The Purple Heights Part 27

In six months he knew the Quartier to the core. He met men who were utter blackguards, whose selfish, cold-blooded brutality filled him with loathing; he met women with the soul of the cat. But the Quartier as a whole was sound-hearted; Peter himself was too sound-hearted not to know. He met Youth at work, his own kind of work. They were all going to do something great presently,--and presently many of them did. The very air he breathed stimulated him.

Here were comrades, to whom, as to himself, art was the one supremely important thing in the universe. They, too, were climbers toward the purple heights.

Shy young men who work like mules are as thick as hops in any art center; but shy young men who are immensely talented, who have a genius for steady labor, and who at the same time have not only the inclination but the opportunity to be generous, are not numerous anywhere.

Peter Champneys never talked about himself, made no parade, was so simple in his tastes that he spent very little upon himself, and while he could say "No" to impudence, he had ever a quick, warm "Yes" for need. That he should be able to become an artist had been the top of his dream; that by a very little self-denial he could help others to remain artists, left him large-eyed at his own good fortune. He experienced the glowing happiness that only the generous can know.

On Sundays he went to see Emma Campbell, for whom he had found a little house on the summit of Montmartre, on the very top of the b.u.t.te. It had a hillside garden, with a dove-cote in it, and a little kiosk in which Emma liked to sit, with the cat Satan on her lap, and projeck at the strange world in which she found herself.

She shared the house with a scene-painter and his wife, and as the scene-painter was an Englishman, Emma could talk to somebody and be understood. Emma's idea of happiness was leisure to sew squares of patchwork together for quilts. She had brought her cut-out quilt sc.r.a.ps with her, and she sat in the kiosk and sewed little pieces of colored calico together, while the big cat scampered about the garden, or lay and blinked at her, and all Paris lay spread out far below, the spires of Notre Dame showing as through a mist.

On Sundays she cooked for Peter,--old homely Riverton dishes,--and waited on him while he ate. Because she couldn't read, she looked forward to Peter's reading what she reverently called "de Book."

Peter had been reading the Bible to old darkies all his life, and he accepted it as a matter of course that he should take the long climb, and give up a part of his Sundays, to save Emma Campbell from being disappointed now. Afterward, Emma spoke of his mother, and of old, familiar things they both remembered. Then he went back to the Quartier feeling as refreshed and rested as if he'd had a swim in the river "over home."

At regular intervals he appeared at Mrs. Hemingway's, and kept up his acquaintance with her friends. When she told him to accept an invitation, he resignedly obeyed, looking, the elder of the Checkleigh boys told him, as if he were doing it for G.o.d's sake. He was beginning to speak French less villainously, and this made things easier for him. He could carry on a simple conversation, by going slowly; and he _almost_ understood about half of what strangers said to him. He interested one or two fine ladies greatly, and they were extremely gracious to him. Artists--that is, young and unknown artists in the Quartier--are more or less pleasant to read about in the pages of Murger and others, but they are too often beggarly and quite impossible persons in real life. But this young American who lived in the Quartier was at the same time on a footing of intimacy in the exclusive home of those so charming Hemingways, who were, one knew, of the _grand monde_. Was it true that the American painter was very wealthy? Yes? Ah, _ciel_! That droll young man was then amusing himself by living in the Quartier? But what an original! His family approved? He was an _orphan_? With no relations save that old uncle whose heir he was? Ah, _mon Dieu_! That touched one's heart! One must try to be very pleasant to that so lonely young man! And that so lonely young man was extended mead and balm in the shape of invitations to very smart affairs. To some of which he found, at the last minute, he couldn't go, for the simple and cogent reason that Checkleigh or Stocks had appropriated his dress suit.

"It's infernally unlucky, Rabbits having an affair on to-night. But you know how it is, Champ--she'd never forgive me if I didn't show up. Big-wigs from home, and all that, and she feels it's her duty to make me show 'em I haven't become an Apache. And my togs are out at interest--one has to pay one's rent _sometimes_, you understand,"

explained Checkleigh, who was dressing before Peter's mirror. "_You_ don't have to care: _you_ aren't compelled to keep in her good graces!"

"Oh, all right. I don't mind. I only accepted to please Mrs.

Hemingway."

"Mrs. Hemingway is my very good friend. At the first opportunity I shall explain to her. She can readily understand that

"One may go without relatives, cousins, and aunts-- But civilized man can_not_ go without pants.

