The Derelict (Bottome, Century Magazine, 1917)/Chapter 4
Synopsis of Chapters I-III—Geoffrey Amberley had irritated his family by becoming a painter; even becoming a successful painter had left them indifferent: but his engagement to Emily Dering delighted them. Emily was beautiful, lovable, and wealthy; but she also had a mission to make people—fallen people—stand on their own feet, and it was in the pursuit of this aim that she called in the unwilling Geoffrey to assist her in making Fanny stand on her own feet. Fanny was beautiful, too, but, as Emily vaguely explained, "had been cut to pieces by life."
Part II. Chapter IV
IF Geoffrey had been a true Amberley, he would have known precisely what he meant to do about painting Fanny. If it had been fun to paint Fanny, he would have painted her; if not, he would have planted his refusal firmly upon all fours.
Bill would have said: "Hang it all! my dear Emily, I'd do anything to please you, but a fellow can't go round painting stray women. 'Pon my word, you'd better not ask it. Don't you get mixed up with queer starts. If she's down on her luck, give her a check for a fiver and let her rip." Tom would have contented himself with even less expression of sentiment. He would have said, "Not my line," and even Emily would have rested upon that finality. Dislike with an Amberley was backbone; but it did nothing to relieve Geoffrey from the wobblings of a jellyfish.
There were times when he was n't even sure that he would dislike to paint Fanny. But something in him was less undecided than his mind; his vision of Fanny was perfectly clear. He made a water-color sketch of her from memory, and hid it behind a row of the portraits of Emily's friends. He was n't sure that he meant to do anything with it; but he knew that he could never have painted from memory any of Emily's friends.
Upon his inconclusiveness burst the incisive splendor of Marcel Dupin. Marcel was Geoffrey's greatest friend; he was also an extremely able young French sculptor. He prided himself upon two things: seeing all that there was to see, and the dexterity with which he transferred vision into practice. His dexterity was as sharp as a razor, and his vision as keen as a hawk's. Half of his feeling for Geoffrey was pity, the other half was the respect of a fellow-artist. He believed in Geoffrey's talent, but he was uneasy as to the use he would make of it.
"I have come," he announced, "to see how you are getting on. Your letter announcing your engagement excited me; it is true that for six months I have not answered it, but during that time the excitement mounted. Do you mean to tell me you are still engaged? What a wonderful people the English are, so precisely described by their beautiful proverb, 'We turn forever down a long lane'! Non. If I had been in your place, for instance, I should have been prepared for you to produce a christening-mug!"
"I dare say I shall be prepared for that by and by," said Geoffrey, without annoyance, "but over here we don't arrange things so much beforehand. As a matter of fact, I did n't arrange my marriage at all; it was as inevitable and as unmanageable as a summer day."
"You should not have summer days that are unmanageable," said Marcel. "I admit that many of them appear to have that defect; but I am on fire to meet the English fiancée, and meanwhile you must show me your work. That is to say, if you have any work; for all I know an English engagement may be in itself a profession. It has one of the qualities of a profession,—duration,—but I am not quite so certain that it pays."
"You can look round you," said Geoffrey, a little nervously; "but don't expect much. I 've been, on the whole, more industrious than satisfactory. Emily has been wonderfully clever at getting hold of people for me to paint, and I 've been, as you see, hard at it; but I confess that people of one class, with five meals a day and the same ideas, look incredibly alike. I'm not sure one would n't get as much variety out of sheep—or Chinamen."
"Ah, my dear fellow," Marcel murmured, "do me one really good Chinaman!" He flitted to and fro about the studio, dragging out canvases and turning them to the light, spinning them aside with the hasty judgment of a man who knows what he is looking for and where he is certain not to find it. Meanwhile Geoffrey watched him with increasing discomfort.
"You 're thinking," he said, "that I 've been wasting my time running about on the surface? They wanted representations,—people do, you know,—and I 've represented them. I suppose you think I ought n't to have given 'em what they wanted? Well, I promise you I won't once I'm married. I 'll have a line of my own then and stick to it."
Marcel looked gloomily across the studio at him.
"But where is it," he demanded, "this line of your own? What you have here, my poor friend, is n't a line at all; it's an abyss. You should have sent mademoiselle's amiable friends to the photographer. There are such good ones now, too. They should be allowed to take a little something off our shoulders."
