Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel

by Marie Van Vorst

From his corner of the room Dearborn drawled, "If the substance of the guillotine had fallen across his neck, Tony, where would you be in our mutual history?"

Antony had asked his companion to call him Tony. He had not been able to disassociate himself with everything that recalled the past.

Fairfax's figure as he turned was dark against the light of the window and the room was full of the shadows of the early January twilight. He wore a pair of velveteen breeches whose original colour might have been a dark, rich blue. His flannel shirt (no longer red) was fastened loosely at the neck by a soft black cravat under a rolling collar. It was Sunday and he was working, the clay white upon his fingers and nails. He wore an old pair of slippers, and Dearborn on a couch in a corner watched him, a Turkish drapery wound around his shoulders, for the big room was chilly and it smelled of clay and tobacco smoke. The studio was an enormous attic, running the length of an hotel once of some magnificence, now a tumble-down bit of still beautiful architecture. The room was portioned off for the use of two people. Two couches served in the night-time as their beds, there was a small stove guiltless of fire, a few pieces of studio property, a skylight, a desk covered with papers and books and manuscripts, and in the part of the room near the window and under the skylight, Tony Fairfax, now Thomas Rainsford, worked among his casts and drawings, amidst the barrels of clay and plaster. To him, in spite of being almost always hungry, in spite of the discomfort, of the constant presence and companionship of another when he often longed for solitude, in spite of this, his domain was a heaven. He had come into the place in June with Dearborn.

Tony had paid a year's rent in advance. He was working as a common journeyman in the studio of Barye, and early in the morning, late at night, and on Sundays, worked for himself eagerly, hungrily, like the slave of old in Albany, and yet, with what a difference! He had no one but himself to consider, but had the interest of the atelier where he studied, even as he sold his skill that it might be lost in the creations of more advanced

artists, and there, during the days of his apprenticeship, his visions came to him, and what conceptions he then had he tried to work out and to mature, when he had the chance, in his own room.

Dearborn, who never left the studio except to eat, smoked and worked and read all day.

The two men were sufficiently of a size to wear each other's clothes. They had thought it out carefully and had preserved from the holocaust, of the different financial crises, one complete out-of-door outfit, from hat to boots—and those boots!

It was "déplorable" the bookseller, whose little shelf of books lay on the stone wall of the quay, said, it was "déplorable" that such a fine pair of men should be lame and in exactly the same fashion. Fairfax could not walk at all in the other man's shoes, so his normal friend made the sacrifice and the proper shoes were pawned, and Robert Dearborn and Tony Fairfax had shared alternately the big boot and the small one, the light and the heavy step. And they were directed by such different individuals, the boots went through Paris in such diverse ways!

"By Jove!" exclaimed Dearborn, examining the boots carefully, "it isn't fair. You're walking these boots of ours to death! Who the deuce will take them out in his bare feet to be repaired?"

They were just as absurdly poor as this. Nobody whose soul is not absorbed in art can ever understand what it is to be so stupidly poor.