A Puritan Bohemia/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
"Don't, please," begged Anne Bradford.
Her companion was silent. A moment before he had been eloquent.
"You are going to say, as you did four years ago, that you need me, that your art would be better for my companionship, and that I ought to sacrifice my work to yours."
Her voice, which she so wanted to be firm, choked a little. There was a pause, and still Howard Stanton said nothing.
"Your art doesn't need me so much as my own art needs me!" she cried passionately.
"Nannie," said the young man, "haven't you found out yet that your art needs me?"
"No indeed. You would ruin it. You would make me think about other people, and selfishness is the soul of my art. A very little of the brotherhood of man would spoil my pictures entirely."
It was a great relief to be able to laugh.
They were standing in the reception-room of the studio building, close by the Van Dyck portrait.
"Won't you sit down?" asked the guest politely.
"I am very busy this afternoon," suggested the hostess.
"That's too bad," said Howard, drawing a chair out for her. "I really must see you. You haven't given me a chance to talk with you alone since I came."
Anne looked industriously out of the window. There was a red Indian-summer haze in the air. Down High Street the last rays of the sun shone on the long rows of windows and on the scarlet vines that covered the houses. Branches of naked elm trees stood out gray against the glow in the west.
"I thought you had changed your mind," said Anne.
"Did you indeed? Then why have you taken such pains to avoid me?" he answered. "It unfortunately isn't a question of changing my mind."
"You promised four years ago not to follow me."
"I didn't follow. I came here to design frescoes. Fate, not I, broke that promise."
The little artist leaned back in the great leather-cushioned chair. Her hands were clasped nervously in her lap. Her face was puzzled.
"I don't see why you care for me in that way," she said mournfully. "I'm an ugly, strong-minded old maid of thirty. I'm not the kind of person to fall in love with. I'm the kind of person who works."
"You aren't thirty. You were twenty-seven on the second day of April. And I didn't fall in love with you. I have loved you ever since I can remember,—at five, ten, sixteen, and ever since. My love for you is one of the constants in my character."
He drew from his pocket a tiny photograph. It was the thin, eager face of a little girl of thirteen.
"Let me see it!" cried Anne. "It looks hungry and fierce. What big eyes it has! It is a kind of composite of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf."
She gave it back.
"I ought to have taken that away from you," she said lightly. "The young woman in fiction always gets her picture back and burns it."
"We're not in fiction," sighed the young man. "I sometimes wish we were. No, you can't have it, Nannie. Tell me: is there anything except your theory about work that stands between us?"
"Isn't that enough?"
"Why you think you can work better for a maimed and incomplete life I don't see!" he exclaimed. "A man doesn't make up his mind that he can't live his life and do his work too. He knows that his life will be better for the work, and his work for the living."
He saw his advantage and pursued it.
"I never asked you to give up your art. I care too much about you to want you to be my wife if I did not think that your work would be all the better for your coming to me. Looking at it impersonally it seems to me that you are making a great mistake."
"It isn't very modest in you to say so," murmured Anne, turning away from the steady gaze of his blue eyes. "No, I cannot do it. I haven't any feelings. I have only a Puritan conscience that has turned its attention to art."
"You are attempting," he continued, "to interpret human life by painting pictures of faces. How can you understand when you know so little about life? You have plenty of theory. You know how they paint portraits in Paris, and how they paint them in New York. But you know little of the experience that makes faces worth painting. A human face is a record of a whole life. How can you read there the traces of love and joy and sorrow until you know what love and joy and sorrow are?"
"I'll be a symbolist," said Anne mischeviously. "Then the less I know about human expression the better."
He did not listen.
"You know that this is true. If you don't you will find it out as you grow older. Then why won't you come and learn your art by living?"
The tone angered her.
"The general and the particular aren't quite the same. Saying that I ought to know love isn't quite the same as saying that I ought to be your wife.
"Don't look like that, Howard," she begged, a minute after. "I did not mean to be unkind. Tell me: do you mean on general principles that my pictures ought to look as if I did not understand things, or do they look so?"
"They do look so, I think," he answered slowly. "It isn't honest human feeling, but a woman's notion of things she hasn't known."
A startled look came into Anne's eyes.
"At least," she said coldly, "I am not a monster. I shall not sacrifice you to my need of experience. You have used the wrong argument."
"The trouble with you, Nannie, is that you think too hard. Your conscience has got into your feelings."
"The trouble with you is," said Anne with a laugh, "that you show the masculine tendency to follow blind impulse. You won't listen to reason."
"I haven't had a chance," said Howard.
"I am going to make a confession," said Anne. "I simply am not fit for any human experience, because I am cursed with an artistic temperament. No matter what I am doing, a second consciousness is always there, playing spectator. It is impossible for anything that I feel to be other than material for my art."
"This only proves my point!" he cried. "It means that you have never cared enough for anything to get beyond the point of dramatic insight. I think I could make you care."
"I think you couldn't."
"Is it quite true, however? As I stand here, begging for your love, am I nothing but material for you?"
"Nothing," she answered resolutely. "I think only how you look while you are doing it, then how I look while you are doing it. It is simply a picture for me."
After Howard had gone Anne sat for a long time in the big chair.
"That was brutal," she said to herself, "but it was true. At least, there was a little truth in it."