"MEES."
Red-armed Annette gave a final glance at the table, and as the clock was striking eight summoned Frau Pastorin Raben's boarders to supper. Promptly came the two Von Ente girls, high-born and high-posed damsels, forced to make themselves teachers. It had been a sad blow to their pride. The elder was somewhat consoled by a huge carbuncle brooch given to her by Kaiser Wilhelm himself. The younger was named for a very great lady; and when a letter came from the very great lady the recipient lifted her head and remembered that, whatever happened, she was a Von Ente.
Following them close, there entered the dining-room a woman who painted pictures and sold them. Hedwig Vogel was about fifty, tall, angular, hard-featured. She was reported to be very rich and very mean. Moreover, she was an undoubted democrat; for when Elsa von Ente's lady patron came to the house, everybody kissed the august dame's hand except Hedwig Vogel and "the Mees." Of course "the Mees," poor thing! knew no better; but Fräulein Vogel!—a woman guilty of such a misdemeanor was capable of putting dynamite in Bismarck's night-cap. She responded curtly to the greeting given to her by the Von Entes, and then asked where the Frau Pastorin might be.
"Here," answered a soft voice, and the plump, smiling, suave mistress of the house entered and seated herself at the table. As she bowed her head to invoke a blessing on the smoked herring, the raw ham, the salad, the three kinds of bread, a tardy boarder opened the dining-room door. She stood on the threshold for a minute, then moved swiftly to her place.
"Good-evening, Mees," said the Frau Pastorin, and "Good-evening, Mees," echoed the Von Entes. Fräulein Vogel contented herself with a nod, and attacked bread and ham in hungry silence.
"Your walk has given you a fine color," the Frau Pastorin continued blandly. Then, turning to the artist, "You should paint the Mees, Fräulein. 'A Study of America.' That would sound well, would it not?"
The Study of America smiled a little disdainfully, and refused the raw ham and the herring offered to her by Elsa von Ente. She had refused raw ham and smoked herring at least a hundred times, but yet the Frau Pastorin protested.
"I am sad there is nothing for you," she murmured in English,—a language she fondly fancied she spoke.
"Oh, there is bread galore," said the Mees.
This set the hostess to thinking. Bread she understood; but what was bread galore?
"I should like to learn some American dishes," she said. "Buckwhit cakes, —so, is it right?—I have read of them. How you would relish them to-night, would you not?"
"No," said Mees ungraciously.
"Not?" said the Von Entes, who talked together habitually. "But what then?"
"Beef—mutton—chickens," said Mees.
"We have them here," murmured the Frau Pastorin sweetly.
"Do you?" said Mees, quite as sweetly. And Hedwig Vogel burst out laughing. The Frau Pastorin bit her lip, the Von Ente girls looked blank, and Annette scuttled away, smelling danger from afar, for she knew full well that she often received a vicarious reproof.
Supper over, the table was cleared and a big Bible laid before the Frau Pastorin, who, as a clergyman's widow, felt that it was her duty to set a good example to the sojourners beneath her roof. Hedwig Vogel, however, did not stay to the reading: she went up to her bare, lonely rooms. They were totally lacking in character, for neither the woman nor the artist was betrayed in their appointments. Everything was scrupulously clean and painfully neat about them. German-fashion, the square table was pushed close to the sofa, and held a lamp and four never-opened books. Here Fräulein Vogel seated herself, turned up the lamp-wick, and then crossed her long, lean, sinewy hands in her lap. The tall white porcelain stove made the room so warm that she presently rose and set a window open a little way. She was indeed a dangerous, unconventional creature, a Prussian who cared neither for great ladies nor draughts. She stood there, feeling the damp air of early spring blow in her face. From the beer-hall near by came the sound of music; over the pavement rattled a cart drawn by two weary dogs and followed by a yet wearier peasant-woman; with a brave clink-clank of spurs and sword strode by a brave lieutenant. Above all these sounds Fräulein Vogel's quick ear caught a light foot-fall on the bare stairs without. She crossed the parlor and flung open the door.
