The Empty Sack Part 25

The steel-blue-gray of a gull's wing swooping above the water is gross as compared with its texture. The violet and the lady-fern are not so delicate as the substance of its palaces. It might be dream; it might be mirage; it might be the city which came down from G.o.d as a bride adorned for her husband. Beginning too far away for the eye to reach, and ending where the gaze can no longer follow, it is immense and yet aerial, a towered, battlemented, mighty thing, yet spun of the ether between the worlds.

Though Jennie and her father had looked at this mystic wraith of a city so often that they hardly noticed it any more, they were never free from its ecstatic influence. That is, it moved them to aspirations without suggesting the objective to which they should aspire. Caught in the web of daily circ.u.mstance, entangled, enmeshed, helplessly captive amid hand-to-mouth necessities, their thoughts were rarely at liberty to wander from the definite calculation as to how to live. They didn't so wander even now. Even now, lifted up as they were among spiritual splendors, food, clothes, gas, taxes, and the mortgage were the things most heavily on their minds; but something else stirred in them with a sluggish will to live.

"Jennie, do you believe in G.o.d?"

For a minute Jennie gazed sidewise at the celestial city in the air and made no answer. Josiah himself hardly knew why he had asked the question unless it was because of vague new fears as to Jennie's a.s.sociations. Of these he knew almost as little as the parent bird of its offspring's doings when the young have taken flight. This was the custom of the family, the custom of the country. But he had never been free from misgivings that Jennie's calling of artist's model was "not respectable," and now this mention of a hundred dollars, even though it were but in jest, roused some little-used sense of paternal responsibility.

"I don't know that I do," Jennie said, at last. She added, after another minute's thought, "What's the good of G.o.d, anyhow?"

"People say he can take you to heaven when you die, or send you to the other place."

"I'm not worrying about what will happen when I die; I've got all I can attend to here. Can G.o.d help me about that?"

It was the test question of Josiah's inner life. His faith stood or fell by it. He would have been glad to tell his child that she could be aided in her earthly problems, but, unlike Job, hadn't he himself served G.o.d for naught?

"He don't seem able to do that, my dear," he sighed, as if the confession of unbelief forced its way out in spite of himself.

"Well, then"-Jennie rose, wearily-"what's the use? If G.o.d can put me off till I die, I suppose I can put him off in the same way, can't I? Do you believe in him, yourself, daddy?"

"I used to."

And that was all he could say.

As the sun sank farther into the west, the celestial city which had hitherto been of a luminous white was shot with rose and saffron. Within its heart lay Broadway, Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, and the Bowery, shops, churches, brothels, and banks, all pa.s.sions, hungers, yearnings, and ambitions, all national tendencies worthy and detestable, all human instincts holy and unclean, all loveliness, all l.u.s.t, all charity, all cupidity, all secret and suppressed desire, all shameless exposure on the housetops, all sorrow, all sin, all that the soul of man conceives of evil and good-and yet, with no more than these few miles of perspective and this easy play of light translated into beauty, uplifting, unearthly, and ineffable.

For a minute longer Jennie and her father looking on the vision as it melted from glory to glory in this pageantry of sky. Then, with arms linked as before, they turned their backs on it.

CHAPTER XIV

For the next twenty-four hours Jennie did her best to suspend the operation of thought. Thought got her nowhere. It led her into so many blind alleys that it made her head ache. She had once heard a returned traveler describe his efforts to get out of the labyrinth at Hampton Court, and felt herself now in the same situation. Each way seemed easy till she followed it and found herself balked by a hedge.

But the fact that her head ached gave her an excuse for going to her room and locking herself in. She could thus pull her books from beneath the bed without fear of detection. The points as to which she needed enlightenment being spires and Lady Hamilton, she went at her task with the avidity of a starving person at sight of food.

As to spires, she was quickly appeased, for her volume on the old churches of Paris had the Sainte-Chapelle as its frontispiece. Now that she had seen the name in print, she was sure of it. Because of being so little taxed, her memory was the more retentive. Every sound that had fallen from Mrs. Collingham's lips was stamped on her mind like a footprint hardened into rock on a bit of untracked soil. Within half an hour, she had learned the outlines of the history of the Sainte-Chapelle, and, with some fluttering of timid vanity, had grasped the comparison of its strong and exquisite grace with her own personality.

