HE SKETCHED HER IN CHARCOAL, DRESSED (HE WOULD HAVE IT) IN BLACK
"Then what would you say to the Prodigal Son?" she shot at me defiantly.
"I say that it's very beautiful and that I'm old enough to hope it may be true," I told her, "but for heaven's sake, Miss Jencks, don't try Mrs. Bradley with it—not just now, at any rate!"
Then there was her guitar, a small one, of lemon-coloured pear wood, curiously inlaid: Whistler got it for her in one of those old pawn shops near the London wharves, and we used to wonder what happy sailor, burnt and eager for the town, had brought it for what waiting girl all the long miles, and how it had crept at last, ashamed and stained, into that dingy three-balled tomb of so many hopes and keepsakes. He sketched her in charcoal, dressed (he would have it) in black, with a Spanish comb in her hair and the guitar on a broad ribbon of strange deep Chinese blue; behind her, on an aerially slender perch, stands a gaudy Mexican parrot. It does not look like her to us who know her well (though, curiously enough, all strangers consider it an extremely fine likeness) but as a tour de force it is remarkable, and amongst the plain, Saxon furnishings of the Island living-room it stands out with an extraordinary vividness—an unmistakable bit of Southern Europe, the perfectly conscious sophistication of old cities and sunny, secret streets, worn uneven and discoloured before Raleigh started across seas.
Roger never liked it, I believe, and I have always suspected the impish James of deliberately putting us face to face with Margarita's foreign strain and the tiny, deep gulf that cut her off, in some parts of her nature, so hopelessly from us. And he made us see it, too, that Puck of all painters, even as he had intended, and we were forced to thank him for it, for it was too beautiful to have gone undone, and he knew it. And Jimmie's dead, worse luck, and one of his most devoted collectors told me last week that he really thought the psychological moment for selling out had arrived, for he'd never go any higher! And we're all grass, that to-day is and to-morrow goes into the oven, and there's no doubt of it, my brothers.
But how she used to sing O sole mio, with that sweet, piercing Italian cry, a real cri du cœur (except for the trifling fact that there was no more heart in it, really, than there is in most Italian singing! I suppose that while the art of song remains among the children of men, that particular child who is able to throw his voice most easily into what Mme. M——i used to call "ze frront of ze face" and detach it from the throat, where the true feelings lie gripped, will continue to thrill the other children with his or her "heart in the voice!") And how she would drag the rhythm, deliciously, intentionally, and shade the downward notes, and hang a breath too long on the phrase-ends, as only Italians dare! And how the distilled essence of Italy dripped out of those luscious, tender, mocking folk-songs, till the vineyards steeped before us, and the white city-squares baked in the noon sun, and the ardent sailor sang to his brown girl over the quaint, bobbing, weighted nets!
The men who dug the ice-house and piled the coast wall and blasted out trenches for draining would stop and lean on their picks, when her resonant, golden humming, like a drowsy contralto bee, floated out from the verandah vines to them: I have seen their faces clear and their dull eyes focus suddenly on some distant, darling memory, while they dropped back for a precious minute into the past that you think is all bread and cheese and beer, because, forsooth, they never sat beside you in white gloves when Margarita sang!
Go to—there was Spring and a girl for every man of them, once, and both were the same as yours.
I had to go into her room at that time, to make sure that the floor should not be unduly marred and that, according to the best of my poor judgment (Roger should have planned it all, as a matter of fact) the registers might be inserted in the best places; and as I moved among the dainty luxuries that replaced the almost sordid bareness of that room when I had first seen it, I realised, with surprise but with clear certainty, that the change was only apparent, not deep or inherent. They were all there, to be sure, the pretty paraphernalia that modern woman (and ancient, too, for the matter of that!) has found necessary to preserve and augment her mystery and charm; ivory and silver and crystal and fluted frills and scented silk. Oh, yes, they were all there, but there was no atmosphere of Margarita amongst them all: she had escaped out of them and given them the slip as effectually as in the old, bare days of the brush and comb and the print gown on a peg in the unscented closet. She was simply not there, that was all, and the most infatuated lover in all the Decameron would have felt that here was not the place for self-indulgent raptures. Margarita used her sleeping-room as a snail uses his shell or a bird its nest: it was impersonal, deserted, out of commission, now—the room, merely, of a beautiful woman, who might have been any woman, with a woman's need of comfort, warmth, clear air, and cleanliness pushed to an arrogance of physical purity.
My mother's bedroom was her own as definitely as her blue-veined, pointed hands; Sue Paynter's, into which I went once to lift out her little son in one of his illnesses, was like no one's else in the world, individual, intense; even old Madam Bradley's, in its clear whites and polished dark wood, translated to my boyish, awed soul, a sense of her impenetrable character.