"Mees."
"Yes, most gracious lady."
"Ridiculous,—'gracious lady'! Come in."
Mees obeyed, and took the place of honor on the sofa beside the painter.
"I have a favor to ask," she said, with a deprecatory smile, "Don't call me Mees, please. It does not mean anything."
"Shall I say Mees Varing?" asked the painter, with a struggle to pronounce the name properly.
"Unless you like Kitty better," said Mees.
"Kitty—Kitty." Fräulein Vogel repeated it gravely. "Kitty." She smiled.
"Kitty Varing, of New York. Now I have it all."
"No," said Kitty, "not quite. Of Withlacootchie, New York."
They both laughed, the Indian name was so unmanageable. Kitty finally wrote it down, and the painter pronounced it over and over again. At last she straightened up, and said sternly,
"But where is the picture, Mees—Kitty?"
"Ah, you don't want to see it," Kitty exclaimed; "and I don't want to show it to you. I tell you I have no talent. I suppose, though, patience must tell in the end," she added, half to herself.
"Yes, it will tell," said the painter grimly. "It will tell—something.
Go get your picture now."
Kitty crossed the corridor to her own little room. There was the picture, —a sketch in oils of the best-known model in DÃ¥sseldorf, this time rigged out as a Roman peasant. The girl looked at the picture with a frown; she seized it as though she would dash it on the floor in scorn, but, checking the impulse, she carried it to Fräulein Vogel.
The successful painter looked at the sketch in silence for a full minute, holding it off at arm's length. Finally, she laid it down on the table, murmuring, "And after three years' hard work!"
"Only a year's real work," Kitty broke in eagerly. "I have only been here a year, you know; and those two years at home I ought not to count, for I did not work then as I do now."
"Why not?" asked Fräulein Vogel sharply. And Kitty changed color.
"Ah, one must not ask questions," Fräulein Vogel remarked; "but one can have plenty of suspicions. I dare say you were in love, and, as love failed, you have taken to art. So it goes with women. Everything but marriage is a pis-aller."
Kitty half rose: the stray arrow had sped home, and it rankled in a new wound.
"I am a woman myself," added Fräulein Vogel, with a droll smile that melted the girl's anger in an instant.
Kitty dropped down on the sofa. "Well," she said gayly, "I grant that I was in love once on a time; but that is all past. Now I want to be a painter. Listen: I have not much money, I have no friends,—that is, friends such as we read about,—and I must learn to make some money. When I am thirty I shall begin to make money; otherwise—"
"You are spending your capital," said Fräulein Vogel.
"If I spent only my income I should either wear shoes and no clothes, or clothes and no shoes," answered Kitty, laughing, with a little air of recklessness that sat well on her. "Besides," she added sagely, "it is well to burn one's ships. Sink or swim."
"But you are quite sure of swimming?" said Fräulein Vogel, taking up the picture again and looking at it closely.
"It is very bad," Kitty said.
"Abominable," said the painter. She drew a long breath and shook her head. "Abominable," she repeated, almost as though such an abominable piece of work demanded respect. "Ach! You leave old Zweifarbe's studio," she exclaimed. "Send your easel over to me. You want to make some money? Good. There are many artists here in Dåsseldorf who say I cannot paint; there is not one who will say I have not made money. Perhaps I can teach you." And Fräulein Vogel burst out laughing, while Kitty stared at her in blank surprise.
"But you have never taken pupils," she stammered.
"I have never died; but I suppose I shall," was the response.
And so old Zweifarbe lost a pupil,—for Kitty's easel was straightway borne on the back of a sturdy dienstmann to Fräulein Vogel's studio. What a chatter, what a commotion, it caused in the nest of painters! They chirped and gossiped and pecked each other like a flock of sparrows. The Frau Pastorin expressed the popular sentiment when she discussed Hedwig Vogel's eccentricities.
