More Lives Than One/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
THE ARTISTS
The pretentiousness of a studio, especially a Washington Square studio, is quite often in inverse proportion to the merit of the pictures it gives up.
But Tommy Locke’s studio defeated this description by being a golden mean as to both propositions.
Indeed, Henry Post, the artist’s cynical friend, said that Locke’s draperies and his canvases showed a wonderfully similar lack of distinction.
And Kate Vallon had quickly added, “Let’s call them his appointments and disappointments.”
But Tommy Locke had only smiled comfortably and had gone on painting his interminable green and blue landscapes in which, if anybody cared for a certain vague misty charm—they did not find it entirely lacking.
And even if he had no high-backed, gilt-framed Italian arm-chairs and no armor or ragged priests’ robes, he often had good-looking bowls of even better looking flowers and he served first-rate tea, and somehow the neighbors loved to drift in and out of his nondescript rooms.
His ways were ways of pleasantness and all his paths were peace, yet though his chums were usually tolerant and broad-minded thinkers, there was little real Bohemianism in evidence, that is, the Bohemianism of what is known as The Village.
His few worthwhile bits of old furniture stood upon worthwhile old rugs and his specimens of artistic junk were few and far between.
Yet, strangely enough, Tommy Locke himself affected the manner of the comic paper artist—at least, to a degree.
He wore his black hair a bit longer than other men, he wore his big round glasses with very heavy tortoise-shell frames, and he wore his collar soft and loose, with a flowing Windsor tie, usually black.
He was chaffed a bit now and then as to his inconsistencies, but it was generally admitted futile to try to get a rise out of old Tommy.
In fact he calmly stated that his get-up was the only real claim he had to being one of the noble army of artists, and Henry Post had glanced at the misty landscapes and murmured, “Some of your titles show latent talent, I think.”
“It’s so nice to be understood!” Locke had exclaimed. “Yes, I’ll say my ‘Monotony in Sagebrush’ is both meanful and catching.”
“If that’s all you want you may well have called it ‘The Mumps,’” Kate Vallon had reported.
These three and another, one Pearl Jane Cutler, formed a sort of chummy quartette, and, though they chummed but seldom, they did most of it in Tommy’s non-committal studio.
“If you’d have a splash of color over that blank looking window,” Kate would suggest, and Tommy would wave away the suggestion without a word.
Then would Pearl Jane, who was remarkably suggestive of Little Annie in Enoch Arden, say, plaintively, “I like it all—just as it is,” and Tommy’s beaming smile would be for her.
They had all finished laughing at her baptismal absurdity—she had been named for the two neighbors on either side of her mother’s house—and without a nickname, they accepted her as Pearl Jane. It was as yet a question what she would sign her masterpieces of art, as she hadn’t, strictly speaking, produced them yet.
She hadn’t been in the city very long, but Washington Square claimed her for its own. She loved it—all four sides—and many of its byways. She dabbled away, with a brush that was, so far, incompetent and irrelevant, but she cheerfully insisted that she was finding herself, and that some day she would paint pictures like Tommy’s.
“Heaven forfend!” Post would cry out. “If you must copy, choose the billboard school, or the newspaper cartoon group, but don’t take aim for Tommy’s greenery dingles and blue glades.”
“Beautiful title!” Tommy mused; “‘The Blue Glades of Glengowrie’—I’ll do that next.”
“And that reminds me,” Kate said, she was always being inscrutably reminded, “our infant here, our Pearl Jane, has never been to a masquerade! A real one, I mean. She doesn’t count the Ivy Club Sociables in her Main Street home. Will you have one for her, Tommy? We’ll all help.”
“Better yet, I’ll paint one for her,” Locke said; “then she can see how one really looks.”
“No, she can’t,” Post declared. “You see, in your pictures, so much more is meant than meets the eye—and Pearl Jane wants her eyes met.”
“All right, then,” and Locke thought a minute. “Not a very big one, you said, didn’t you? And, no one asked but our own crowd, you insisted on, didn’t you? And you stipulated it would be small and early—am I not right? And if I am not mistaken, you said there’s no hurry about it.”
But he was set right on all these points, and the masquerade party for Pearl Jane was arranged in exactly the fashion Kate Vallon and Henry Post deemed fitting and proper.
