Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Did ever an engaged gentleman face the prospect of impending happiness with such a long face as this suitor of mine is wearing!”

  His voice broke in the protest wrung from his lips.

  “You must be my wife. I tell you! For God’s sake marry me and let the future take care of itself!”

  “You say so many sweet, confusing, and foolish things to me, Louis, that while you are saying them I almost believe them. And then that clear, pitiless reasoning power of mine awakens me; and I turn my gaze inward and read written on my heart that irrevocable law of mine, that no unhappiness shall ever come to you through me.”

  Her face, sweetly serious, brightened slowly to a smile.

  “Now I am going home, monsieur — home to think over my mad and incredible promise to you … and I’m wondering whether I’ll wake up scared to death…. Daylight is a chilly shower-bath. No doubt at all that I’ll be pretty well frightened over what I’ve said and done to-night…. Louis, dear, you simply must take me home this very minute!” She came up to him, placed both hands on his shoulders, kissed him lightly, looked at him for a moment, humorously grave:

  “Some day,” she said, “a big comet will hit this law-ridden, man-regulated earth — or the earth will slip a cog and go wabbling out of its orbit into interstellar space and side-wipe another planet — or it will ultimately freeze up like the moon. And who will care then how Valerie West loved Louis Neville? — or what letters in a forgotten language spelled ‘wife’ and what letters spelled ‘mistress’? After all, I am not afraid of words. Nor do I fear what is in my heart. God reads it as I stand here; and he can see no selfishness in it. So if merely loving you all my life — and proving it — is an evil thing to do, I shall be punished; but I’m going to do it and find out what celestial justice really thinks about it.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  Valerie was busy — exceedingly busy arranging matters, in view of the great change impending.

  She began by balancing her check book, comparing stubs with cancelled checks, adding and verifying sums total, filing away paid bills and paying the remainder — a financial operation which did not require much time, but to which she applied herself with all the seriousness of a wealthy man hunting through a check book which will not balance, for a few pennies that ought to be his.

  For since she had any accounts at all to keep, she had kept them with method and determination. Her genius for order was inherent: even when she possessed nothing except the clothes she wore, she had always kept them in perfect condition. And now that her popularity in business gave her a bank balance and permitted some of the intimate little luxuries that make for a woman’s self-respect, a perfect passion for order and method possessed her.

  The tiny bedroom which she inhabited, and the adjoining bathroom, were always immaculate. Every week she made an inventory of her few but pretty garments, added or subtracted from her memorandum, went over her laundry list, noted and laid aside whatever clothing needed repairs.

  Once a week, too, she inspected her hats, foot-wear, furs; dusted the three rows of books, emptied and cleaned the globe in which a solitary goldfish swam, goggling his eyes in the sunshine, and scrubbed the porcelain perching pole on which her parrot sat all day in the bathroom window making limited observations in French, Spanish, and English, and splitting red peppers and dried watermelon seeds with his heavy curved beak. He was a gorgeous bird, with crimson and turquoise blue on him, and a capacity for deviltry restrained only by a silver anklet and chain, gifts from Querida, as was also the parrot.

  So Valerie, in view of the great change impending, began to put her earthly house in order — without any particular reason, however, because the great change would not affect her quarters or her living in them. Nor could she afford to permit it to interfere with her business career for which perfect independence was necessary.

  She had had it out with Neville one stormy afternoon in January, stopping in for tea after posing for John Burleson’s Psyche fountain ordered by Penrhyn Cardemon. She had demanded from Neville acquiescence in her perfect freedom of action, absolute independence; had modestly requested non-interference in her business affairs and the liberty to support herself.

  “There is no other way, Louis,” she explained very sweetly. “I do not think I am going to lose any self-respect in giving myself to you — but there would not be one shred of it left to cover me if I were not as free as you are to make the world pay me fairly for what I give it.”

  And, another time, she had said to him: “It is better not to tell me all about your personal, private, and financial affairs — better that I do not tell you about mine. Is it necessary to burst into financial and trivial confidences when one is in love?

  “I have an idea that that is what spoils most marriages. To me there is a certain respectability in reticence when a girl is very much in love. I would no more open my personal and private archives in all their petty disorder to your inspection than I would let you see me dress — even if we had been married for hundreds of years.”

  [Illustration: “She began by balancing her check book.”]

  And still, on another occasion, when he had fought her for hours in an obstinate determination to make her say she would marry him — and when, beaten, chagrined, baffled, he had lost his temper, she won him back with her child-like candour and self-control.

  “Your logic,” he said, “is unbaked, unmature, unfledged. It’s squab-logic, I tell you, Valerie; and it is not very easy for me to listen to it.”

  “I’m afraid that I am not destined to be entirely easy for you, dear, even with love as the only tie with which to bind you. The arbitrary laws of a false civilisation are going to impose on you what you think are duties and obligations to me and to yourself — until I explain them away. You must come to me in your perplexity, Louis, and give me a chance to remind you of the basic and proven proposition that a girl is born into this world as free as any man, and as responsible to herself and to others; and that her title to her own individuality and independence — her liberty of mind, her freedom to give and accept, her capability of taking care of herself, her divine right of considering, re-considering, of meeting the world unafraid — is what really ought to make her lovable.”

