Kitabı oku: «Between Friends», sayfa 2
“Do you think you are a Sultana?” he inquired, draping the towel across her outstretched arms and leaving it there.
“I thought perhaps you’d dry them,” she said sweetly.
“Not in the business,” he remarked; and lighted his pipe.
Her hands were her particular beauty, soft and snowy. She was much in demand among painters, and had posed many times for pictures of the Virgin, her hands usually resting against her breast.
Now she bestowed great care upon them, thoroughly drying each separate, slender finger. Then she pushed back the heavy masses of her hair—“a miracle of silk and sunshine,” as Quair had whispered to her. That same hair, also, was very popular among painters.
It was her figure that fascinated sculptors.
“Are you ready?” grunted Drene. Work presently recommenced.
She was entirely accustomed to praise from men, for her general attractiveness, for various separate features in what really was an unusually lovely ensemble.
She was also accustomed to flattery, to importunity, to the ordinary variety of masculine solicitation; to the revelation of genuine feeling, too, in its various modes of expression—sentimental, explosive, insinuating—the entire gamut.
She had remained, however, untouched; curious and amused, perhaps, yet quite satisfied, so far, to be amused; and entirely content with her own curiosity.
She coquetted when she thought it safe; learned many things she had not suspected; was more cautious afterwards, but still, at intervals, ventured to use her attractiveness as a natural lure, as an excuse, as a reason, as a weapon, when the probable consequences threatened no embarrassment or unpleasantness for her.
She was much liked, much admired, much attempted, and entirely untempted.
When the Make-up Club gave its annual play depicting the foibles of artists and writers in the public eye, Cecile White was always cast for a role which included singing and dancing.
On and off for the last year or two she had posed for Drene, had dropped into his studio to lounge about when he had no need of her professionally, and when she had half an hour of idleness confronting her.
As she stood there now on the model stand, gazing dreamily from his busy hands to his lean, intent features, it occurred to her that this day had not been a sample of their usual humdrum relations. From the very beginning of their business relations he had remained merely her employer, self-centered, darkly absorbed in his work, or, when not working, bored and often yawning. She had never come to know him any better than when she first laid eyes on him.
Always she had been a little interested in him, a little afraid, sometimes venturing an innocent audacity, out of sheer curiosity concerning the effect on him. But never had she succeeded in stirring him to any expression of personal feeling in regard to herself, one way or the other.
Probably he had no personal feeling concerning her. It seemed odd to her; model and master thrown alone together, day after day, usually became friends in some degree. But there had been nothing at all of camaraderie in their relationship, only a colorless, professional sans-gene, the informality of intimacy without the kindly essence of personal interest on his part.
He paid her wages promptly; said good morning when she came, and good night when she went; answered her questions when she asked them seriously; relapsed into indifference or into a lazy and not too civil badinage when she provoked him to it; and that was all.
He never complimented her, never praised her; yet he must have thought her a good model, or he would not have continued to send for her.
“Do you think me pretty?” she had asked one day, saucily invading one of his yawning silences.
“I think you’re pretty good,” he replied, “as a model. You’d be quite perfect if you were also deaf and dumb.”
That had been nearly a year ago. She thought of it now, a slight heat in her cheeks as she remembered the snub, and her almost childish amazement, and the hurt and offended silence which lasted all that morning, but which, if he noticed at all, was doubtless entirely gratifying to him.
“May I rest?”
“If it’s necessary.”
She sprang lightly to the floor walked around behind him, and stood looking at his work.
“Do you want to know my opinion?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, with unexpected urbanity; “if you are clever enough to have an opinion. What is it?”
She said, looking at the wax figure of herself and speaking with deliberation:
“In the last hour you have made out of a rather commonplace study an entirely spontaneous and charming creation.”
“What!” he exclaimed, his face reddening with pleasure at her opinion, and with surprise at her mode of expressing it.
“It’s quite true. That dancing figure is wholly charming. It is no study; it is pure creation.”
He knew it; was a little thrilled that she, representing to him an average and mediocre public, should recognize it so intelligently.
“As though,” she continued, “you had laid aside childish things.”
“What?” he asked, surprised again at the authority of the expression.
“Academic precision and the respectable excellencies of-the-usual;—you have put away childish things and become a man.”