"How much a lesson?" she said, half closing one shrewd gray eye. "How much a lesson? Ah, she would not take pupils,—no, no, not while she was Hedwig Vogel; and der liebe Gott knows she will never be Hedwig anything else. But she will make an exception for our deer Mees Varing; oh, yes, an exception! Wait till Mees Varing's rich American friends come along and buy some of the great Vogel's pictures. You will see."
"But has the Mees any rich friends?" asked her crony the Frau Doctorin.
And then the parson's widow laughed in a worldly way.
"So pretty a girl," she said, "so fine a complexion, such little feet! And those winning ways!"
From which it will be seen that the Frau Pastorin could admire and appreciate a woman who was young and beautiful. So could the painters; but that is easier to believe. And so could the tight-booted lieutenants; but that is perfectly understood. When Kitty Waring crossed the Hof Garten, even that old woman who years and years ago sold little Heinrich Heine plums would point out the girl to her contemporary the venerable under-gardener.
"HÃ¥bsch" the old woman would growl.
"Aber leichtsinnig—leichtsinnig," the old man would add,—for he was a misogynist.
But Kitty was not quite leichtsinnig, although she did stroll through the garden sometimes with Fritz Goebel, sometimes with Otho Weiss, sometimes with her fellow-countryman Joe Buckley. They were all young, all painters, all poor. Who cared what they did? What if they sat on a beach under a linden-tree and played cat's-cradle like children? What if they made little excursions to Zons or to Xanten? What if there was a supper in Joe Buckley's studio, and Kitty Waring and Anna van der Meer—a sedate creature from Rotterdam was she—were taught how to make a true, good bowl? Who cared? In fact, all DÃ¥sseldorf cared.
One day the Frau Pastorin called Kitty into her parlor. "Dear child," she began, "if your good mother—"
"She has been dead fifteen years," said Kitty.
"If your father—" continued the Frau Pastorin.
"He? Oh, I can't remember him at all," said Kitty.
"Have you no family?" was the question that the Frau Pastorin put squarely.
"An uncle or two somewhere in Iowa," Kitty answered. "An aunt brought me up, and then died, poor thing!" A smile flitted across Kitty's face, and tears sprang to her eyes; but her questioner saw only the smile. The world is full of such purblind folk.
"Where were you last night so late?" she said acridly.
Kitty turned on the plump little woman and looked down at her.
"When Miss Smythe told me that I should find a pleasant home here, she made a sad mistake," was the irrelevant answer that Mees gave. It puzzled the Frau Pastorin for full a week. Then Hedwig Vogel and Mees paid their honest debts and took up quarters with Frau Tisch, in the Rosenstrasse.
"It is much pleasanter here," cried; Kitty, as she moved about the parlor, transforming the commonplace aspect of the room. "And it is cheap, too. I thought Frau Tisch would ask more than Frau Raben."
"It is less because we club together," said Fräulein Vogel.
Kitty might have suspected something if her new friend had not had the name of being so close-fisted. Who would dream that Hedwig Vogel could be free-handed?—she who would beat a gemÃ¥se-frau out of two cents; she who refused to subscribe to the fund for painters' widows, declaring that it was as likely she would leave a widow as be left one. She was not susceptible, she cared naught for sweet smiles and gentle ways. That she, a gaunt, grim, brusque woman of fifty, could suddenly feel all the stifled mother-love within her spring up,—that was preposterous, the vain imagining of a romancer.
They worked together, these two, in Hedwig Vogel's studio, and Kitty strove to make up for her lack of talent by her abundance of patience.
"Why did you decide to be a painter?" Fräulein Vogel asked her one day.
"Because I had a start in that line," Kitty answered. "If I had had a start in music I should have tried to play or sing. I wonder if I could sing? They say everybody has a voice. People are just like fields: plough 'em up, plant cabbages, plant potatoes, you can raise some sort of a crop. How do you happen to be a painter?"
Hedwig Vogel paused, palette in one hand, brush in the other. "Because I would rather paint than eat," she answered.
