One Woman's Life Part 26

Bragdon decided to do the figure out of doors in a corner of the ruined garden wall with a cl.u.s.tering festoon of purple creeper above and a narrow slit of sea in the distant background. Against the gray and green and purple of the wall he placed Madame Saratoff, who was tall, with a supple, bony figure. It was for him a daring and difficult composition.

The first afternoon, while the figure was being lined in with charcoal, Milly was much excited. She tried to keep quite still, but Madame Saratoff persisted in making little jokes and impertinent comments upon the artist. She did not seem to feel the importance of the event. Milly thought to herself, "How wonderful if he should do a really stunning picture and have it in the Salon next season!" and she said to herself, "Portrait of the Baroness Saratoff by John Archer Bragdon." That would be a start towards fame!

But the start was scarcely perceptible those first days. Milly could make nothing of the blurred canvas and was depressed. Jack seemed more intent on watching the lithe figure, with the mottled flesh tones, the steel-blue eyes, the mocking mouth than in putting brush to canvas. When Milly complained of his dawdling, the Baroness remarked with a curl of her lips,--

"How do you expect an artist to work with his wife hanging over his brushes and counting every stroke?"

Milly pretended to be hurt and ran off to the other end of the garden.

She asked her husband on their way back if she were really in the way, and though he laughed at her question and considered the Russian woman's remark as merely one of her rather feline jokes, Milly did not come the next day. She said the baby was sick, and needed her attention. It was several days before she returned to the _manoir_, and then because Jack made a point of it. She was astonished at the progress which he had made. The picture had suddenly leaped into life.

"See!" the Russian remarked, indicating the canvas with a slow sweep of her long, thin fingers. "The painter has done all that without his wife's help."

Milly resented the joke. But it was true that in these few days the picture had grown surprisingly: the pose of the tall figure, the background was all firmly worked in, and he had begun to define the features,--the perilous part. Already something of the subtle mockery of the Russian woman's expression was there. Milly turned away. For the first time she felt outside her husband's world and in the way.

Presently, in spite of the Baroness's protests, she took little Paul Saratoff to the beach. When her husband came in at the hotel just in time for dinner and expressed surprise that she had not returned to the _manoir_ for him, she said coldly,--

"Oh, I didn't care to--I didn't want to interrupt."

"Anna expected you back to tea."

"I guess not."

Bragdon gave her a swift glance, but said nothing. This was a new aspect of his wife, and it evidently puzzled him. He was too much absorbed by his picture, however, to give much heed to anything.

Latterly another American had joined the circle around the dinner table on the terrace,--a long, lanky young man who had been in the navy during the late war and was now engaged in the production of literature. That is, he contributed profusely to those American magazines with flaming covers stories of love and adventure in strange seas,--the highly seasoned bonbon entertainment for the young. He was southern by birth with a p.r.o.nounced manner towards women. And Milly found him attractive.

Roberts and the fat Hawaiian wit had many encounters that kept the table stirred. To-night they were discussing the needs of the artist nature,--and "temperament." That was a term not much in vogue in the Chicago of Milly's time, but it seemed to occupy endlessly the talkers about the table at the Hotel du Pa.s.sage. Milly never understood exactly what was meant by "having a temperament," or the "needs of the artistic temperament" except vaguely that it was a license to do flighty things that all reasonable Chicago folk would deplore.

To-night the Hawaiian was maintaining his favorite thesis,--that the first duty of the artist was to himself, to preserve and make effective his "temperament." Modern life, especially in America, he held, made _bourgeois_ of us all. The inevitable ruin of the artist was to attempt to live according to the _bourgeois_ ideal of morality. (That was another term which puzzled Milly always,--_bourgeois_. These young artists used it with infinite contempt, and yet she concluded shrewdly that the people she had known best and respected all her life would have to come under this anathema. To be healthy and normal, to pay one's bills and be true to husband or wife, was to be just _bourgeois_.

According to that standard Jack was _bourgeois_, she supposed, and she was glad of it, and yet a little afraid at the same time, because it seemed to mark him out for artistic inept.i.tude.) But the fat man was talking heatedly, and Milly was listening.

"In our society artists have no chance to experiment in life, to perfect their natures untrammelled by public opinion, as the artists of old did." (And he cited a lot of names, beginning, of course, with Benvenuto and including Goethe, but Milly was not interested in these historical cases. It was the immediate application of the principle she was waiting for.)

"In those days," some one said, "artists were content to live in their own cla.s.s like actors and had no social ambitions."

"And much better for them, too!" the Honolulu man put in.

"How about Leonardo and Petrarch?" the great artist queried from his end of the table, and then for a few moments the conversation got off into the question of the social position of artists in the renaissance and their relation to their patrons, which bored Milly, but the Hawaiian brought it back to his point.

