I
And, like all serious patrons of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, we devoted our last afternoon to the Spring Academy. Of course it turned out to be as academysh as ever, and the medals had as usual gone to people who deserved them less than I. We therefore amused ourselves by playing our favourite Academy game. The Academy game consists in stalking haughtily by the obvious pictures, eyes averted and noses on high, and in darting with delight upon some forlorn hope, worrying over it until everybody else comes to stare—when you silently steal away. The success of this game, I must admit, depends largely upon Nick. For he has inches, hath Nick, and an air that overalls cannot bottle up.
We had thus decoyed the multitude from the first Hallgarten picture to a skied futurism that nobody could make head or tail of, and were casting eagle eyes about for our next pounce, when what should I spy but the familiar signature of Zephine Stumpf! I was feeling silly anyway, and the sudden recollection of Zephine was too much for me. I collapsed on to a sofa.
“What is it?” asked Nick, ready for the coming pounce.
I could only wag my head hysterically and wave at the wall in front of us. It was enough for Nick, however, who always had superhuman intelligence and a catalogue.
“What is loose mit Zephine?” demanded he.
Nothing was loose with Zephine—except her painting, as it ought to be. Her picture, as a matter of fact, was very decent—some children, sketchily but becomingly dressed in splashes of sunlight, in an orchard. Zephine had been painting pink infants in sunshiny orchards ever since I first knew her in darkest Greenwich Village—when she could get hold of the orchard or the infant—and this was quite the best of the lot. But I could only gibber like an imbecile and wipe my streaming eyes.
Nick gave me up as a bad job. He proceeded to examine the picture. He looked at it from one side, he looked at it from the other side, he poked his nose into it to see how it was painted, he cocked his eye at it from across the room. Finally he came back to me.
“You can have delirium tremens till you’re black in the face, if you choose,” he announced, “but I like Zephine. I’m going to buy her.”
“I wish you would,” I managed to hiccough. “She deserves it.”
“But why do you go on about her like a demented cockatoo?”
“It’s only her—her clothes!” I snorted, going off again.
Nick went off too—to the Secretary’s office. And he presently returned, brandishing a receipt at me.
“There now! She’s mine and I shall stand up for her!” he exclaimed. “Why, species of a beast, do you make fun of a sister brush’s clothes?”
“I don’t make fun of them,” I retorted. “I always admired them very much. Only——” I had to stuff my handkerchief into my mouth lest my inept cachinnations profane anew the decorous shades of the National Academy of Design.
“Only what, animal?” pursued Nick severely.
“They were so—so original!” I gasped.
“Original? How can anyone’s clothes be original?” inquired Nick. “I have tried all my life to invent original clothes, and never achieved anything more original than when I was young enough to induce a scandalised tailor to sew blue serge with green thread.”
“Well, hers were,” I insisted. “And do you have the courage to tell me, Nick Marler, that you never saw them—or heard of them?”
Nick signified that such was the case. And at the thought of what lay before me I was near erupting again. But Nick held me to sanity with a cold grey eye.
“I suppose she wasn’t very well off,” I began. “None of us were, of course. And I suppose she must have had some German philosophy in her system. Her people came from Halle. So she set about solving the problem of dress. She said no woman could begin to dress who hadn’t at least ten thousand a year to do it on. For other women, then, the only thing was a sort of uniform—like postmen, or peasants. She really would have liked the costume of Thuringian village girls, she said, but was afraid it might be too conspicuous for New York. She therefore evolved a uniform of her own—always the same thing for the same time of day.”
“Very sensible, too,” put in Nick.
“The real beauty of it, though, was its compactness. She only kept three or four things going, and they were all”—I caught my breath—“reversible.”
“Reversible! How do you mean reversible?”
“How do I mean reversible? I mean reversible. I remember a certain brown skirt in which I oftenest saw her. When Zephine went to a party, Nicholas, what did Zephine do? Zephine turned her brown skirt inside out, Nicholas, and then it suffered a sea-change to a pea-green rich and strange, Nicholas, with brown leather bindings and big silver buttons—for Schönheit’s sake.”
The madness began to flicker again within me. But Nick, out of the perversity of his heart, refused me the shadow of a smile.
“What else had Zephine?” queried he.
“What else had Zephine?” echoed I, nettled at Nick’s gravity. “Let me see. Zephine had else a creation of écru silk, which in conjunction with the pea-green skirt and the leather bindings and the silver buttons completed her effect of splendour for varnishing days and studio teas. But minus the pea-green skirt it might be a morning dress, or a painting apron, or a dust cloak, or—who knows, Nicholas?—perchance a robe of night.”
Nick looked at me and I looked at Nick.
“Do I shock you, my Nicholas? Nicholas mine, be not shocked. You know the morals of Greenwich Village, how milk-mild they are, as compared to its scarlet conversation. And Zephine never made any bones about the secrets of her toilet. She had, for instance, a——No, Nick; I cannot pronounce it. You gaze at me too solemnly, and we are surrounded by too many of what you would call the best people in New York. Very likely you’re right. It is not given me to read their hearts. But it is given me to inform you that Zephine also had a shiny grey skirt of state, of super-state, which by means of unimaginable buttonings, hookings, loopings, and heaven knows what, transformed itself at will into a blouse or an opera cloak. And she had only one hat, which in summer was a sailor and in winter a sort of Turk’s turban. The other girls said she was always urging them to go and do likewise.”
I giggled to myself at the remembrance of it. But as for Nick, he obstinately continued to frown upon me like a Spanish inquisitor.
“Look here,” he pronounced at last. “I don’t know whether you’re drawing on the recollections of an extremely lurid past, or whether you’re being visited by the divine afflatus. But it strikes me that you’re more amused than anyone else. It also strikes me that this is a pretty sleazy line of stuff for one man to pull or another to listen to.”
With which Zephine dropped abruptly from our conversation.