The Gay Cockade Part 24

I

Perry Cunningham and I had been friends for years. I was older than he, and I had taught him in his senior year at college. After that we had traveled abroad, frugally, as befitted our means. The one quarrel I had with fate was that Perry was poor. Money would have given him the background that belonged to him--he was a princely chap, with a high-held head. He had Southern blood in his veins, which accounted perhaps for an almost old-fas.h.i.+oned charm of manner, as if he carried on a gentlemanly tradition.

We went through the art galleries together. There could have been nothing better than those days with him--the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace. Perry's search for beauty was almost breathless. We swept from Filippo Lippi to Botticelli and Bellini, then on to Ghirlandajo, Guido Reni, Correggio, Del Sarto--the incomparable Leonardo.

"If I had lived then," Perry would say, glowing, "in Florence or in Venice!"

And I, smiling at his enthusiasm, had a vision of him among those golden painters, his own young beauty enhanced by robes of clear color, his thirst for loveliness appeased by the sumptuous settings of that age of romance.

Then when the great moderns confronted us--Sorolla and the rest--Perry complained, "Why did I study law, Roger, when I might be doing things like this?"

"It is not too late," I told him.

I felt that he must not be curbed, that his impa.s.sioned interest might blossom and bloom into genius if it were given a proper outlet.

So it came about that he decided to paint. He would stay in Paris a year or two in a studio, and test his talent.

But his people would not hear of it. There had been lawyers in his family for generations. Since the Civil War they had followed more or less successful careers. Perry's own father had made no money, but Perry's mother was obsessed by the idea that the fortunes of the family were bound up in her son's continuance of his father's practice.

So Perry went home and opened an office. His heart was not in it, but he made enough to live on, and at last he made money enough to marry a wife. He would have married her whether he had enough to live on or not.

She was an artist, and she was twenty when Perry met her. We had been spending a month in Maine, on an island as charming as it was cheap.

Rosalie was there with a great-aunt and uncle. She was painting the sea on the day that Perry first saw her, and she wore a jade-green smock.

Her hair was red, drawn back rather tightly from her forehead, but breaking into waves over her ears. With the red of her cheeks and the red of her lips she had something of the look of Lorenzo Lotto's lovely ladies, except for a certain sharp slenderness, a slenderness which came, I was to learn later, from an utter indifference to the claims of appet.i.te. She was one of those who sell bread to buy hyacinths.

I speak of this here because Rosalie's almost ascetic indifference to material matters, in direct contrast to Perry's vivid enjoyment of the good things of life, came to have a tragic significance in later days.

Perry loved a warm hearth in winter, a cool porch in summer. He had the Southerner's epicurean appreciation of the fine art of feasting. The groaning board had been his inheritance from a rollicking, rackety set of English ancestors, to whom dining was a rather splendid ceremony. On his mother's table had been fish and game from Chesapeake, fruits and vegetables in season and out--roast lamb when prices soared high in the spring, strawberries as soon as they came up from Florida. There had always been money for these in the Cunningham exchequer, when there had been money for nothing else.

Rosalie, on the other hand, ate an orange in the morning, a square of toast at noon, a chop and perhaps a salad for dinner. One felt that she might have fared equally well on dew and nectar. She had absolutely no interest in what was set before her, and after she married Perry this att.i.tude of mind remained unchanged.

She was a wretched cook, and made no effort to acquire expertness. She and Perry lived in a small but well-built bungalow some miles out from town, and they could not afford a maid. When I dined with them I made up afterward for the deficiencies of their menu by a square meal at the club. There was no chance for Perry to make up, and I wondered as the years went on how he stood it.

He seemed to stand it rather well, except that in time he came to have that same sharpened look of delicacy which added a spiritual note to Rosalie's rich bloom. He always lighted up when he spoke of his wife, and he was always urging me to come and see them. I must admit that except for the meals I liked to go. Rosalie's success at painting had been negligible, but her love of beauty was expressed in the atmosphere she gave to her little home; she had achieved rather triumphant results in backgrounds and in furnis.h.i.+ng.

I remember one spring twilight. I was out for the week-end, and we dined late. The little house was on a hill, and with the French windows wide open we seemed to hang above an abyss of purple sky, cut by a thin crescent. White candles lighted the table, and there were white lilacs.

There was a silver band about Rosalie's red hair.

