A Puritan Bohemia/Chapter 24
CHAPTER XXIV
"Along white roadways thou shalt travel
Whereon men thirst."
Through the hot July afternoon Anne Bradford worked with fierce zest. An Italian boy was posing for her, a tiny creature whose big brown eyes and pointed chin suggested a baby faun. Anne's eyes shone as she sketched the shaggy curls. At length the child grew tired and she sent him home.
The artist too was exhausted, but she did not know it. She climbed the steps to the gallery and looked out upon the deserted Square. All the shutters were closed. Only here and there a row of small flower-pots upon a window-sill betrayed the presence of some lingering Bohemian.
Anne leaned her elbows upon the window-seat and dropped her head upon her hands. Once again life was like wine upon her lips in the joy of creating. For days she had been toiling with her brushes, painfully conscious of herself. Now had come one of the divine moments when work and worker are one. For other people there were other ways of escape. This was hers.
The winter and its perturbations seemed very far away. Now that its troubles were all over and nothing personal greatly mattered, the old inspiration was coming back. Hope and fear and regret made only a kind of mental atmosphere in which the one reality of Anne's life, her art, stood out in soft relief.
"If I can only keep out of my own way," she murmured, "I can do something."
Even the disillusionment of success had ceased to pain. To have expected satisfaction from anything external had been childish. In no flippant sense was it true that the thing one has is not the thing one wants. Truly one never reaches any place without finding that the place is not there. The worn ideas came to the girl with the poignancy of a new experience. She had—all she wanted—a chance to work on. In store for her were perhaps keener insight, greater skill, a firmer grasp on the real meanings of things.
A spray of ivy outside the window blew out into the sun. Its beauty brought quick tears to Anne's tired eyes. For all that the artist missed there was compensation in the added preciousness of little things. Surely, in a world so prodigal of life, there was a place for the mere watcher. Among people who squandered experience so recklessly there was room for one whose task was to record.
It was a limited life, but one need not suffer all in order to understand. He who "raised the walls of man" made them not altogether opaque. Oh, people did not know how keen the taste of another's experience might be! For some, the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table have made a liberal feast. Here was the eternal paradox of art, to feel all so sharply, to have nothing of one's own.
Here, too, was the divine satisfaction of the artist,—to lose the consciousness of self, to be only a mirror, reflecting the faces of others. Not self-expression, but accurate report, was what one should strive for. From that criticism of her too egoistic work she would start out with a prayer for clearer vision.
Yes, this was her home. She looked out with quiet exultation at the Square. Angle and corner, clinging wisteria and quaint window were hers in peculiar possession. For her remained strenuous endeavour, stern discipline; for her, too, the moments when the shaping idea took possession, walked with her down the enchanted street.
Then, there was Mrs. Kent.
Anne thought of Howard with a remote sadness.
"If it had not been for Mrs. Kent, I might have given up. The real thing is too beautiful to be imitated in any kind of sham."
But apparently it was the real thing for Howard. Oh, this was a puzzling world!
It was not real for her. Down under love and friendship and every human feeling lay the artist passion. This alone had haunted her at night, risen with her in the morning, had been "nearer than breathing, closer than hands and feet." It was the deepest reality, as yet. To it should be given the devotion of an undivided heart.
She was to be only a wayfarer, then, past other people's lives. From the picture above the door her father's eyes looked over to her with the old sympathy. Into her mind came a fragment of the Odyssey that she had translated for him long ago in his study at Hazleton:
"Whoso draws near unwarned and hears the Sirens' voices, by him no wife nor little child shall ever stand, glad at his coming home."