"So that's why we have no real creators to-day in any of the arts," he a.s.serted. "They're merely a lot of little citizens who daub canva.s.s to support a wife and a respectable house or pay the butcher's bill with fluffy stories about silly women and impossible heroes." (This, Milly thought, was a raw stab at young Roberts. She wondered how men could say such things to one another and still remain friends.) "They have bank-accounts and go to dinner-parties."

To which the story-teller retorted when he got his chance:--

"What you fellows always mean by 'living' is messing around with some woman who isn't your own wife. A good many of our modern citizens manage to live their own lives that way, and what does it do for them?"

Milly approved.

"That's just the trouble: society d.a.m.ns them and finishes them if they don't behave like proper _bourgeois_. Take the case of----" and he cited an instance of a young artist who was having much newspaper notoriety over his pa.s.sional experiments. "Women kill art, anyway," he concluded with a growl.

Thereat Roberts' southern blood was touched, and he launched into a glowing sentimental eulogy of Woman as the Inspirer of Men towards the n.o.blest Things, and incidentally of the peace and the purity of marriage. Milly liked what he said, although it seemed to her rather florid in phrasing, and she felt an instinctive hostility towards the fat gentleman from Honolulu, whom she suspected of disgusting immorality. (Later in New York she was astonished to learn that Roberts had had a very scandalous divorce from a wife, while the Hawaiian lived a laborious and apparently upright life, supporting a mother, as a newspaper correspondent. She learned then that men's expressed views had very little to do with their conduct, and that an ideal was often merely the sentimental reaction from experience.)

Just as Milly, thinking she heard Virginia cry in the room above, slipped away from the table some one said,--

"A man who has anything to do in the world will never let a woman stand in his way. If he does, he is soft, and that's the end of him."

Milly felt moved to put a word in here in behalf of her s.e.x, but the child's cry came more loudly and as she left she heard her husband ask mildly,--

"And how about the children?"

"Oh, the kids--that's woman's business," the fat man replied carelessly.

"Pa.s.s the cigarettes, will you," and the talk went off somewhere else....

Children were not all "woman's business," Milly felt indignantly. She had surprised her pretty little maid Yvonne in a lonely lane one moonlight night, in company with a tall man, who did not look like a Breton. She had reported the fact to her husband, with her suspicions as to the tall man, observing,--"Men are so horrid!" to which Jack had merely laughed easily. She had scolded him for his frivolity, also scolded Yvonne, who cried, yet somehow seemed to smile through her tears.

To-night when her husband came up for bed, she asked seriously,--

"You don't believe all that stuff Steve Belchers was saying, do you?"

"What stuff?"

"About artists and women."

Bragdon yawned and laughed. Milly came close to him and put her arm about his neck.

"You don't feel that your temperament is ruined by marriage, do you?"

"Never knew I had one before," he replied jokingly.

"Because you know if you ever want your freedom, you can have it."

"Thanks."

"If you need that sort of experience, I shan't stand in your way," she concluded in a heroic burst....

Nevertheless she was glad that her husband had shown no symptoms. .h.i.therto of this dangerous "temperament" and was content to be as _bourgeois_ as the best. All the time there was growing in her a sense of s.e.x distinction, and a dislike, or rather disapproval, of men as a whole. G.o.d, she was convinced, as the Southerner had said, had meant the perfect type to be Woman, rather than Man.

IX

THE PARDON

One day the noisy chatter at the mid-day meal was interrupted by the terrific splutter and throbbing of a motor-car. Those were still the days when touring cars with strangely clad occupants were less familiar, even on French roads, than they have since become, and the machines announced themselves from afar by their ponderous groans. Very few cars, indeed, got down to this secluded Brittany village which was reached by only one road of the third cla.s.s that penetrated the little peninsula from Morlaix, a number of miles away to the north.

So every one left the table and crowded to the terrace wall to observe the arrivals. As a dusty, becapped and begoggled figure got down from the seat beside the driver, Milly exclaimed excitedly, "Why, it's Roy Gilbert!" and ran towards the courtyard. The car finally disgorged Nettie Gilbert and her uninteresting fourteen-year-old daughter. They came in for luncheon, and their story was soon told. Paris was hot, and in despair of dispelling Roy's thickening ennui at his European exile, which threatened to terminate their trip, Mrs. Gilbert had induced her husband to charter the car for a tour of Normandy and Brittany. Having done all the north-coast watering-places and remembering that the Bragdons were staying at this little place "with a funny name," they had decided to make them a call. Roy Gilbert ate copiously and denounced hotels, food, and the people, while Milly and Nettie Gilbert talked Chicago and Baby.

"We want to see a '_Pardon_,'" Mrs. Gilbert announced at last, "and we've come to take you and your husband with us."