There was not much to eat, and Perry apologized, "Rose hates to fuss with food in hot weather."

Rosalie, as mysterious in that light as the young moon, smiled dreamily.

"Why should one think about such things--when there is so much else in the world?"

Perry removed the plates and made the coffee. Rosalie did not drink coffee. She wandered out into the garden, and came back with three violets, which she kissed and stuck in Perry's coat.

The next morning when I came down Rosalie was cutting bread for toast.

She was always exquisitely neat, and in her white linen and in her white-tiled kitchen she seemed indubitably domestic. I was hungry and had hopes of her efforts.

"Peer is setting the table", she told me.

She always called him "Peer". She had her own way of finding names for people. I was never "Roger", but "Jim Crow". When questioned as to her reason for the appellation she decided vaguely that it might be some connection of ideas--dances--Sir Roger de Coverley--and didn't somebody "dance Jim Crow"?

"You don't mind, do you?" she had asked, and I had replied that I did not.

I did not confess how much I liked it. I had always been treated in a distinctly distant and dignified fas.h.i.+on by my family and friends, so that Rosalie's easy a.s.sumption of intimacy was delightful.

Well, I went out on the porch and left Rosalie to her culinary devices.

I found the morning paper, and fifteen minutes later there came up across the lawn a radiant figure.

Rosalie, hearing the garden call, had chucked responsibility--and her arms were full of daffodils!

We had burned toast for breakfast! Rosalie had forgotten it and Perry had not rescued it until it was well charred. There was no bread to make more, so we had to eat it.

For the rest we had coffee and fruit. It was an expensive season for eggs, and Rosalie had her eye on a bit of old brocade which was to light a corner of her studio. She breakfasted contentedly on grapefruit, but Perry was rather silent, and I saw for the first time a shadow on his countenance. I wondered if for the moment his mind had wandered to the past, and to his mother's table, with Sunday waffles, omelet, broiled bacon. Yet--there had been no bits of gay brocade to light the mid-Victorian dullness of his mother's dining-room, no daffodils on a radiant morning, no white lilacs on a purple twilight, no slender G.o.ddess, mysterious as the moon.

It was in the middle of the following winter that I began to realize that Perry was not well. He had come home on a snowy night, tired and chilled to the bone. He was late and Rosalie had kept dinner waiting for him. It was a rather sorry affair when it was served. Perry pushed his chair back and did not eat. I had as little appet.i.te for it as he, but I did my best. I had arrived on an earlier train, with some old prints that I wanted to show him. Rosalie and I looked at them after dinner, but Perry crouched over the fire and coughed at intervals.

At last I couldn't stand it any longer.

"He needs some hot milk, a foot bath, and to be tucked up in bed."

Rosalie stared at me above the prints. "Perry?"

"Yes. He isn't well."

"Don't croak, Jim Crow."

But I knew what I was talking about. "I am going to get him to bed. You can have the milk ready when I come down."

It developed that there was no milk. I walked half a mile to a road house and brought back oysters and a bottle of cream. I cooked them myself in the white-tiled kitchen, and served them piping hot in a bowl with crackers.

Perry, propped up in bed, ate like a starved bird.

"I've never tasted anything better," he said; and, warmed and fed, he slept after a bit as soundly as a satisfied baby.

It was while he was eating the oysters that Rosalie came to the door and looked at him. He was not an aesthetic object--I must admit that no sick man is--and I saw distaste in her glance, as if some dainty instinct in her shrank from the spectacle.

When I went down I found her sitting in front of the fire, wrapped in a Chinese robe of black and gold. You can imagine the effect of that with the red of her hair and the red of her cheeks and lips. Her feet, in black satin slippers, were on a jade-green cus.h.i.+on, and back of her head was the strip of brocade that she had bought with her housekeeping money. It was a gorgeous bit, repeating the color of the cus.h.i.+on, and with a touch of blue which matched her eyes.

She wanted me to show her the rest of the prints. I tried to talk to her of Perry's health, but she wouldn't.

"Don't croak, Jim Crow," she said again.

As I look back at the two of us by the fire that night I feel as one might who had been accessory to a crime. Rosalie's charm was undoubted.

Her quickness of mind, her gayety of spirit, her pa.s.sion for all that was lovely in art and Nature--made her indescribably interesting. I stayed late. And not once, after my first attempt, did we speak of Perry.