Around the embers of the dying fire.
From an open window—Mac had thrown it wide—came a breath of summer air, telling of green fields and fleecy clouds; of lappings about the bows of canoes; of balsam beds under bark slants; of white scoured decks and dancing waves; of queer cafés under cool arched trees and snowy peaks against the blue.
The glorious old fire felt the sun's power and shuddered, trembling with an ill-defined fear. It knew its days were numbered, perhaps its hours. No more romping and sky-larking; no more outbursts of crackling laughter; no more scurrying up the ghostly chimney, the madcap sparks playing hide-and-seek in the soot; no more hugging close of the old logs, warming themselves and everybody about them; no more jolly nights with the hearth swept and the pipes lighted, the faces of the smokers aglow with the radiance of the cheery blaze.
Its old enemy, the cold, had given up the fight and had crept away to hide in the North; so had the snow and the icy winds. No more! No more! Spring had come. Summer was already calling. Now for big bowls of blossoms, their fragrance mingling with the pungent odor of slanting lines of smoke. Now for half-closed blinds, through which sunbeams peeped and restless insects buzzed in and out. Now for long afternoons, soft twilights, and wide-open windows, their sashes framing the stars.
Mac had noted the signs and was getting ready for the change. Already had he opened his dust-covered trunk and had hauled out, from a collection of tramping shoes, old straw hats, and summer clothes, a thin painting coat in place of his pet velveteen jacket. It was only at night that he raked out the coals hiding their faces in the ashes, gathered them together—the fire had never gone out since the day he lighted it—and encouraged them with a comforting log.
Most of the members had formed their plans for the summer; one or two had already bidden good-by to the Circle. Lonnegan was off trout-fishing, and Jack Stirling was three days out—off the Banks really.
"Gone to look up Christine and the old boys and girls," Marny said; at which Mac shook his head, knowing the bee, and knowing also the kinds and varieties of flowers which grew in the gardens most frequented by that happy-go-lucky fellow.
Murphy was back in London; cabled for, and left without being able to bid anybody good-by. "Throw on another stick," he had written Mac by the pilot-boat, "and give the dear old logs a friendly punch and tell 'em it is from that wild Irishman, Murphy. I'd give you a tract of woodland if I had one, and build you a fireplace as big as the nave of a church. I shall never forget my afternoons around your fire, MacWhirter. You and your back-logs and the dear boys warmed me clear through to my heart. Keep my chair dusted, I'm coming back if I live."
With the budding trees and soft air and all the delights of the out-of-doors, the attendance even of those members who still remained in town began to drop off. Only when a raw, chill wind blew from the east, reminding us of the winter and the welcome of Mac's fire, would the chairs about the hearth be filled. Boggs, Pitkin, Woods, Marny, and I were the only ones who came with any regularity.
"Got to cover them up, Colonel," Mac said to me the last afternoon the fire was alight. I had arrived ahead of the others and had found him crooning over the smouldering logs, looking into the embers. "They've been mighty good to us all winter—never sulked, never backed out; start them going and give them a pat or two on their backs and away they went." He spoke as if the logs were alive. "Lots of comfort we've had out of them; going to have a lot more next year, too. I shall bury the embers of the last fire—perhaps this one, I can't tell—in its ashes and keep the whole till we start them up in the autumn. It will seem then like the same old fire. The flowers lie dead all winter but they bloom from the same old charred ember of a root. All the root needs is the sun and all the coals need is warmth. And the two never bloom in the same season—that's the best part of it."
He had not once looked at me as he spoke; he knew me by my tread, and he knew my voice, but his eyes had not once turned my way, not even when I took the chair beside him.
"And what are you going to do, Mac, all summer? Got any plans?"
"Got plenty of plans, but no money. Heard there was a man nibbling around my 'East River'—but you can't tell. Brown, the salesman, says it's as good as sold, but I've heard Brown say those things before. Exhibition closes this week. Guess the distinguished connoisseur, Mr. A. MacWhirter, will add that picture to his collection: that closet behind us is full of 'em."
"Where would you like to go, old man?"
"Oh, I don't know, Colonel. I'd like to try Holland once more and get some new skies—and boats."
"Nothing on this side, Mac?" I was not probing for subjects for Mac's brush.