I wish you hadn't such deucedly long legs, Champ. Regular hop-poles!" grumbled Checkleigh, ungratefully.

"They are poor things, but mine own," said Peter, mildly. "You will find a five-franc piece in the waistcoat pocket, Checkleigh, if you happen to want it. I keep it there for cab fare."

"If I happen to want it!" shrieked Checkleigh. "Oh, bloated plutocrat, purse-proud millionaire, I always happen to want it!" He waved an eloquent hand to the circ.u.mambient air. "He has five-franc pieces in his waistcoat pocket--and no Rabbits in his family!" cried Checkleigh. "Now, have you a presentable pair of gloves, Croesus?--Oh, d.a.m.n your legs, Champneys! Look at these beastly breeches of yours, will you? I've had to turn 'em up until you'd fancy I was wearing cuffs on the ankles, and still they're too long!"

"You should have cut 'em off a bit--then you wouldn't look as though you were poulticing your s.h.i.+ns. And they'd fit me, too," commented Stocks, who had sauntered in.

Checkleigh looked at Peter's watch--his own was "out at interest"

along with his dress suit--and shook his head dolefully.

"If you'd just suggested it sooner, I could have done it--now it's too late." he lamented. "Your progeny will probably resemble herons, Champneys, and serve 'em right!--Are those _new_ gloves? I _am_ a credit to Rabbits!" And he rushed off.

"What a friend we have in Champ-neys, All his gloves and pa-ants to wear!"

Stocks sang in a voice like the sc.r.a.ping of a mattock over flint; one saw that he had been piously raised. Then he hooked his arm in Peter's and the two went forth to join the joyous hordes surging up the Boul' Miche, and to dine in their favorite restaurant, where the waiters were one's good friends, and Madame the proprietress addressed her Bohemians as "mes enfants." Having dined, one joined one's brother workers who waged the battle of Art with jaws and gestures. Bawling out the slang of the studios, they grimaced, sneered, shrugged, praised, demolished. Nothing was sacred to these young savages but the joy of the present. They had no past, and the future hadn't arrived. They lived in the moment, worked, laughed, loved, and, when they could, dined. When one had a handful of silver, how gay the world was! How one wished to pat it on the back and invite it to come and be merry with one!

In the full stream of this turbulent tide, behold Peter Champneys; with a lock of his black hair falling across his forehead; his head c.o.c.ked sidewise; and his big nose and clear golden eyes giving him the aspect of a benevolent hawk, like, say, Horus, Hawk of the Sun.

Those golden eyes of his saw tolerantly as well as clearly. This quiet American worked like a fiend, yet had time to look on and laugh with you while you played. He was gravely gay at his best, but he didn't neglect the good things of his youth. And he had a genius for playing impromptu Providence when you were down on your luck and about all in. Maybe you hadn't dined for a couple of days, or maybe you were pretty nearly frozen in your room, as you had no fire; and you were wondering whether, after all, you weren't a fool to starve and freeze for art's sake, and whether, all things considered, life was worth living; and there'd be a gentle tap at your door, and Peter Champneys would stick his thin dark face in, smilingly. He'd tell you he'd been lonely all day, and would you, if you hadn't done so already, kindly come and dine with him? He spoke French with a South Carolina accent, in those days, but an archangel's voice could not then have sounded more dulcet in your ears than his. Presently, over your cigarettes, you found yourself telling him just how things were with you. Maybe you slept on a lounge in his studio that night, because it was warmer there. And next morning you could face life and work feeling that G.o.d's in his heaven, all's right with the world. That's what Peter Champneys meant to many a hard-pressed youngster.

With his immense capacity for work, at the end of a year Peter Champneys had made great strides. But he was troubled. Like Millet, he couldn't take the ordered direction. He felt that he was merely marking time, that he wasn't on the right track. His robust and original talent demanded heartier food than was offered it.

Reluctantly enough, Peter withdrew from the official studio to which he was attached, and went on his own. It was a momentous step.

One Sunday afternoon he said to Emma Campbell, seriously:

"You've never laid eyes on a G.o.ddess, Emma, have you? Or a nymph?

Well, neither have I. And I can't paint what I don't know." He walked up and down the little graveled garden path. And he burst out: "That is not life. It is not truth. I don't want G.o.ds. I only see _men_! I don't want G.o.ddesses. I want _women_!"