However, their ideas were much in line with Locke’s own, and so they made it only a few hours later and a few people larger than he consented to.
Pearl Jane was in ecstasies, and when the night came, and she was togged out in her Dutch Peasant costume, her already bobbed fair hair flying from under her stiff lace cap, she couldn’t wait for the hour and ran round to Tommy’s early.
She found him, garbed in a monk’s robe and cowl, standing before an easel, gazing at one of his own pictures.
“Do you really like it, Pearl Jane?” he said, almost wistfully, as she came up and stood at his side in silence.
“Yes, I do. They can guy you all they like—there’s something in your work—something of Manet—I mean Monet”
“Eeny, meeny, miney, mo!” he laughed, and turned to look at her. “Why, bless my soul, madam, you’ve suddenly grown up!”
“No, that’s ’cause this frock is longer than I usually wear. Do you like it?”
“Do blue and yellow make green? Yes, I like it. You’re a picture!”
“What’s the title?” asked another voice, and Kate and Post appeared.
“I think it might be called ‘The Puritan’s Carouse,’ Locke said, wresting his glance from the pretty Dutch girl. “Hello, Kate, you’re quite all right as a Contadina—Henry, not quite so good as a Spanish Don.”
“Ah, I’m not a Spanish Don—your mistake. I’m a Portuguese Man o’ War.”
“You look more like an Oscar Wilde.”
“Take that back! Call me anything but like that overrated, underbred gyastyockus!”
“I thought he was a great poet,” Pearl Jane said, wonderingly. “I never read any of his”
“Don’t!” Post said, “I forbid it. There’s enough for you, yet unread. Pearl Jane, dear, without touching that Purple Jellyfish!”
“Some of his poems are fine,” Kate began, but Locke interrupted her:
“Only one—‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ is a great poem, but nothing else of his is worthy of consideration.”
Kate Vallon began to quote:
And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword.
“Oh, I hate it!” Pearl Jane shuddered. “If it’s like that, I don’t want to read it!”
“No, you don’t,” Locke agreed; “besides, he’s out of date now. You stick to your John Masefield and Carl Sandburg.”
“I don’t know them very well,” the girl acknowledged, “they’re rather hard, I think.”
Now Pearl Jane Cutler was by no means a child or an ignoramus. But she had been simply brought up in a small town, and though fairly well grounded in the rudiments of Life and Literature, she had still quite a bit to learn, and was swallowing it in chunks—anaconda like. She was twenty-two, and carried a little more flesh on her young bones than the average all-city girl did. Kate Vallon, half a dozen years older, was keeping an eye on her, and she thought maybe, perhaps, possibly, after a thousand years of study. Pearl Jane might learn to paint something noisier than clay pots and onions.
Chinese Charley appeared in the doorway.
“They arrive,” he said, a little laconically.
“Show them up,” Tommy ordered, as succinctly, and then the quartette hurried on their masks and the revel began.
Locke was a little surprised at the stream of people that flowed in. He was not inhospitable, and there was room enough, but he thought Post might have told him what he was up to. He said as much to Henry Post, who responded:
“I didn’t do it, Tommy, honest, I didn’t. But several whom I did invite, just casually said they might bring friends. I couldn’t say them nay—now could I?”
“Rather not,” said Locke, and turned to greet some new-comers.
But, in his mask, and his concealing robe and cowl, almost no one knew him, and so he had no duties as host. This suited him well enough, and he sauntered about, looking at the hackneyed costumes, recognizing some figure here and there, or mistakenly thinking he did.
The studio looked festive to-night, for Kate and Henry had insisted on a few decorations and had chosen Chinese lanterns and artificial cherry blossoms. These delighted the soul of Charley, Locke’s house-boy, and he gazed up at them, now and then, beatifically picturesque.
He was devoted to Locke, though so quiet of manner and scant of speech that there were no protestations, but he showed his affection in immaculate housekeeping and meticulous obedience to orders.
The place was not large; only the second floor entire, and a room or two on the first floor. Supper would be served downstairs, so the big studio and one or two smaller rooms could be used for dancing. This left a small room for a smoking den, and Locke’s own bedroom for a ladies’ dressing room.