“Where did you hear that?” he said bluntly.
“I heard it when I said it. You know, Mr. Drene, I am not wholly uneducated, although your amiable question insinuates as much.”
“I’m not unamiable. Only I didn’t suppose—”
“Oh, you never have supposed anything concerning me. So why are you surprised when I express myself with fragmentary intelligence?”
“I’m sorry—”
“Listen to me. I’m not afraid of you any more. I’ve been afraid for two years. Now, I’m not. Your study is masterly. I know it. You know it. You didn’t know I knew it; you didn’t know I knew anything. And you didn’t care.”
She sat down on the sofa, facing him with a breathless smile.
“You don’t care what I think, what I am, what interests I may have, what intellect, what of human desire, hope, fear, ambition animates me; do you? You don’t care whether I am ignorant or educated, bad or good, ill or well—as long as it does not affect my posing for you; whether I am happy or unhappy, whether I—”
“For Heaven’s sake—”
“But you don’t care!… Do you?”
He was silent; he stood looking at her in a stupid sort of way.
After a moment or two she rose, picked up her hat, went to the glass and pinned it on, then strolled slowly back, drawing on her gloves.
“It’s five o’clock, you know, Drene.”
“Yes, certainly.”
“Do you want me to-morrow?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“You are not offended?”
He did not answer. She came up to him and repeated the question in a childishly anxious voice that was a trifle too humble. And looking down into her eyes he saw a gleam of pure mischief in them.
“You little villain!” he said; and caught her wrists. “A lot you care whether I am offended!”
She looked away from him, turning her profile. Her expression was inscrutable. After a silence he dropped her wrists with a vague laugh.
“You should have let me alone,” he said.
“‘The woman tempted me,’” she repeated, still looking away from him. He said nothing.
“Good night,” she nodded, and turned toward the door.
He went with her, falling into step beside her. One arm slipped around her waist as they entered the hallway. They walked slowly to the door. He unlatched it, hesitated; she moved one foot forward, and he took a step at the same time which brought her across his path so closely that contact was unavoidable. And he kissed her.
“Oh,” she said. “So you are human after all! I often wondered.”
She looked up, trying to laugh, but could not seem to take it as coolly as she might have wished to.
“Not that a kiss is very important in these days,” she continued, “yet it might interest you to hear that a friend of yours rather fancies me. He wouldn’t like you to do it. But—” She lifted her blue eyes with faint malice—“What is a woman between friends?”
“Who is he?”
“Jack Graylock.”
Drene remained motionless.
“I haven’t encouraged him,” she said. “Perhaps that is why.”
“Why he fancies you?”
“Why he asked me to marry him. It was the only thing he had not asked.”
“He asked that?”
“After he realized it was the only way, I suppose,” she said coolly. Drene took her into his arms and kissed her deliberately on the mouth. Looking up at him she said: “After all, he is your friend, isn’t he?”
“A friend of many years. But, as you say, what is a woman between friends?”
“I don’t know,” said the girl. And, still clasped in his arms, she bent her head, thoughtfully, considering the question.
And as though she had come to some final conclusion, she raised her head, lifted her eyes slowly, and her lips, to the man whose arms enfolded her. It was her answer to his question, and her own.
When she had gone, he went back and stood again by the great window, watching the cote on a neighboring roof, where the pigeons were strutting and coquetting in the last rays of the western sun.
II
When she came again to the studio, she was different, subdued, evading, avoiding, smiling a little in her flushed diffidence at his gay ease of manner—or assumption of both ease and gaiety.
He was inclined to rally her, tease her, but her reticence was not all embarrassment. The lightest contact, the slightest caress from him, added a seriousness to her face, making it very lovely under its heightened color, and strangely childlike.
Model and master they would have remained no longer had it been for him to say, he desiring now to make it a favor and concession on her part to aid him professionally, she gravely insisting on professionalism as the basis of whatever entente might develop between them, as well as the only avowed excuse for her presence there alone with him.
“Please. It’s respectable,” she insisted her agreeable, modulated voice. “I had rather the reason for my coming here be business—whatever else happens.”