  He had answered: “What rotten books have you been reading?” And it annoyed her, particularly when he had asked her whether she expected to overturn, with the squab-logic of twenty years, the formalisms of a civilisation several thousand years old. He had added:

  “The runways of wild animals became Indian paths; the Indian paths became settlers’ roads, and the roads, in time, city streets. But it was the instinct of wild creatures that surveyed and laid out the present highways of our reasoning civilisation. And I tell you, Valerie, that the old ways are the best, for on them is founded every straight highway of modern thought and custom.”

  She considered:

  “Then there is only one way left — to see you no more.”

  He had thought so, too, infuriated at the idea; and they had passed a very miserable and very stormy afternoon together, which resulted in her crying silently on the way home; and in a sleepless night for two; and in prolonged telephone conversation at daybreak. But it all ended with a ring at his door-bell, a girl in furs all flecked with snow, springing swiftly into his studio; a moment’s hesitation — then the girl and her furs in his arms, her cold pink cheeks against his face — a brief moment of utter happiness — for she was on her way to business — a swift, silent caress, then eyes searching eyes in silent promise — in reluctant farewell for an hour or two.

  But it left him to face the problems of the day with a new sense of helplessness — the first confused sensation that hers was the stronger nature, the dominant personality — although he did not definitely understand this.

  Because, how could he understand it of a young girl so soft, so yielding, so sweet, so shy and silent in the imminence of passion when her consenting lips trembled and grew fragrant in half-awakened re
sponse to his.

  How could he believe it — conscious of what he had made of himself through sheer will and persistent? How could he credit it — remembering what he already stood for in the world, where he stood, how he had arrived by the rigid road of self-denial; how he had mounted, steadily, undismayed, unperturbed, undeterred by the clamour of envy, of hostility, unseduced by the honey of flattery?

  Upright, calm, self-confident, he had forged on straight ahead, following nobody — battled steadily along the upward path until — out of the void, suddenly he had come up against a blank wall.

  That wall which had halted, perplexed, troubled, dismayed, terrified him because he was beginning to believe it to be the boundary which marked his own limitations, suddenly had become a transparent barrier through which he could see. And what he saw on the other side was an endless vista leading into infinity. But the path was guarded; Love stood sentinel there. And that was what he saw ahead of him now, and he knew that he might pass on if Love willed it — and that he would never care to pass on alone. But that he could not go forward, ignoring Love, neither occurred to him nor would he have believed it if it had. Yet, at times, an indefinable unease possessed him as though some occult struggle was impending for which he was unprepared.

  That struggle had already begun, but he did not know it.

  On the contrary all his latent strength and brilliancy had revived, exquisitely virile; and the new canvas on which he began now to work blossomed swiftly into magnificent florescence.

  A superb riot of colour bewitched the entire composition; never had his brushes swept with such sun-tipped fluency, never had the fresh splendour of his hues and tones approached so closely to convincing himself in the hours of fatigue and coldly sober reaction from the auto-intoxication of his own facility.

  That auto-intoxication had always left his mind and his eye steady and watchful, although drugged — like the calm judgment of the intoxicated opportunist at the steering wheel of a racing motor. And a race once run and ended, a deliberate consideration of results usually justified the pleasure of the pace.

  Yet that mysterious something which some said he lacked, had not yet appeared. That something, according to many, was an elusive quality born of a sympathy for human suffering — an indefinable and delicate bond between the artist and his world — between a master who has suffered, and all humanity who understands.

  The world seemed to recognise this subtle bond between themselves and Querida’s pictures. Yet in the pictures there was never any sadness. Had Querida ever suffered? Was it in that olive-skinned, soft-voiced young man to suffer? — a man apparently all grace and unruffled surface and gentle charm — a man whose placid brow remained smooth and untroubled by any line of perplexity or of sorrow.

  And as Neville studied his own canvas coolly, logically, with an impersonal scrutiny that almost amounted to hostility, he wondered what it was in Querida’s work that still remained absent in his. He felt its absence but he could not define what it was that was absent, could not discover the nature of it. He really began to feel the lack of it in his work, but he searched his canvas and his own heart in vain for any vacuum unfilled.

  [Illustration: “He stood before it, searching in it for any hint of that elusive and mysterious something”]

  Then, too, had he himself not suffered? What had that restless, miserable winter meant, if it had not meant sorrow? He had suffered — blindly it is true until the truth of his love for Valerie had suddenly confronted him. Yet that restless pain — and the intense emotion of their awakening — all the doubts, all the anxieties — the wonder and happiness and sadness in the imminence of that strange future impending for them both — had altered nothing in his work — brought into it no new quality — unless, as he thought, it had intensified to a dazzling brilliancy the same qualities which already had made his work famous.

  “It’s all talk,” he said to himself— “it’s sentimental jargon, precious twaddle — all this mysterious babble about occult quality and humanity and sympathy. If José Querida has the capacity of a chipmunk for mental agony, I’ve lost my bet that he hasn’t.”

  And all the time he was conscious that there was something about Querida’s work which made that work great; and that it was not in his own work, and that his own work was not great, and never had been great.