"That is genius," said Kitty solemnly. "I would rather eat. That is lack of genius. But because I want to eat I paint. That is—what would you call that?"
"You have a daub of ochre on your nose," said Fräulein Vogel.
"Anyway," Kitty remarked after a while, "if worse came to worst I could teach. There is German. Now, I really speak German well, don't I? I could teach that."
"Oh, you have the gift o' gab!" said the painter. "But you will be married, sure."
A long silence followed. "I am twenty-four," said Kitty.
"There is no safety for you this side of the grave," said Fräulein Vogel.
"I may be married, but I doubt it," Kitty continued. "I—" And then she dropped her brushes, flung herself prone on the floor, and burst into passionate tears. Hedwig Vogel did not try to comfort her, but she knelt beside her and put her strong right arm about the girl's quivering shoulders. At last Kitty sat up and brushed back her tangled hair.
"Every day I think of him," she said. "Every day I hope, I pray he will come. I watch for the postman,—I have watched for him so long. He never brings me a letter, but my heart stops beating when he draws near the house. When he rings the bell, when the servant comes up the stairs, I shut my eyes. I can almost believe I have the letter in my hand. I almost see the words. But there is never a letter,—there never can be. Oh, I—" She rose and walked to and fro. "I am to blame," she added, laying her hand on Fraulein Vogel's shoulder. "I wronged him by my suspicion, my petty jealousy; then I ran away from him, and expected him to roam over Europe trying to find me. I hid myself from him, and I am eating my heart out because he does not come."
"Suppose," said Fräulein Vogel, "that he is seeking for you now?"
Kitty's wet eyes shone for a moment. "I am not worth that," she said.
"But if he loves you?"
"Oh, he loves me, I know!" she exclaimed. "And I doubted him. I thought all manner of base thoughts, and I told him of them to his face,—to him, the noblest, dearest,—and he never reproached me. Do you wonder I am ashamed to write to him? Do you wonder I dare not ask his pardon?"
"If he loves you he would forgive anything," said Fräulein Vogel.
The room had grown dark, and they mechanically washed their brushes, cleaned their palettes, and made ready to go home. As they crossed the Hof Garten, two or three young painters joined them, and the talk ran on gayly. Fräulein Vogel had heard Kitty's laugh ring out many a time before, but never until now did she hear the sad note that dimmed the sweetness of it. The young men turned away at last.
"To-morrow, then, at eight," sang out Otho Weiss.
"Until to-morrow," cried the others.
"Until to-morrow," Kitty echoed. "Always to-morrow," she added softly to herself.
"I do not understand," said Fräulein Vogel, going back to the talk in the studio.
"I was jealous," Kitty answered simply. "He was above me in station—"
"I thought there was no rank in America," said Fräulein Vogel.
"Then you cannot understand how a big tradesman scorns a little one," Kitty rejoined. "My aunt kept a shop, but she would never let me help her sell pins and needles and tape. No, I must go to school with girls whose fathers sold pins by the ton instead of by the paper,—or by the pound, as you do here. His father sold them by the ton,—a mere matter of big and little. The family was reconciled to me after a while. You see, the family had to be reconciled, for Frank did not care what they said to him."
"He loved you," said Fräulein Vogel.
"Yes, but they wanted him to love somebody else. Perhaps he would have done so if I had not come in his way. Perhaps he would have married the right girl,—a limp, languid creature, with money enough to build a cathedral like the one at Cologne. She made the trouble. They said he was tired of me, that he repented his impetuosity; and I heard it all, and I grew jealous,—jealous of nothing. I reproached him, told him that he wanted her and her money. Then came the crash. My aunt died. I had a chance to come to Europe with some people, and I did not even bid him good-by. Now I expect him to write to me—to find me."
She laughed a little as she said this. "Some day," said Fräulein Vogel.
"If he loves you," she added.
"I doubted him," Kitty said, "and I deserve all this. Ah, if you knew him, if you saw him, you would know what a fool I was!"