Then Marcel unearthed Fanny. He gave a long, low whistle as he drew the sketch out into the light. It was Fanny, just as she had sat in the old cloak and the battered, scarlet straw hat, digging her toes into the carpet.
"Mon Dieu!" murmured Marcel. "This time you have not been making money. Vous y êtes! Work this up. For the rest,—forgive me if I say,—love has disagreed with you. Perhaps by the time you painted this you had got over it?"
Geoffrey frowned.
"You can't get over the kind of feeling I have for Emily," he explained. "I dare say it has made my work go to pieces temporarily, but what you fellows don't understand is that to love one woman tremendously and all the time is worth what you have to pay for it."
"My dear, to whom do you say it?" laughed Marcel, perching himself on the window-sill and flicking an imaginary speck of dust from his blue silk socks. "If the love of one woman is like that, figure to yourself the love of dozens! Did I not tell you in Paris that the hearts of women are the school of men? But you have no imagination; your eyebrows rise at the word dozens. I should recommend to your notice the progress of the spring. Is the violet out of place because of the daffodil, and have you no room for the tulip when it rises simultaneously with your little milk-faced primrose? And I assure you, if you judge of the value of love by the price, it is far more expensive to pay for dozens than for one."
"No; there you 're wrong," said Geoffrey. "It is less expensive, for you don't pay with yourself."
"But never, never, never," cried Marcel, vehemently. "That is the last and the most clumsy of human errors. I implore you, and a little in vain I am afraid, having looked at your pictures, to keep yourself out of it! The secret of passion is self-preservation. You have not preserved yourself. If you had, you would not have perpetrated these types. They are so many pieces of your lost soul."
"I beg your pardon," said a laughing voice from the door, "but how has Geoffrey lost his soul?"
The two men sprang to their feet; both looked equally guilty. Emily stood in the open doorway, her arms full of early spring roses.
"I knocked, and you never heard," she said to Geoffrey; "but I sha'n't apologize. I 've been shopping, and I thought of tea; but Monsieur—Faust, is it?—has n't yet answered me."
"Ah, Mademoiselle," said Marcel, "I forget what happened to the soul of Endymion; but I know that he loved the moon. That was always some excuse. I recognize now the excuse of Geoffrey."
"I am not sure," said Emily, holding out her hand to him, "that that is not the most invidious compliment I ever received; but I forgive you in advance, for I have guessed you are Geoffrey's friend Marcel Dupin, and I am Emily."
She could n't perhaps have done it better, except that Marcel thought her graciousness a trifle too matronly. Marcel had very distinct ideas about women. He respected mothers, but he did not wish to meet the maternal aspect in any woman under forty.
Geoffrey left them to go out to buy cakes for tea. He thought that they were the two most wonderful people in the world, and he rejoiced in the certainty of how they would get on together. They got on together as well as the two most wonderful people in the world would be likely to get on together.
"I'm so glad to see you for a few minutes alone," Emily said, with her ready eagerness, "for now you can tell me what I want most to know about Geoffrey's work. He has made me feel as if you were an oracle. Has n't he made a great advance?"
Emily was quite sure that Geoffrey's work had improved; she liked his pictures better herself. A certain queerness in them had evaporated lately, something which made them unlike the pictures of anybody else; and, besides, he had had the great incentive of her love. She smiled reassuringly upon Marcel Dupin. It is a mistake to imagine that Frenchmen flatter upon a question of fact; it is only in the region of fancy that they allow themselves to evade the rigor of perfect accuracy.
Marcel's light eyes fixed themselves with a certain hardness upon Emily's vague, gray ones.
"No, Mademoiselle," he said firmly, "I regret to say he has not. It was of this subject that we spoke as you entered. You have been engaged for six months, have you not? Well, forgive me, but to be in love with a very beautiful woman like yourself, who may at any moment appear, in your perfect English freedom, at his studio door, is very bad for a man's art."
Emily stared a little.
"Oh," she said, "but, you see, I never come near him in the mornings."
"I can understand how that must make him dislike that time of day," said Marcel, remorselessly; "but the lure remains the same."
"The what?" exclaimed Emily, coloring to her forehead. She was n't only astonished; she was annoyed. She wondered if Marcel meant something French.
