"I've got it!" he shouted. "Emma, you're It!"
No one ever had a more patient model. She couldn't exackly understan' why Mist' Peter should want to paint a ole nigger like her, but if Peter Champneys had wanted to bury her alive in the ground, with only her head sticking out, Emma would have known it had to be all right, somehow. So she sat for weary hours, while Peter made rough sketches, and tried out many theories, before he settled down to work in dead earnest.
And presently Emma saw herself as it were alive on a square of canvas, so alive that she was more than a bit afraid. She said it looked like her own ha'nt, and Emma wasn't partial to ha'nts. There she sat in her plain black dress and her plain white apron and head-handkerchief, and her gold hoop ear-rings. On the table beside her were the vegetables she was to prepare. She had forgotten work for the time being. Emma projecked, one hand resting idly on the table, the other on the great black cat in her lap. She looked at you, with the wistfully animal look of a negro woman, who is loving, patient, kind, long-suffering, imbued with a terrible patience, and of a sound, sly, earthy humor; and who at the same time is childishly credulous, full of dark passions, and with the fires of savagery banked in her heart. There she sat, that sphinx that is Africa, who has seen the white races come, and who will probably see them go; you could almost sense the half-slumbrous brain of her throbbing under her head-handkerchief. She wasn't a mere colored woman; she was a symbol and a challenge. And her eyes that had seen so much and wept so much were as inscrutable as fate, as sphinx-like as the cat's who watched you from her knee. The whole picture breathed an amazingly bold and original power, and was so arrestingly vital that it gripped and held one. Down in one corner, painted with exquisite care and delicacy, was a Red Admiral.
The Quartier came, squinted through the fingers, and praised and dispraised, after its wont. The Symbolists sneered and told Peter to his teeth he was a Philistine; they said you can't boot-lick Nature: you've got to bully her, demand her soul, make her give you her Sign! Quieter men came and studied Emma Campbell and her cat, and clapped Peter on the back; the more exuberant Latins kissed him, noisy, hearty, hairy kisses on both cheeks. Undoubtedly, it would be accepted, they said!
It was, and hung conspicuously. There were always small groups before it, for it created something like the uproar that Manet's "Olympia" had raised in its time. Peter learned from one critic that his technique was magnificent, his picture a masterpiece of psychology and of portraiture, and that if he kept on he'd soon be one of the Immortals. He learned from another that while he undoubtedly had technique, his posing was commonplace, his subject banal, his imagination hopelessly bourgeois; that he was a painter of the ugly and the ordinary, without inspiration or imagination; that the one pretty and delicate note in the whole canvas was the butterfly in the lower left-hand corner, and that that was obviously reminiscent of Whistler, who on a time had used a butterfly signature! But on the whole the criticisms were highly favorable; it was admitted that a young painter of promise had arisen.
Peter Champneys went about his business, indifferent to praise or blame. He knew he was a way-faring man whose business it was to follow his own road, a road he had to hack out for himself; and somewhere on the horizon were the purple heights.
The unbounded delight, the disinterested pride of the Hemingways, couldn't have been greater had he been their son. Mrs. Hemingway gave a brilliant entertainment in his honor, and he was fêted and made much of. Young ladies who danced divinely found his stork-like hopping pleasing, and his stammering French delightful. This charming Monsieur Champneys, you see, was not only invested with the glamour of art; he was the heir of an American millionaire! Ah, the dear young man!
The picture was sold to a Spanish nobleman, who said it reminded him of Velasquez's "Æsop"; he was so delighted with the painter's power that he commissioned Peter to portray his own long, pale, melancholy visage. Whereupon the two Checkleighs and Stocks called loudly for a proper celebration, and Peter honored their clamorous demand. It was a memorable affair, graced by the Quartier's darlingest models, who had long since voted M'sieu Champnees a bon garçon. A Spanish student, in a velvet coat and with long black hair, insisted upon charcoaling mustachios and imperial upon his host's countenance, in honor of his countryman who had distinguished himself as a patron of art. Later, a laughing girl whose blue-black hair was banded Madonna-wise around a head considerably otherwise, washed it off with a table napkin dipped in wine. She sat on his knee to perform the operation, scanned his clean face with satisfaction, and taking him by the ears as by handles, kissed him gaily. Then she went back to her own chèr ami, who wasn't in the least disturbed.
"It is like kissing thy maiden aunt, Jacques," she told him. "Now, with thee—" They looked at each other eloquently, and Peter Champneys, whose eyes had followed the girl, smiled crookedly. An unaccountable gloom descended upon him. All these lusty young men shouting and laughing around him, all these handsome, ardent young women, snatched what joy from life they could; they lived their hour, knowing how brief that hour must be. They ate to-day, starved to-morrow; but they were rich because they loved, because they laughed, because theirs was the passionate unforced comradeship, the intoxicating joy of youth. Peter Champneys, whose good luck was being celebrated, looked at his penniless, hilarious comrades, and twisted a smile of desperate gaiety to his lips. He had never in his life felt more utterly alone.
The affair ended at six o'clock the next morning, in a last glad, mad romp up the Boul' Miche. Peter and Stocks waved good-by to the last revelers, looking somewhat jaded in the fresh morning air. The two young men, both rather tired, walked slowly. Venders in clacking sabots pushed their carts ahead of them, shouting their wares. Crowds of working-people poured through the streets. At a little restaurant they knew, they had coffee and rolls. While they were drinking, a girl came in. Peter looked up and saw Denise.