They had reached the house by this time, and, as Kitty opened the door, she added, "I must write soon. I must hear something about him. What may not have happened in a year? Perhaps he is dead."
She did not mention her lover again to Fräulein Vogel, but she showed her his portrait; and the sharp-eyed painter looked at the frank, manly face a long time.
"Write to him, you foolish woman," she said.
"Not yet. I will wait a little longer," Kitty rejoined.
The summer wore away. In August they went for a fortnight to a little place near Remagen,—Bad Neunahr it is called,—and here Kitty's eyes were opened, and she suddenly awoke to the fact that her new friend was no ordinary friend.
"You need not worry about money," said Fräulein Vogel. "If you don't learn how to make it, you know how to spend it. I could never learn that myself."
But in the autumn Kitty only worked the harder, believing with all her heart that patience would make a respectable, picture-selling painter out of a Chinese mandarin. When the gray dawn stole in at the window she sprang out of bed, dressed, and was off to the studio for an hour before breakfast. She begrudged the time spent for dinner, she bemoaned a dark day, and she laid her brushes down reluctantly in the twilight. In the evening she wanted to go to the theatre, to a concert, to a supper. Such as she find plenty of companions, and from time to time DÃ¥sseldorf raised its hands over her doings. Fräulein Vogel watched and waited in a sort of patient agony, but at last, not without deep reflection, she wrote a letter to Kitty's sweetheart. She read his name on the back of a photograph, she knew well how to spell the name of the town, she knew the town was near New York, she knew New York was in North America, and she had to buy an extra big envelope to hold the whole address. But the letter was a terrible thing, and a happy thought came to her. She made a little picture of Kitty,—a perfect little picture,—and beneath it she wrote name and address. That was better than a thousand letters. Carefully she did it up, placing tissue-paper above and beneath the cardboard, and laying it tenderly in a white box. Surely it could not go astray, unless all the post-office men were blind; but, to make sure, she would register it, if that were possible. All must be done without Kitty's knowledge, and the touch of mystery made the romance the sweeter. One fine day she sallied forth to send the little portrait on its way. She entered the Hof Garten, sauntered down the Linden Allée thinking all the while how delightfully the comedy would end. Her own part, as good fairy of the play, pleased her, too, and she smiled to herself as she strayed off from the Allée and, seating herself on a bench that was well screened from prying eyes, she gave herself up to revery. Of course the lover would come, of course he would carry Kitty off; but Fräulein Vogel did not mean to be left far behind. She would look after Kitty, for the foolish, impetuous creature would need at least two people to keep her out of mischief.
"Frank."
Some one uttered the name, and Fräulein Vogel peered through the leaves. Sitting near was a pale, sweet-faced woman, drawing figures in the gravel with the tip of her parasol.
"Frank," she repeated, "shall we go home?"
"Do you mean Withlacootchie or the hotel?" was the answer.
The man had his back to Fräulein Vogel, but now he turned, and she recognized him. The portrait had lied a little, as portraits will lie, and yet he was a handsome man enough, after all.
"Home or the hotel, dear?" His voice was very gentle, and his smile tender. "Are you tired of wandering?" he added.
"Oh, no!" she said, "but whither shall we wander?"
"Up-stairs, down-stairs, in my ladies' chamber," he rejoined. "Last summer, the Tyrol; last winter, Italy; this summer, Switzerland; now,—where? We are making a long honeymoon of it."
"And are you tired?" she asked.
He gave a rapid glance up and down the Allée then stooped and kissed her.
Fräulein Vogel had not understood all the words, the caress she saw. She rose and went slowly homeward. In the tiny Dåssel the swans were floating majestically, and, standing there on the bank, she tore the box and the picture into scraps and flung them in the water. The swans hastened after the bits of white paper; they fought and screamed over them, and the victor proudly bore away a fragment from his envious mates, only to discover that it was worthless.
CHARLES DUNNING.
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