"No, don't seem so. Can't sell them anyhow. I thought my 'East River' was about the best I had done, but nobody wants it. Cook calls it a 'Melancholy Monochrome,' and that other critic—I forget his name—says it lacks 'spontaneity,' whatever that is. I ought to have stayed at home and helped my Governor instead of roaming round the world deluding myself with the idea that I could paint. About everything I've tried has failed: Had to borrow the money to get me to Munich; took me three years to pay it back, doing pot-boilers; even painted signs one time. Been chasing these phantoms now for a good many years, but I haven't got anywhere. I'd rather paint than eat, but I've got to eat—that's the worst of it. A little encouragement, too, would help. I try not to mind what Cook says about my things, but it hurts all the same. And yet if he ever over-praised my work it would be just as offensive. What I want is somebody to come along and get underneath the paint and find something of myself and what I am trying to do with my brush. It may be monotonous to Cook; it isn't to me. I could crisp up my 'East River' with a lot of cheap color and a boat or two with figures in the foreground, but it was that vast silence of the morning that I was after, and the silvering quality of the dawn. Doesn't everybody see that? Some of them can't. Well, in she goes with the rest; you'll all have a fine bonfire when I'm gone. I'll keep out the one hanging over the lounge and maybe another back somewhere in that mausoleum of a closet. I'll give one to you, old man, if you'll promise to take care of it," and Mac took an unframed canvas from the wall and propped it up on a chair. There were dozens of others around it and so it had never attracted my attention.
"Not much—just a garden wall and a bench—pretty black—too much bitumen, I guess," and he wet his finger and rubbed the canvas.
I took the sketch in my hand and examined it carefully. It was dated "Lucerne," and signed with two initials, not Mac's.
"Old sketch?"
"Yes, about fifteen years ago."
"Doesn't look like your work."
"It isn't."
"Who did it?"
"A pupil of mine."
"Girl?"
Mac nodded, replaced the sketch on the wall and sank into his chair again.
"Only pupil I ever had. She and her mother had spent the winter in Munich—that's where I met her."
"It is signed 'Lucerne,'" I said.
"Yes, I followed her there."
"To teach?"
"No; because I loved her."
The announcement came so suddenly that for a moment I could not answer. He often gave me his confidence, and I thought I knew his life, but this was news to me. I had always suspected that some love affair had sweetened and mellowed his nature, but he always avoided the subject and I had, of course, never pressed my inquiries. If he was ready to tell me now I was willing to listen with open ears.
"You loved her, Mac?" I said simply.
"Yes, as a boy loves; without thought—crazily—only that one idea in his mind; ready to die for her; no sleep; sometimes a whole day without tasting a mouthful; floating on soap-bubbles. Ah! we never love that way but once. It was all burned out of me though, that summer. I've just lived on ever since—painting a little, nursing these old logs, hobnobbing with you boys; getting older—most forty now—getting poorer."
"And did she love you, Mac?"
"Yes, same way. Only she got over it and I didn't."
"Some other fellow?"
"No, her father. Oh, there's no use going into it! But sometimes when I do my level best and put my heart into a thing, as I have done into that picture at the Academy, or as I poured it out to that girl in that old garden at Lucerne, and it all comes to naught, I lose my grip for a time and feel like putting my foot through my canvases and hiring out somewhere for a dollar a day."
I made no comment. My long years of intimacy with my friend had taught me never to interrupt him when he was in one of these moods, and never to ask him any question outside the trend of his thoughts.
"Self-made, dominating man, her father; began life as a brass-moulder. 'Worked with my hands, sir,' he would tell me, holding out his stubs of fingers. Didn't want any loafers and spongers around him. He didn't say that to me, of course, but he did to her. The mother was different, like the daughter; she believed in me. She believed in anything Nell liked. Behind in her music—that's what she came to Munich for; and when she wanted to paint, hunted me up to teach her. She was eighteen and I was twenty-three. Well, you can fill in the rest. Every day, you know; sometimes at my hole in the wall, sometimes at her apartment. Went on all winter. In May he came over and wired them to meet him in Lucerne. We tried parting; sat up half the night, we three, talking it over—the dear mother helping. She loved us both by that time! I tried it for two days and then locked up my place and started. That old garden was where we met and where we continued to meet. He came down one morning to see what we were doing; we were doing that sketch—had been doing it for two weeks. Some days it got a brushful of paint and some days it didn't. You know how hard you would work when the girl you loved best in the world sat beside you looking up into your face. Sometimes the dear mother would be with us, and sometimes she would make believe she was. In the intervals she was working on the old gentleman, trying to break it to him easy. 'You have worked all your life,' she would say to him, 'and you have, outside of me, only two things left—your money and your daughter. The money won't make her happy unless there is somebody to share it with her. This boy loves her; he is clean'—I'm just quoting her words, old man; I was in those days—'honest, has an honorable profession, and will succeed the better once he has Nellie to help him and your money to relieve his mind for the time of anxiety. When he becomes famous, as he is sure to be, he will return it to you with interest.' That was the sort of talk, and it occurred about every day. Nellie would hear it and add her voice, and we would talk it over in the garden.
