won’t be in any great hurry about it.”

  “How magnificent!” said Miss Maybough. “Of course, with that calm of yours, you can wait, as if you had eternity before you. Do you know that you are terribly calm?”

  Cornelia turned and gave her a long stare. Miss Maybough broke her bit of cake in two, and offered her half, and Cornelia took it mechanically, but ate her sandwich. “I feel as if I had eternity behind me, I’ve been in the Preparatory so long.”

  On the common footing this drop to the solid ground gave, Cornelia asked her how long.

  “Well, it’s the beginning of my second year, now. If they don’t let me go to round hands pretty soon, I shall have to see if I can’t get the form by modelling. That’s the best way. I suppose it’s my imagination; it carries me away so, and I don’t see the thing as it is before me; that’s what they say. But with the clay, I’ll have to, don’t you know. Well, you know some of the French painters model their whole picture in clay and paint it, before they touch the canvas, any way. I shall try it here awhile longer, and then if I can’t get to the round in any other way, I’ll take to the clay. If sculpture concentrates you more, perhaps I may stick to it altogether. Art is one, anyhow, and the great thing is to live it. Don’t you think so?”

  “I don’t know,” said Cornelia. “I’m not certain I know what you mean.”

  “You will,” said Miss Maybough, “after you’ve been here awhile, and get used to the atmosphere. I don’t believe I really knew what life meant before I came to the Synthesis. When you get to realizing the standards of the Synthesis, then you begin to breathe freely for the first time. I expect to pass the rest of my days here. I shouldn’t care if I stayed till I was thirty. How old are you?”

  “I’m going on twenty,” said Cornelia. “Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. You can’t begin too young; though some people think you oughtn’t to come before you’re eighteen. I look upon my days before I came here as simply wasted. Don’t you want to go out and sit on the stairs awhile?”

  “I don’t believe I do,” said Cornelia, taking up her drawing again, as if she were going on with it.

  “Horrors!” Miss Maybough put her hand out over the sketch. “You don’t mean that you’re going to carry it any farther?”

  “Why, it isn’t finished yet,” Cornelia began.

  “Of course it isn’t, and it never ought to be! I hope you’re not going to turn out a niggler! Please don’t! I couldn’t bear to have you. Nobody will respect you if you finish. Don’t! If you won’t come out with me and get a breath of fresh air, do start a new drawing! I want them to see this in the rough. It’s so bold.”

  Miss Maybough had left her own drawing in the rough, but it could not be called bold; though if she had seen the block hand with a faltering eye, she seemed to have had a fearless vision of many other things, and she had covered her paper with a fantastic medley of grotesque shapes, out of that imagination which she had given Cornelia to know was so fatally mischievous to her in its uninvited activities. “Don’t look at them!” she pleaded, when Cornelia involuntarily glanced at her study. “My only hope is to hate them. I almost pray to be delivered from them. Let’s talk of something else.” She turned the sheet over. “Do you mind my having said that about your drawing?”

  “No!” said Cornelia, provoked to laughter by the solemnity of the demand. “Why should I?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Do you think you shall like me? I mean, do you care if I like you — very, very much?”

  “I don’t suppose I could stop it if I did, could I?” asked Cornelia.

  The Sphinx seemed to find heart to smile. “Of course, I’m ridiculous. But I do hope we’re going to be friends. Tell me about yourself. Or, have some more tea!”

  XIV.

  “I don’t want any more tea, thank you,” said Cornelia, “and there isn’t anything to tell.”

  “There must be!” the other girl insisted, clinging to her bottle with tragic intensity. “Any one can see that you’ve lived. What part of the country did you come from?”

  “Ohio,” said Cornelia, as the best way to be done with it.

  “And have you ever been in Santa Fé?”

  “Goodness, no! Why, it’s in New Mexico!”

  “Yes; I was born there. Then my father went to Colorado. He isn’t living, now. Are your father and mother living?”

  “My mother is,” said Cornelia; the words brought up a vision of her mother, as she must be sitting that moment in the little front-room, and a mist came suddenly before her eyes; she shut her lips hard to keep them from trembling.

  “I see, you worship her,” said Miss Maybough fervidly, keeping her gaze fixed upon Cornelia. “You are homesick!”

  “I’m not homesick!” said Cornelia, angry that she should be so and that she should be denying it.

  “Mine,” said the other, “died while I was a baby. She had Indian blood,” she added in the same way in which she had said her name was Charmian.

  “Did she?” Cornelia asked.

  “That is the legend,” said Miss Maybough solemnly. “Her grandmother was a Zuñi princess.” She turned her profile. “See?”

  “It does look a little Indian,” said Cornelia.

  “Some people think it’s Egyptian,” Miss Maybough suggested, as if she had been leading up to the notion, and were anxious not to have it ignored.

  Cornelia examined the profile steadily presented, more carefully: “It’s a good deal more Egyptian.”

  Miss Maybough relieved her profile from duty, and continued, “We’ve been everywhere. Paris two years. That’s where I took up art in dead earnest; Julian, you know. Mamma didn’t want me to; she wanted me to go into society there; and she does here; but I hate it. Don’t you think society is very frivolous, or, any way, very stupid?”

  “I don’t know much about it. I never went out, much,” said Cornelia.

  “Well, I hope you’re not conventional! Nobody’s conventional here.”

  “I don’t believe I’m conventional enough to hurt,” said Cornelia.

  “You have humor, too,” said Miss Maybough, thoughtfully, as if she had been mentally cataloguing her characteristics. “You’ll be popular.”

  Cornelia stared at her and turned to her drawing.

  “But you’re proud,” said the other, “I can see
that. I adore pride. It must have been your pride that fascinated me at the first glance. Do you mind my being fascinated with you?”

  Cornelia wanted to laugh; at the same time she wondered what new kind of crazy person she had got with; this was hardly one of the art-students that went wild from overwork. Miss Maybough kept on without waiting to be answered: “I haven’t got a bit of pride, myself. I could just let you walk over me. How does it feel to be proud? What are you proud for?”

  Cornelia quieted a first impulse to resent this pursuit. “I don’t think I’m very proud. I used to be proud when I was little; — I guess you ought to have asked me then.”

  “Oh, yes! Tell me about yourself!” Miss Maybough implored again, but she went on as before without giving Cornelia any chance to reply. “Of course, when I say mamma, I mean my step-mother. She’s very good to me, but she doesn’t understand me. You’ll like her. I’ll tell you what sort of a person she is.” She did so at such length that the lunch hour passed before she finished, and a hush fell upon all the babbling voices about, as the monitor came back to her place.

  Toward the end of the afternoon the monitor’s vigilance relaxed again, and Miss Maybough began to talk again. “If you want to be anything by the Synthesis standards,” she said, “you’ve got to keep this up a whole year, you know.” It was now four o’clock, and Cornelia had been working steadily since eleven, except for the half-hour at lunch-time. “They’ll see how well you draw; you needn’t be afraid of their not doing that; and they’ll let you go on to the round at once, perhaps. But if you’re truly Synthetic in spirit, you won’t want to. You’ll want to get all you can out of the block; and it’ll take you a year to do that; then another year for the full length, you know. At first we only had the block here, and a good many people think now that the full length Preparatory encroaches on the Antique. Sometimes they even let you put in backgrounds here, but it don’t matter much: when the instructor in the Antique gets hold of you he makes you unlearn everything you’ve learnt in the full-length. He’s grand.”