A small orchestra arrived and soon proved that it could make jazz music out of all proportion to its size.
Locke asked a Carmen to dance with him, thinking he knew her, but found he was again mistaken.
“Strange how merely a mask can disguise one so thoroughly,” he said; “I’d think the face only a small part of a personality.”
“Then it proves, practically, that the face is the whole individual,” Carmen returned, turning her mask a trifle until he saw a lovely cheek and curving lips. “But as you’ve never seen me before, you couldn’t be expected to know me.”
“I didn’t expect to, I merely thought you were someone else.”
“I know almost no one here,” Carmen said; “of course it makes no difference while we’re masked, but at supper time I shall know nobody.”
“That’s all right, I’ll introduce you about, and you’ll have made dozens of friends among your partners by that time. . . .”
“Who are you, Sir Monk, tell me that, at any rate.”
“My name would mean nothing to you—it’s entirely uncelebrated.”
“Tell me all the same”—the pretty voice was peremptory.
“Smith,” he replied, “John Smith.”
“And you call that name uncelebrated? One of the best known in the country. Fie, fie, Mr. Smith—just for that I shall call you John.”
“And I may call you?”
“Mary—Mary Smith.”
“Miss Smith, then. I never begin to call the ladies by their first names until midnight—at least.”
“Tell me something—who is that woman in the gorgeous Oriental costume?”
“Where?”
“Over toward the hall door. See?”
“Oh, yes, I see. I haven’t the faintest idea who she is. But as I say, they’re all disguised from me. Besides, with this silly cowl, I can only see straight ahead! I might as well be a horse in blinders!”
“Can’t you take it off?”
“And spoil my real Cistercian rig! Never! Besides, I haven’t my tonsure on straight.”
“Do you know the host?” Carmen asked, suddenly.
“Do you mean, do I know him? or, do I know which one he is?”
“Both.”
“Yes, I am acquainted with him,” Locke said, truthfully, and mendaciously added, “but I don’t know which one he is. That Spanish Don, maybe. Don’t you know Locke at all?”
“No, but I’ve heard a lot of him.”
“Good, bad or rotten?”
“Not the last—they all say he’s a trump. But queer.”
“Queer, how?”
“Sort of a vagabond—goes off on jaunts by himself”
“Painting?”
“I suppose so. Is his work any good?”
“Middling. Not very little and not very big. But I think he’s happy in it.”
“I’m only happy when I’m dancing.”
“My heavens, I can’t dance all night!”
“There are others! That’s what I was hinting!”
“How prettily rude you are! That’s the beauty of a masquerade—one can say anything.”
“Can one? Then listen! I know you! I know who you are!”
“Do you?” said Locke. “Well, I’m not so overwhelmed at that! I know who you are!”
“Ah, but I’m telling the truth—and you’re fibbing!”
And with a merry trill of laughter, Carmen disengaged herself from his clasping arm and ran away.
“Foolish chit!” Locke thought, and wandered about, looking for Pearl Jane.
The Dutch Girl was dancing with a Sailor Boy, and Locke stood to one side and watched them.
“Funny thing about Pearl Jane,” he thought; “she’s womanly—and all that—and yet she’s little more than a child. Lucky she has Kate beside her—Kate’s a trump. But Kate’s party here to-night is rubbish! I am bored already. However, the kiddy wanted her Bal Masque, and now she’s got it. I hope she’s enjoying herself. I wonder what she’ll grow up to. It will take a jolt of some sort to waken her. She’s a dear thing—but—well, she’s Pearl Jane!”
And then, he discovered he could claim her for a dance, and at once did so.
“How’s the party?” he inquired, as they swung off.
“Oh, it’s blissful! It’s double-distilled Paradise!”
“There, there, save your adjectives! Don’t be foolishly extravagant!”
“But don’t you think so? Don’t you just love it? All the lights and the people, and the jewels”
“Mock jewels.”
“What of it? Don’t be cynical to-night, Tommy—dear.”
His heart missed a beat, as he caught something in her tone that he had never heard there before.
He must have shown his perception of it, for he saw a rosy blush beneath the edge of her little mask, and he hastened to say, “No, it doesn’t matter that they’re mock jewels—for they’re mock people.”
“Yes,” she said, softly, “all but you and me.”
