Matthew Strang fed the hens and was taken by the humors of the quarter, into which he had scarcely penetrated before, knowing mainly the other side of the water. Perceiving him looking at her pictures, the stout smiling proprietress, whose homely face, minus her characteristic smile, flared in paint on a wall, protruding from a scarlet-striped bodice, asked him in very loud tones if he would like to see her collection, and straightway haled him up-stairs to her salon, which was hung thickly with meritorious pictures, upon whose beauties she held a running comment, astonishing Matthew by the intelligence of her criticisms. “This represents a hawthorn, monsieur, which blossoms in the spring. This was done by a Dane who is dead. The King of Denmark offered him a commission, but he would not work for him, because he was a revolutionary—in painting only, you understand, an Impressionist. That is a copy of the one in the Luxembourg. I paid two hundred francs to have it made, because I love the original so. Oh yes, it is a very good copy. My landlord offered me four hundred for it, but I prefer to live in a little apartment, surrounded by my pictures. As you say, I am an amateur of pictures. There are more here in my bedroom,” and she ushered him in, apologizing for the bed not being made. Then she told him her history. She was a widow with an only son, who was beau garçon. Ah, she was beautiful herself when she had twenty years. Her son was to be an artist. Matthew Strang feelingly hoped the boy would become a great artist; inwardly he wondered wistfully why he himself had not been blessed with an art-loving mother. And then in a curious flash of retrospective insight he recognized for the first time the essential artistic elements in his mother’s character, stifled by a narrow creed—her craving for the life of gay cities, her Pagan anger at Abner Preep’s bow-legs! What a pity she had not been born in this freer artistic atmosphere, which indeed her ancestors must have breathed, though their blood had been crossed with German and Scotch, as if to produce his own contradictory temperament. In London, he thought, artistic connoisseurship was the last thing one would look for in small shopkeepers. In a softer mood he repaired to the Academy, which was entered through a pair of large folding doors that gave upon a stone corridor. He passed through this passage and came out under a sloping porch, with broken trellis-work at one side and an untidy tree. At the top of a flight of stone steps that descended thence, he was stopped by a block of young American fellows in soft felt hats, who motioned him to stand still, and, to his astonishment and somewhat melancholy amusement, he found himself part of a group about to be photographed by a pretty young lady student in the sunny, dusty court-yard below.
The group she had posed stretched all down the steps, and consisted mainly of models—male and female. There were Italian women, dusky and smiling, some bareheaded, some hooded, and a few pressing infants—literal olive-branches—to their bosoms. There was an Italian girl of fourteen with a mustache, who was a flare of color in her green velvet apron and gorgeous trailing head-dress. There were Frenchwomen with coquettish straw hats, and a child in a Tam o’ Shanter; there was a Corsican in a slouch-hat, with coal-black hair and a velvet jacket to match, and a little Spanish boy in a white hat. Thrown in as by way of artistic contrast with all this efflorescence of youth was a doddering, pathetic old man with a spreading gray beard and flowing gray locks; and there were young lady students of divers nationalities—Polish, Greek, Dutch, and American—curiously interspersed in the motley group which stretched right down the stone steps between the stone balustrades that terminated in stone urns spouting disorderly twigs. Behind the pretty photographer were the terra-cotta walls of the sculpture atelier, which, high beyond her head, were replaced by long, green-glazed windows, into which a pink lilac-bush, tiptoeing, tried to peep; around her were stools, dumb-bells, damaged busts, a headless terra-cotta angel with gaping trunk and iron stump, nursing a squash-faced cherub, and dismantled packing-cases swarming with sportive black kittens; and facing her a great blackened stone head of Medusa stared from a red-brick pedestal, awful with spiders’ webs across the mouth and athwart the hollow orbits and in the snaky hair covered with green moss; and towering over her head and dominating the court-yard stood a colossal classical statue, tarnished and mutilated, representing a huge helmeted hero, broken-nosed and bleared, sustaining a heroine, as armless but not so beautiful as the Venus de Milo, doing a backward fall. But the sun shone on the dusty litter and the mess and the lumber, and the lilac-bush blossomed beautifully, and over all was the joy of youth and Art and the gayety of the spring. Matthew Strang felt an ancient thrill pass through his sluggish veins. To be young and to paint—what happiness! His eyes moistened in sympathy with the scene. The models were redolent of Art—the very children breathed Art, the babes sucked it in. Art was a republic, and everybody was equal in it—the doughtiest professor and the meanest model, the richest amateur and the penurious youth starving himself to be there. There was nothing in the world but Art—it was the essence of existence. There were people who lived for other things, but they did not count. Oh, the free brave life! He was glad to be photographed as part and parcel of all this fresh aspiration; it revivified him; he had a superstitious sense that it was symbolic.