Emma Campbell said in a scandalized voice:

"Dat ain't no kind o' way to talk! Leastwise," she compromised, "not on Sundays."

Peter burst out laughing. Emma wore her usual Sunday cashmere, with a snowy ap.r.o.n and head-handkerchief. Satan lay upon the small table beside her, in the att.i.tude of a sphinx, his black, velvety paws stretched in front of him, his inscrutable eyes watching the restless young man. Peter paused, and his eyes narrowed. Then he snapped his fingers, as he had done when he was a little boy back in Riverton and something had pleased him.

"I've got it!" he shouted. "Emma, you're It!"

No one ever had a more patient model. She couldn't exackly understan' why Mist' Peter should want to paint a ole n.i.g.g.e.r like her, but if Peter Champneys had wanted to bury her alive in the ground, with only her head sticking out, Emma would have known it had to be all right, somehow. So she sat for weary hours, while Peter made rough sketches, and tried out many theories, before he settled down to work in dead earnest.

And presently Emma saw herself as it were alive on a square of canvas, so alive that she was more than a bit afraid. She said it looked like her own ha'nt, and Emma wasn't partial to ha'nts. There she sat in her plain black dress and her plain white ap.r.o.n and head-handkerchief, and her gold hoop ear-rings. On the table beside her were the vegetables she was to prepare. She had forgotten work for the time being. Emma projecked, one hand resting idly on the table, the other on the great black cat in her lap. She looked at you, with the wistfully animal look of a negro woman, who is loving, patient, kind, long-suffering, imbued with a terrible patience, and of a sound, sly, earthy humor; and who at the same time is childishly credulous, full of dark pa.s.sions, and with the fires of savagery banked in her heart. There she sat, that sphinx that is Africa, who has seen the white races come, and who will probably see them go; you could almost sense the half-slumbrous brain of her throbbing under her head-handkerchief. She wasn't a mere colored woman; she was a symbol and a challenge. And her eyes that had seen so much and wept so much were as inscrutable as fate, as sphinx-like as the cat's who watched you from her knee. The whole picture breathed an amazingly bold and original power, and was so arrestingly vital that it gripped and held one. Down in one corner, painted with exquisite care and delicacy, was a Red Admiral.

The Quartier came, squinted through the fingers, and praised and dispraised, after its wont. The Symbolists sneered and told Peter to his teeth he was a Philistine; they said you can't boot-lick Nature: you've got to bully her, demand her soul, _make_ her give you her Sign! Quieter men came and studied Emma Campbell and her cat, and clapped Peter on the back; the more exuberant Latins kissed him, noisy, hearty, hairy kisses on both cheeks. Undoubtedly, it would be accepted, they said!

It was, and hung conspicuously. There were always small groups before it, for it created something like the uproar that Manet's "Olympia" had raised in its time. Peter learned from one critic that his technique was magnificent, his picture a masterpiece of psychology and of portraiture, and that if he kept on he'd soon be one of the Immortals. He learned from another that while he undoubtedly had technique, his posing was commonplace, his subject ba.n.a.l, his imagination hopelessly bourgeois; that he was a painter of the ugly and the ordinary, without inspiration or imagination; that the one pretty and delicate note in the whole canvas was the b.u.t.terfly in the lower left-hand corner, and that _that_ was obviously reminiscent of Whistler, who on a time had used a b.u.t.terfly signature! But on the whole the criticisms were highly favorable; it was admitted that a young painter of promise had arisen.

Peter Champneys went about his business, indifferent to praise or blame. _He_ knew he was a way-faring man whose business it was to follow his own road, a road he had to hack out for himself; and somewhere on the horizon were the purple heights.

The unbounded delight, the disinterested pride of the Hemingways, couldn't have been greater had he been their son. Mrs. Hemingway gave a brilliant entertainment in his honor, and he was feted and made much of. Young ladies who danced divinely found his stork-like hopping pleasing, and his stammering French delightful. This charming Monsieur Champneys, you see, was not only invested with the glamour of art; he was the heir of an American millionaire! Ah, the dear young man!