Locke was nonplussed. He didn’t know whether Pearl Jane was trying to make love to him, or whether the gayety of the occasion had gone to her head a little. He decided on the latter opinion, and steered the talk into a safer channel.
And yet, he couldn’t help thinking, she was very sweet, the soft little chin that nestled against his shoulder, the curve of the cheek that still showed pink, and most of all the bright happy eyes that now and then met his through the eyeholes of their masks.
Clearly, he decided, I’d better get away from her. She’ll enchant me in another minute—and that won’t do. Little Pearl Jane! Waking up! Oh, Lord!
So, with a graceful bow, he handed her to a waiting and eager Clown, and sauntered off himself to do a duty dance with Kate.
Not but that he liked Kate Vallon, but after all, Locke was not overly fond of dancing, and he had a dim idea of retreating to the smoking room as soon as might be.
“Buck up,” said Kate, after a few rounds, “you’re a good dancer, Tommy, but you have no soul in it.”
“I’d rather paint,” Locke returned. “Wouldn’t you, Kate?”
“Yes, I would. I’d rather do lots of things. But we’re a few years older than Pearl Jane, or Henry, either. How old are you, Tommy?”
“Twenty-eight; why?”
“So’m I. Well, after twenty, nowadays, one gets fed up with dancing.”
“Nonsense, lots of old ones love it. I never was keen about it. Want to sit out a while?”
“Yes, but not with you! Find Jack Henderson for me, won’t you? He’s a Continental Soldier.”
Not at all minding Kate’s candor, Locke went after the man she preferred. He looked about in the rooms, and then went downstairs in his search. The staircase was crowded, and as he passed a “Winter,” he heard her say, “How very warm it is—I must have some air!”
He turned to see if he could be of assistance, but others were nearer her, so he went on.
He found Henderson and sent him to Kate.
“My, but I’m glad to be summoned,” the cheery Henderson said, as he reached her. “I didn’t dare intrude till I was sent for.”
After a few moments they concluded the room was too crowded for chat, and they started for a tiny balcony that gave from a rear window.
“What’s that?” cried Henderson, as they passed through the little smoking room, dimly lighted and now deserted.
“What’s what?”
“That on the floor, behind the table!”
“Looks like a pillow from a couch,” and Kate glanced toward some gay colored silk that lay in folds.
“It isn’t! Kate—stay back!”
Henderson took another step, and gave a startled exclamation.
“Keep back, I tell you, Kate. There’s been some awful accident. Call some one—some man. Call Locke and Post first. Wait, don’t raise a general alarm. Get that Chinese servant.”
“What is it, Jack? I will see! Oh, my God!”
Kate Vallon pulled herself together by strong will power.
“Who is it? Take off her mask!”
“I—oh, I can’t! Get Locke—do, Kate!”
Kate ran through the rooms, and though she didn’t see Locke just then, she saw Henry Post and bade him go at once to the smoking room.
He did so, and Kate continued her hunt for Charley, trying to keep from screaming out.
“What is it?” Post asked, coming into the dimly lighted room.
“Something terrible,” Henderson said, gravely. “See here, Post, this woman is dead. I’ve felt her heart—and I tell you, man, she’s dead.”
“Who is she?”
“I’ve no idea. A stranger. I wouldn’t raise her mask when Kate was here, but I’ve done so now, and I don’t know her.”
“My heavens! What shall we do? What ought we to do?”
“First get Locke. Also Chinese Charley. And as you go out, shut the door. I don’t fancy being here alone—but you must shut the door to keep the women out. Then—oh, I don’t know what then! Get Locke first.”
Henry Post gone, Henderson again looked at the woman’s features. She was beautiful, save for an awful wound where something had crashed down on her temple, and had surely killed her.
“What a strange accident!” Henderson thought. “If she had fallen against a fender now—but there’s no mantelpiece in this room. I wonder if there’s a doctor here. I ought to call one. It can do no harm to leave the poor thing alone for a minute—I won’t go past the door.”
Half uncertainly he rose and went to the door into the studio.
Slightly opening it, he asked the first man he saw to see if any doctor was present and would come to him at once.
“I’ll get one,” and the youth hurried away.
And in a moment he was back, with Doctor Gannett.