But, after all, the Sainte-Chapelle was a thing of stone, whereas Lady Hamilton-she loved, the name-must have been of flesh and blood. Here, too, there was a frontispiece, the very Dian of the Frick Gallery to which Mrs. Collingham had referred. Unfortunately, the ill.u.s.trations were in black and white, so that she could get no adequate idea as to the complexion or the color of the hair. The face, however, with its bewitching softness, its heavenly archnesses, bore some resemblance to her own.

It was a shock to learn that the possessor of so much beauty, the bearer of so melodious a t.i.tle, had begun life as Emma Lyon, a servant girl, but, after all, she reflected, the circ.u.mstance only created a.n.a.logies with herself. There were more a.n.a.logies still. Emma Lyon had been an artist's model. In an artist's studio she had made the acquaintance of men of lofty station, just as she herself had met Bob. She had loved and been loved. Romney was perhaps her Hubert Wray. Her career had been exciting and dramatic-the friend of a queen, the more-than-wife of one of the great men of the age. The tragic, miserable death didn't frighten Jennie, since misery and tragedy always stalked on the edge of her experience. She fell asleep amid vast, vague concepts of queens and heroes beset with loves and problems not unlike Jennie Follett's.

All through the next day she stilled the working of thought by application to _The Egoist_. She took to it as to a drug. In the intervals of her household duties, or whenever her mind became active over her affairs, she ran to her room to begin again, "Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent clashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing." She got little farther, since, for her purpose, this was far enough. She was drugged already, as by dentist's gas. The more she read the more she felt herself wandering sleepily through realms of dream, where words, as she understood them, had ceased to have significance.

So, by sheer force of will, she brought herself to that moment in the afternoon when she stood at the studio door. She hadn't thought; she hadn't, in her own phrase, _imagined_. She had allowed herself no instant in which to count the cost or to shrink from paying it. Hubert, love, and the family deliverance from poverty would be hers before nightfall, and she meant not to look beyond. She opened the door softly.

Before showing herself, she stopped and listened. There was not a sound.

It was often so if Hubert was painting, and the silence only a.s.sured her that if he was there, as he probably was, he was waiting for her alone.

He was waiting for her alone with that look in his eyes, that maddened animal look which she had seen yesterday, so b.e.s.t.i.a.l and yet so compelling! Still more softly she moved forward among the studio odds and ends.

Then she saw-and stopped.

In the Byzantine chair, a nude woman, seated in the manner of the Egyptian cat-G.o.ddess, was holding up a skull. Though the woman looked the other way, Jennie could see her as a lovely creature, straight, strong, triumphant, and unashamed. Hubert was painting, busily, eagerly.

He raised his eyes, saw Jennie as she cowered, took no notice of her at all, and went on with his work. It pa.s.sed all that she had ever imagined of cruelty that, as she turned to make her way out again, he should glance up once more-and let her go.

Hubert-and the woman _dressed like that_! The woman _dressed like that_-in this intimacy with Hubert! She herself shut out-cast out-sent to the devil! Some one else in her place, when she might so easily have kept it!

Jennie's suffering was in the dry and stony stage at which it hardly seemed suffering at all. Yes, it did; she knew it was suffering-only, she couldn't feel. She could think lucidly and yet put the whole situation away from her for the reason that it would keep. Anguish would keep; tears would keep. She could postpone everything, since she had all the rest of her life to give to its contemplation. Just for the present, the memory of the woman in the chair with _Hubert looking at her_ was so scorching to the mind that she could do nothing but s.n.a.t.c.h her faculties away from it.

Coming to Fifth Avenue and seeing an electric bus stop near the curb, she climbed into it. It was the old story of not knowing where to go or what to do once her simple round of habits had been upset. Snuggled close to a window, she could at least be jolted along without effort of her own while she still fought off the consciousness of the frightful thing that had happened. It was not merely Hubert and the woman; it was everything. So much was included that she couldn't bear to think of this ruin to her beautiful house of cards.

Such wealth and beauty in the shop windows! Such streams of people in their new spring clothes! She had heard it said that every heart had its bitterness, but she didn't think that that could be possible. If everyone had a heartache like hers, or even the memory of such a heartache, it would make too monstrous a world, too deplorable a human race. After all, there must be _some_ sense in the presence of mankind on earth, and if all were kicked about and bruised, there would be none.

She preferred to think that the people on the pavements and in the limousines were as happy as they looked, and that she alone was selected for bewilderment and pain.

She wondered where she was going. There was a ferry far up on the Riverside Drive which would take her across to New Jersey, and thence, by a combination of trolley-cars, she could work her way southward to Pemberton Heights. This would consume an hour and more, and so eat up part of the afternoon. What she would do when she arrived home with her dreams all shattered G.o.d alone knew. If she could only have seen her friend, Mrs. Collingham, clinging to that kind hand as she poured out her heart....