“What has happened,” he said, balancing a handful of wet clay in one hand and looking laughingly up at her, where she stood on the model-stand, “is that a pretty girl strolled in here one day and held up a mirror to a solemn ass who was stalking theatrically through life. That solemn ass is very grateful for the glimpse he had of himself. He behaved gratefully, didn’t he?”
“Very,” she said with a forced smile.
“Do you object to the manner in which he expressed his gratitude?”
She hung her head.
“No,” she said.
After a while she raised her eyes, her head still lowered. He was working, darkly absorbed as usual in the plastic mass under his fingers.
She watched him curiously, not his hands, now, but his lean, intent face, striving to penetrate that masculine mask, trying to understand. Varying and odd reflections and emotions possessed her in turn, and passed—wonder, bewilderment at herself, at him; a slight sense of fear, then a brief and sudden access of shyness, succeeded by the by glow of an emotion new and strange and deep. And this, in turn, by vague bewilderment again, in which there was both a hint of fear, and a tinge of something exquisite.
Within herself she was dimly conscious that a certain gaiety, an irresponsibility and lightness had died out in her, perhaps permanently, yet leaving no void. What it was that replaced these she could not name—she only was conscious that if these had been subdued by a newer knowledge, with a newer seriousness, this unaccustomed gravity had left her heart no less tender, and had deepened her capacity for emotion to depths as profound and unexplored as the sudden mystery of their discovery by herself.
Always, now, while she posed, she was looking at him with a still intentness, as though he really wore a mask and she, breathlessly vigilant, watched for the moment when he might forget and lift it.
But during the weeks that followed, if the mask were indeed only the steady preoccupation that his visage wore, she seemed to learn nothing more about him when his features lost their dark absorption and he caught her eye and smiled. No, the smile revealed nothing except another mask under the more serious cast of concentration—only another disguise that covered whatever this man might truly be deeper down—this masculine and unknown invader of frontiers surrendered ere she had understood they were even besieged.
And during these weeks in early spring their characteristics, even characters, seemed to have shifted curiously and become reversed; his was now the light, irresponsible, half-mocking badinage—almost boyishly boisterous at times, as, for instance, when he stepped forward after the pose and swung her laughingly from the model-platform to her corner on the sofa.
“You pretty and clever little thing,” he said, “why are you becoming so serious and absent-minded?”
“Am I becoming so?”
“You are. You oughtn’t to: you’ve made a new and completely different man of me.”
As though that were an admirable achievement, or even of any particular importance. And yet she seemed to think it was both of these when, resting against him, within the circle of his arm, still shy and silent under the breathless poignancy of an emotion which ever seemed to sound within her depths unsuspected.
But when he said that she had made a new and completely different man of him, she remembered his low-voiced when that change impended as he held her by her wrists a moment, then dropped them. He had said, half to himself: “You should have let me alone!”
Sometimes at noon she remembered this when they went out for luncheon realizing they would never have been seated together in a restaurant had she not satisfied her curiosity. She should have let him alone; she knew that. She tried to wish that she had—tried to regret everything, anything; and could not, even when within her the faint sense of alarm awoke amid the softly unchangeable unreality of these last six weeks of spring.
Was this then really love?—this drifting through alternating dreams of shyness, tenderness, suspense, pierced at moments by tiny flashes of fear, as lightning flickers, far buried in softly shrouded depths of cloud?
She had long periods of silent and absorbed dreaming, conscious only that she dreamed, but not of the dream itself.
She was aware, too, of a curious loneliness within her, and dimly understood that it was the companion of a lifetime she was missing—her conscience. Where was it? Had it gone? Had it died? Were the little, inexplicable flashes of fear proof of its disintegration? Or its immortal vitality?
Dead, dormant, departed, she knew not which, she was dully aware of its loss—dimly and childishly troubled that she could remember nothing to be sorry for. And there was so much.
Men in his profession who knew him began to look askance at him and her, amused or otherwise, according to their individual characters.
That Cecile White went about more or less with the sculptor Drene was a nine days’ gossip among circles familiar to them both, and was forgotten—as are all wonders—in nine days.
Some of his acquaintances recalled what had been supposed to be the tragedy of his life, mentioning a woman’s name, and a man’s—Drene’s closest friend. But gossip does not last long among the busy—not that the busy are incapable of gossip, but they finish with it quickly, having other matters to think about.