"It is a little difficult to explain, Mademoiselle," said Marcel, hesitating. "If you were his wife—well—then he would have arrived, would he not? And if there were some other arrangement, in that also there would be a point of decision; but an engagement that is very free and continuous and does not arrive, one wonders a little if the imagination is capable of leaving it enough to do good work. Personally I should say, looking about me at Geoffrey's attempts, no. He is wool-gathering, the poor child. These ladies and gentlemen,—pardon me,—but do you not think they have a resemblance to wool?"
"I don't think I quite know what you mean," said Emily, a little awefully. Emily always knew exactly what people meant unless she was seriously annoyed with them. "Must n't an artist paint the types he has orders from?"
Marcel shrugged his shoulders.
"I would rather model a suet-pudding than starve," he agreed, "but short of a constriction around the stomach I should avoid modeling too many suet-puddings. Geoffrey has been doing what does not inspire him. That is always possible, it is sometimes a necessity; but to make a rule of it is bad. None of these canvases bear the look of people; they are casts. Oh, but I make a mistake,"—he drew Fanny out with a certain flourish,—"this one is alive. For her Geoffrey has had an idea. He has not said to himself: 'I am a young man who wants very much to be married. Therefore I will earn twenty-five pounds.'"
Emily's benevolent eyes turned suddenly hostile. She disliked Marcel Dupin thoroughly. He spoke of marriage and twenty-five pounds as if they were the same thing.
When Geoffrey returned he felt as if a cold wind had got into the room.
"I did not know," said Emily, pouring out tea, "that you had begun to paint Fanny."
"Oh, that," said Geoffrey, hastily, "is just a sketch from memory, you know; it came into my head. I did n't bother you with it because I rather thought that if I did seriously study her I'd work it up."
"But, of course," said Marcel, flying forward for his tea, "you must seriously study her. You have an idea, an idea like that, and you talk of playing with it! The English are surely the lightest race under the sun! As light as gnats! If this puritan conscience of yours, mon cher, we are told so much about worked where there is a convenience for conscience, mademoiselle and I would share the felicity of your arrival somewhere. But if you do not seriously study your ideas, allow me to assure you—you will arrive nowhere."
"Conscience," said Emily, "is an inner spirit, Monsieur Dupin; it deals with everything either in art or in life. I have no fear that Geoffrey will not listen to it."
"Comment?" demanded Marcel, nibbling without appreciation an English rock cake. "A bonne à tout faire? What a rôle you provide her with, Mademoiselle! Are you not afraid the poor little one will become unwholesomely fatigued?"
Geoffrey intervened hastily; he was watching Emily's foot on the floor. It tapped, and he had never seen her tap her foot before.
"Don't you worry, Marcel, old boy," he said, putting the sketch of Fanny back against the wall. "I 'll work up as hard as I can at any tail-end of an inspiration that comes my way; I dare say my conscience can stand it."
"But this Fanny, where is she?" demanded Marcel, giving up the rock cake in despair. "I am very intrigué; may I not share her with Geoffrey? I think I could do a little with her here in London. One sees she has good bones."
"I am afraid not," said Emily, decisively, drawing on her gloves. "Fanny is not an ordinary model."
"No, no; of course not," said Marcel, with cordiality. "One sees what she is,—how shall I put it?—one of the more unconventional ladies? But for all that, Mademoiselle, she is a model in a million; and if you allow the good Geoffrey to benefit by her, you must not mind exposing me. As far as that goes, I may frankly say that exposure is one of my habits."
"There are serious reasons against it," said Emily, moving toward the door.
"Reasons," Marcel murmured as he held the door open for her, "have such a way in this country of being serious! They seem also to be oftenest upon the side that says 'No.' Repudiate it, Mademoiselle, this side that says 'No.' It is like a lady that has lived too long without a husband."
Emily ignored this appeal, but she turned to him with a certain grave sweetness before she left the studio.
"I shall remember," she said, "what you have told me about Geoffrey's work, Monsieur Dupin."
Geoffrey followed Emily down-stairs. Marcel returned to the picture of Fanny. He eyed it with a certain sympathy.
"Women," he said to himself, "should never be treated well. The result is so unsatisfactory."