Just then a huge building came into sight on the left, and with it a new impulse. She had often meant to visit it, though the day never seemed to come. Gussie had once gone to the Metropolitan Museum in company with Sadie Inglis, since when she had been in the habit of saying that she had as good as taken a trip abroad. Jennie didn't want a trip abroad; she wanted soothing, comforting, affection. She wanted another drop of that experienced, womanly sympathy, instinct with kindliness and knowledge of the world which she had tasted for the first and only time on that blissful afternoon at Collingham Lodge.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _JENNIE, YOU HAVEN'T GOT A HUNDRED DOLLARS! TELL ME YOU HAVEN'T!_]

It was to get nearer to Collingham Lodge that she left the bus to drag herself up the long flight of steps and into the vast, cool hall. There were others going in, chiefly the Slavs and Italians for whom she felt a legitimate Anglo-Saxon contempt, so that she had nothing to do but to follow them. Thus she found herself at the top of another long flight of steps, gazing about her in an awe that soon became an intoxicating sense of beauty.

It was Jennie's first approach to beauty on this scale of immensity and variety. It was her first draught of Art. Her childhood's poring over _Ancient Rome Restored_ had given her a feeling for line and economy, but she had never dreamed that color, substance, and texture could be used with this daring, profuse creativeness. Having no ability to seize details, she drifted helplessly up and down aisles of splendor and gleam. Here there were gold and silver, here was tapestry, here crystal, here enamel. The pictures were endless, endless. She could no more deal with them than with a sunset. Life came to the Scarborough tradition in her as it does to a frozen limb, with distress and yet with an element of ecstasy. A soul that had pa.s.sed to a higher plane of existence, whom there was no one to welcome and guide, might have ventured timidly into the celestial land as Jennie among these lovely things outside her comprehension.

She came to herself, as it were, on hearing a man's voice say, in a kind of tone and idiom with which she was familiar:

"Have you looked at this Cellini now? That's the only authentic bit of Cellini in the United States. There's six or seven other pieces in different museums that people says is Cellini, but there's always a hitch in the proof."

Turning, she saw a stocky man in custodian's uniform who was addressing a group of Italians, two bareheaded women, three children between ten and fifteen, and a man. All were interested. All studied the gold sh.e.l.l with its dragon-shaped handle in purplish enamel. They commented, criticized, appraised, even the children pointing out excellencies to one another. When they had drifted away, Jennie turned to the kindly Irishman, who, by dint of living with beauty, had grasped its spirit, and put a hesitating question. She asked him to repeat the name of the gold-smith, p.r.o.nouncing it after him till she registered it on her mind as she had that of Lady Hamilton.

"Sure, there was an artist for you," the custodian went on. "The breed is dead and gone. Hot-timpered fellow, though. Had more mistresses and killed more men than you could count. Should read about him in a book he wrote himself." He looked at Jennie from the corner of an eye, accustomed to "size up" an individual here and there among the thousands who floated daily through his little domain, apparently finding in her something that merited further favors. "Are you wise to this Memling?"

he asked, leading the way to a corner of the wall where hung a small portrait. "There's only two other men in the wor-rld that could have painted that head, and that's Holbein and Rembrandt. Memling himself never did it but just that wance."

Jennie looked, registering Memling's name. It was the head of an elderly man; so living, kindly, and humorous that she loved him. When she turned to her guide he stood with a smile of curiosity, like that of a mother showing her baby to a friend.

"What d'ye say to that now?"

Jennie said what she could-that it was marvelous, but that she didn't know anything about art. Since he was so kind, she ventured, however, on another question. Did the museum contain a portrait of Lady Hamilton?

He pursed up his nose. Not a good one. Not a Romney. There was one in gallery twenty-four, but it was by John Opie, of whom he had no high opinion. In comparison with Romney, he thought Opie big and coa.r.s.e, but, since there was nothing better to be seen, Jennie might choose to glance at this second-rate specimen.

"And I'll tell you another thing," he went on, confidentially. "You're not used to looking at pictures and such like, are you, now?"

Jennie said she was not.

"Well, then, go to gallery twenty-four. Find your Opie, which you'll see hanging over one of the doors-and don't look at anything else. You'll have seen all you can absor-rb in wan day. Come back to-morrer, or anny other toime, and come straight to me. You'll find me here, and I'll tell you what to look at next. But don't take more to-day than you can enjoy."

He walked with her till she reached the boundary of his realm.