The picture was sold to a Spanish n.o.bleman, who said it reminded him of Velasquez's "aesop"; he was so delighted with the painter's power that he commissioned Peter to portray his own long, pale, melancholy visage. Whereupon the two Checkleighs and Stocks called loudly for a proper celebration, and Peter honored their clamorous demand. It was a memorable affair, graced by the Quartier's darlingest models, who had long since voted M'sieu Champnees a _bon garcon_. A Spanish student, in a velvet coat and with long black hair, insisted upon charcoaling mustachios and imperial upon his host's countenance, in honor of his countryman who had distinguished himself as a patron of art. Later, a laughing girl whose blue-black hair was banded Madonna-wise around a head considerably otherwise, washed it off with a table napkin dipped in wine. She sat on his knee to perform the operation, scanned his clean face with satisfaction, and taking him by the ears as by handles, kissed him gaily. Then she went back to her own _cher ami_, who wasn't in the least disturbed.

"It is like kissing thy maiden aunt, Jacques," she told him. "Now, with thee--" They looked at each other eloquently, and Peter Champneys, whose eyes had followed the girl, smiled crookedly. An unaccountable gloom descended upon him. All these l.u.s.ty young men shouting and laughing around him, all these handsome, ardent young women, s.n.a.t.c.hed what joy from life they could; they lived their hour, knowing how brief that hour must be. They ate to-day, starved to-morrow; but they were rich because they loved, because they laughed, because theirs was the pa.s.sionate unforced comrades.h.i.+p, the intoxicating joy of youth. Peter Champneys, whose good luck was being celebrated, looked at his penniless, hilarious comrades, and twisted a smile of desperate gaiety to his lips. He had never in his life felt more utterly alone.

The affair ended at six o'clock the next morning, in a last glad, mad romp up the Boul' Miche. Peter and Stocks waved good-by to the last revelers, looking somewhat jaded in the fresh morning air. The two young men, both rather tired, walked slowly. Venders in clacking sabots pushed their carts ahead of them, shouting their wares.

Crowds of working-people poured through the streets. At a little restaurant they knew, they had coffee and rolls. While they were drinking, a girl came in. Peter looked up and saw Denise.

His first thought was that she would have been lovely if she hadn't been so thin. Then he saw how shabby she was, and how neat. Nothing could have been more charming than her chestnut hair, or her blue eyes that had a look of innocence, or her fair and transparent complexion, though one could have wished she were rosier. She did not look around with the quick, alert, bright glance of the Parisienne whom everything interests and amuses; she had the abstracted and sad air of a child who suffers, and whom suffering bewilders.

Stocks said, in a low voice, tinged with pity:

"_L'amie de Dangeau_."

Peter received that announcement with a shock of surprise and distaste. Dangeau was such an utter brute! Handsome in his way, without conscience or pity, Dangeau would have eaten his mother's heart to satisfy his own hunger, or wiped his feet upon his father's beard. The gifted, intellectual, and rapacious savage seized whatever came near him that pleased his fancy or aroused his curiosity, extracted the pith, and tossed aside what no longer amused or served him. There was no generosity in him, only an insatiable and ferocious demand that life should give him more, always more! Peter, who both admired and detested him, was sorry for this gentle creature fallen into his remorseless claws. And he wondered, as decent men must, at the fatal fascination animals like Dangeau seem to possess for women.

He saw her occasionally after that, always alone. Plainly, things were not well with her. Her pale face grew paler and thinner; her dress shabbier. The look of bewilderment was now a look of pain. Her eyes were heavy, as if they wept too much. Peter watched her with a troubled heart. One day Henri, the garcon, murmured confidentially, as she left the cafe after a particularly slim meal:

"These thin little blondes, they do not last long. That one was like a rose when I first saw her. _Pauvre enfant_!" And he looked after her with a compa.s.sionate glance.

"She seems--different," said Peter. "It is not well with her?"

"Alas, no! She is from the provinces, Monsieur, come to Paris to earn more. And so she wearied her _ami_. You know him, Monsieur; he is a restless man, quickly tiring--that sculptor! Also, he feared she would fall sick upon his hands--you see how frail she is, and he abhors all that is not robust." And Henri made an expressive gesture. He added: "_She_ is of the sort that love, Monsieur; and, you understand, that is fatal!"

"And how does she manage now?" asked Peter.

Henri shrugged significantly. Peter drummed on the table and scowled. A little girl, from the provinces! One understood now how she had fallen into Dangeau's hands, and how, inevitably, he had tired, and tossed her aside like a wilted flower. And now she was facing slow starvation--Oh, d.a.m.n!