  “But it will be,” he said rather grimly to himself one day, turning with a shrug from his amazing canvas and pulling the unfinished portrait of Valerie into the cold north light.

  For a long while he stood before it, searching in it for any hint of that elusive and mysterious something, and found none.

  Moreover there was in the painting of this picture a certain candour amounting to stupidity — an uncertainty — a naïve, groping sort of brush work. It seemed to be technically, almost deliberately, muddled.

  There was a tentative timidity about it that surprised his own technical assurance — almost moved him to contempt.

  What had he been trying to do? For what had he been searching in those slow, laborious, almost painful brush strokes — in that clumsy groping for values, in the painstaking reticence, the joyless and mathematical establishment of a sombre and uninspiring key, in the patient plotting of simpler planes where space and quiet reigned unaccented?

  “Lord!” he said, biting his lip. “I’ve been stung by the microbe of the precious! I’ll be talking Art next with both thumbs and a Vandyke beard.”

  Still, through his self-disgust, a sensation of respect for the canvas at which he was scowling, persisted. Nor could he account for the perfectly unwelcome and involuntary idea that there was, about the half-finished portrait, something almost dignified in the very candour of its painting.

  John Burleson came striding in while he was still examining it. He usually came about tea time, and the door was left open after five o’clock.

  “O-ho!” he said in his big, unhumorous voice, “what in hell and the name of Jimmy Whistler have we here?”

  “Mud,” said Neville, shortly— “like Mr. Whistler’s.”

  “He was muddy — sometimes,” said John, seriously, “but you never were until this.”

  “Oh, I know it, Johnny. Something infected me. I merely tried to do what isn’t in me. And this is the result. When a man decides he has a mission, you can never tell what fool thing he’ll be guilty of.”

  “It’s Valerie West, isn’t it?” demanded John, bluntly.

  “She won’t admire you for finding any resemblance,” said Neville, laughing.

  The big sculptor rubbed his big nose reflectively.

  “After all,” he said, “what is so bad about it, Kelly?”

  “Oh, everything.”

  “No, it isn’t. There’s something about it that’s — different — and interesting—”

  “Oh, shut up, John, and fix yourself a drink—”

  “Kelly, I’m telling you that it isn’t bad — that there’s something terribly solid and sincere about this beginning—”

  He looked around with a bovine grunt as Sam Ogilvy and Harry Annan came mincing in: “I say, you would-be funny fellows! — come over and tell Kelly Neville that he’s got a pretty good thing here if he only has the brains to develop it!”

  Neville lighted a cigarette and looked on cynically as Ogilvy and Annan joined Burleson on tiptoe, affecting exaggerated curiosity.

  “I think it’s rotten,” said Annan, after a moment’s scrutiny; “don’t you, Sam?”

  Ogilvy, fists thrust deep into the pockets of his painting jacket, eyed the canvas in silence.

  “Don’t you?” repeated Annan. “Or is it a masterpiece beyond my vulgar ken?”

  “Well — no. Kelly was evidently trying to get at something new — work out some serious idea. No, I don’t think it’s rotten at all. I rather like it.”

  “It looks too much like her; that’s why it’s rotten,” said Annan. “Thank God I’ve a gift for making pretty women out of my feminine clients, otherwise I’d star
ve. Kelly, you haven’t made Valerie pretty enough. That’s the trouble. Besides, it’s muddy in spots. Her gown needs dry-cleaning. But my chief criticism is the terrible resemblance to the original.”

  “Ah-h, what are you talking about!” growled Burleson; “did you ever see a prettier girl than Valerie West?”

  Ogilvy said slowly: “She’s pretty — to look at in real life. But, somehow, Kelly has managed here to paint her more exactly than we have really ever noticed her. That’s Valerie’s face and figure all right; and it’s more — it reflects what is going on inside her head — all the unbaked, unassimilated ideas of immaturity whirring in a sequence which resembles logic to the young, but isn’t.”

  “What do you mean by such bally stuff?” demanded Burleson, bluntly.

  Annan laughed, but Ogilvy said seriously:

  “I mean that Kelly has painted something interesting. It’s a fascinating head — all soft hair and delicious curves, and the charming indecision of immature contours which ought some day to fall into a nobler firmness…. It’s as interesting as a satire, I tell you. Look at that perfectly good mouth and its delicate sensitive decision with a hint of puritanical primness in the upper lip — and the full, sensuous under lip mocking the upper and giving the lie to the child’s eyes which are still wide with the wonder of men and things. And there’s something of an adolescent’s mystery in the eyes, too — a hint of languor where the bloom of the cheek touches the lower lid — and those smooth, cool, little hands, scarcely seen in the shadow — did you ever see more purity and innocence — more character and the lack of it — painted into a pair of hands since Van Dyck and Whistler died?”

  Neville, astonished, stood looking incredulously at the canvas around which the others had gathered.

  Burleson said: “There’s something honest and solid about it, anyway; hanged if there isn’t.”

  “Like a hen,” suggested Ogilvy, absently.

  “Like a hen?” repeated Burleson. “What in hell has a hen got to do with the subject?”