The group scattered, dismissed by the “Merci” of the pretty photographer; and Matthew, descending the steps, asked her if Mrs. Wyndwood worked in her atelier. She did not know, but she guessed from his description it must be the aristocratic-looking lady who had dropped in once or twice in Miss Regan’s company. Miss Regan came regularly every morning at eight o’clock, but not at all in the afternoon, when she worked at home. Miss Regan’s own studio was in an Impasse about ten minutes away; probably her friend lived with her. Heartily thanking his informant, he betook himself thither. He found the Impasse in a prosaic, grimy street, amid which the charming, if battered bass-relief of Venus with Cupids over its entrance, struck an unexpected note of poetry, which was intensified by the little Ionic portico with classic bronze figures between its pillars that faced him as he passed through the corridor. Leafy trees and trellised plants added rusticity to the poetry of the sunny, silent, deserted court-yard, so curiously sequestered amid the surrounding squalor. The windows of many studios gave upon it, and the backs of canvases showed from the glass annexes for plein air study. But as he passed under the pretty, natural porch of embowering foliage that led to the door of the studio he sought, his heart beat as nervously at the thought of again facing the Hon. Mrs. Wyndwood as when, in his young days, he had first saluted the magnificent uncle whose name he bore. He had an inward shrinking: was it wise to expose himself to the perturbation of another interview with this cold, stately creature, the image of whom, passing graciously to her carriage, was still vivid to him? But he could not go back now. He knocked at the door.
Eleanor opened the door—a radiant, adorable apparition in a big white clay-smeared blouse with a huge serviceable pocket. He had never imagined her thus; he was as taken aback by her appearance as she by his presence. He stared at her in silence, as she stood there under the overarching greenery, with gold flecks of sunlight on her hair. But both recovered themselves in a moment; the sight of her in this homely artistic costume knocked her off the pedestal of fashion and propriety on which his mental vision had posed her; she became part of that brave young democracy of Art he had just left; and there was a charming camaraderie in the gay laugh with which, withdrawing her long white hands beyond reach of his proffered glove, and exhibiting them piquantly clay-covered, she cried, “Can’t shake.”
The seriousness of the imagined meeting vanished in a twinkling. He looked at her dancing eyes, the sweet, red mouth smiling with a gleam of lustrous teeth: he had an audacious inspiration.
“Well, then there’s nothing for it but—” he said, smiling back, and finished the sentence by kissing her. Instantly her eyelids drooped, half-closing; her lips responded passionately to his.
They were withdrawn in a moment before he could realize what he had done, or the wonderful transformation in their relations.
“In the open air!” she cried, horrified, and ran within. He followed her, closing the door; his heart beat tumultuously now. Nothing could undo that moment. A wilderness of talk could not have advanced matters so far.
Through the tall glass roof of the airy studio the sun streamed in rays of dusty gold, dappling the imaginative clay models in their wet wrappings, the busts, fountains, serpents, rock-work, witches, that variegated the shelves, and lent an air of fantasy and poetry, extruding the tedious commonplace of plebeian existence, and harmonizing with the joyous aloofness of the scene in the court-yard its sense of existence in and for itself, by souls attuned to Art and dedicate to loveliness.
Mrs. Wyndwood stood, saucily beautiful, leaning against a shelf, with one hand in the pocket of her blouse, and rubbing the clay of the other against the sides of what looked like a tin baking-dish filled with plaster-pie. How harmonious was that tilt to her nose! He had never noticed before how delightfully it turned up. She smiled roguishly.