"One day he came down himself. The garden was up the hill behind the Schweitzerhoff—you remember it—in one of those smaller hotels—Lucerne was crowded.
"'Let me see what you two are doing,' he said, with a sort of police-officer air.
"I turned the easel toward him. The sketch was about as you see it—all except the signature and the word 'Lucerne'—that I added afterward.
"'How long have you been at this?'
"'About two weeks,' I said. I thought I'd give it its full time, so as to prove to him how carefully it had been painted.
"'Two weeks, eh?' he repeated slowly. 'Done anything else?'
"'No.'
"'What's it worth?'
"'Well, it's only a study, sir.'
"'Well, but what's it worth?'
"I thought for a moment, and then, knowing how he valued everything by his own standard, said:
"'I should think, perhaps, fifty dollars, when it's finished.'
"'That's at the rate of twenty-five dollars a week, isn't it? A little over three dollars a day. I earned more than that, young man, when I was younger than you, and I was making something that was sold before I turned a hand to it. You've got to shop your things around till you sell 'em. Come into the house, Nellie, I want to speak to you.'
"Brutal, wasn't it? I have hated his kind ever since. Money! Money! Money! You'd think the only thing in life was the accumulation of dollars. Flowers bloom, mists curl up mountain sides, brooks laugh in the sunlight, birds sing, and children romp and play. There is poverty and suffering and death; there are stricken hearts needing help; kind words to speak; famishing minds to educate; there is art, and science, and music—Nothing counts. Money! Money! Money! I'm sick of it!"
"And that ended it with the girl?" I asked, without moving my head from my hand.
"Yes, practically. She went to Paris and I went back to Munich. I felt as if my heart had been torn out of me; like a plant twisted up by the roots. The letters came—first every day, then once or twice a week, then at long intervals. You won't believe it, old man, but do you know that wound never healed for years; hasn't yet, parts of it. Shams, flaunted wealth, society—all irritate it, and me. It seemed so cruel, so damned stupid. What counts but love, I would say to myself over and over again. If I had a million dollars, what better off would I be? If we were both on a desert island without a cent we could be happy together, and if we had a million apiece and didn't love each other we would be miserable. Quixotic, I know, indefensible, out of date with modern methods, but I'd give my career if more of that sort of doctrine saturated the air we breathe."
"You saw her again?"
"Yes, once in Paris, driving with her husband. This was about five years ago. She didn't see me, although I stood within ten feet of her. He was much older, older than I am now, I should think. Commonplace sort of fellow—see a dozen like him any morning on the Avenue going down to Wall Street. Only her eyes were left, and the fluff of hair about her forehead. She made no impression on me; she wasn't the woman I loved. My memories were of a girl in the garden, all in white, her hair about her shoulders, the molten sunlight splashed here and there, the cool shadow tones between the drippings of gold. And the sound of her voice, and the way she raised her eyes to mine! No, it never comes but once. It is the bloom on the peach, the flush of dawn, never repeated in any other sky; the thrill of the first kiss at the altar, the cry of the first child. Yours! Yours! for ever and ever!
"Talking like a first-class idiot, am I not, old man? But I can't help it. And I get so lonely for it sometimes! Often when you fellows go home and I am left alone at night I draw up by this fire and build castles in the coals. And I see so many things: the figure of a woman, the uplifted hands of children, paths leading to low porticos, gardens with tall flowers along their paths, an arm about my neck and a warm cheek held close to mine. I know I am only half living tucked up here pegging away, and that I ought to shake myself loose and go out into the world more and see what it is made of. In a few years I'll be frozen fast into my habits like an old branch in a stream when the winter's cold strikes it. Only you and the other boys and the fire keep me young."
"Have you never met anybody since, Mac, you cared for?" I had braced myself for that question, wondering how he would take it.
"Yes, once, but she never knew it. I had nothing—why begin over again? It would have turned out like the other—worse. Then I was too young, now I'm too old. Besides, she's on the other side of the water; lives there."
"She liked you?"
"Oh, I don't know. Women are hard to understand. I never abuse their confidence when they trust me, and they generally do trust me when I get close to them. I seem always to be the big brother to them and so they let themselves go, knowing I won't misunderstand. Women like me, they don't love me—great difference. A lot of men make this mistake, thinking a woman is in love with them when she only wants to be kind. She can't always be on the defensive and still be natural. The greatest relief that can come to one of them is to find that the man whom she wants only as a companion is contented to be that and nothing more and won't take advantage of her confidence. So I say I don't know. She was a human kind of a girl, this one—real human."
Here Mac paused for an instant, his eyes on the fast-dying embers—as if he were recalling the girl more clearly to his mind. "Had a heart for things outside of her own affairs. Girl a man could tie up to. Human, I tell you—real human!"
"Follow it up, Mac?" He had volunteered nothing about her personality, and I dared not ask.
"No, let it go. I've been hoping I'd make a hit some time and then maybe I'd—no, don't talk about it any more. Listen! who's that coming upstairs? That's Woods, I know his step. Happy fellow! Hear his whistle—he must have got another order for a full-length; nothing like powder-puff teas for encouraging American art, my boy," and a smile crept over Mac's face, which broadened into a laugh when he added, "I'm beginning to think that a course in cooking is as necessary for a painter as a course in perspective."
The expected arrival was by this time beating a rat-a-tat-too on the Chinese screen, his whistle more shrill than ever.
"Come in, you pampered child of fashion!" cried Mac, the sound of Woods's joyous step having completely changed the current of his thoughts. "Stop that racket, I tell you. We know you've got another portrait, but don't split our ears over it."
A black slouch hat rose slowly above the edge of the screen, then a lock of hair, and then a round fat face in a broad grin. It was Boggs!
"Thought you were Woods," cried Mac.
"I'm aware of that idiotic mistake on your part, great and masterful painter," burst out Boggs, bowing grandiloquently.
"You're not half so good-looking as Woods, you fat woodchuck," shouted back Mac.
"I am aware of it, great and masterful painter, but I am infinitely more valuable. I carry priceless things about me. In fact I'm just chuck-full of priceless things. Shake me and I'll exude glad tidings. Marvellous events are happening at the Academy. I have just left there, and I know! The main stairway is in the hands of a mob of disappointed millionnaires pressing up toward the South Room. Every art critic in town is clinging to the columns craning his head. Brown is in a collapse, his body stretched out on one of the green sofas. All eyes are fastened—even Brown's glazed peepers—on a small yellow card slipped into the lower left-hand corner of a canvas occupying the centre of the south wall. Before it, down on his knees, pouring out his heart in thankfulness, is the happy purchaser, the tears rolling down his cheeks, his——"
"Boggs, what the devil are you talking about!" cried Mac, a sudden light breaking out on his face. "Do you mean——"
"I do, most masterful painter—I mean just that! Toot the hewgag! Bang the lyre! The 'East River' is sold!"
"Sold!"
"Sold! you duffer!"
"Who to?" Mac's voice had an unsteady tremor in it.
"To Pitkins's friend, the banker. He's wild about it. Says he's been looking for something of yours ever since the night he was here, and only knew you had a picture on exhibition when he read Cook's abuse of it in yesterday's paper. And that isn't all! No sooner had the 'Sold' card been slipped into the frame than Mr. Blodgett came in; swore he had been intending to buy the 'East River' for his gallery ever since the show opened; offered an advance of five hundred dollars to the banker, who laughed at him; and then in despair bought your other picture, 'The Storm,' hung on the top line. Both sold, O most masterful painter! All together now, gentlemen—
"'Should auld acquaintance be forgot—'" and Boggs's voice rang out in the tune he knew Mac loved best.
Mac dropped into his chair. The news thrilled him in more ways than one. Certain vague, hopeless plans could now, perhaps, be carried out; plans he had driven from his mind as soon as they had taken shape: Holland for one, which seemed nearer of realization now than ever. So did some others.
"Millionaires have their uses, Mac, after all," laughed Marny.
"Yes, but this fellow was an exception. He filled my mug and——"
"—And your pocket," added Boggs; "don't forget that, you ingrate. Again—all together, gentlemen—
"'Should auld acquaintance be forgot——'"
This time Boggs sang the couplet to the end, Mac and all of us joining in.
When all the others had gone I still kept my chair. There was one thing more I wanted to know. Mac was on his feet, restlessly pacing the room, a quickness in his step, a buoyant tone in his voice that I had not noticed all winter.
"Sit down here, old man, and let me ask you a question."
"No," answered Mac, "fire it at me here. I'm too happy to sit down. What is it?"
"Was that human girl you spoke of, who lives abroad, the one in the steamer chair with the red roses in her lap?"
Mac stopped and laid his hand on my shoulder.
"Yes; I got a letter from her this morning."
"And you are going over?"
"By the first steamer, old man."