She thought of herself going with them, whirling about in the currents, serenely indifferent to everything that tortured her now. The thought had a creeping fascination. She drew nearer, staring down at the water, stabbed with hundreds of quivering lights, and saw herself—a face, a trail of hair, a few folds of eddying drapery—go floating by. A sudden gust of wind snatched at her umbrella, and shook a deluge from the tree boughs, fretting the surface of the pools. It roused her, and she turned away shuddering. She would wait and meet the Giant face to face.
As she turned into the impasse where her studio was, she felt that he was getting very near. The long walk had tired her. Since yesterday her only food had been the free tea at the Girls’ Club. Her door was the last on the left-hand side, and broke the face of what looked a blank wall. Near it a bell-handle hung on the end of a wire. On the fourth floor she opened a door that had her card nailed to it.
The studio was dark, only the large window showed a dim, gray square. She lit the lamp, and then, suddenly, in the recklessness of her desperation, the fire. There were eight pieces of wood and six briquettes in the box. She would burn them all. She would burn the bed and the chairs, but she would be warm to-night. To-morrow was twelve hours off.
The light showed the emptiness of the chill, barn-like room. The walls alone were furnished, decorated with a series of life-class studies, some made twenty years before, when she had been the star of one of the Julians. Now these spirited delineations of nakedness, unlovely and unabashed, offered silent testimony to the brilliant promise of Celia Reardon’s youth. To-night she only thought of the fire and cowered over it—a little, pale shadow of a woman, near upon middle age.
For hours she sat watching the flames dart up through the holes in the briquettes. The warmth consoled her. She grew dreamy and retrospective. Her thoughts went slipping back from point to point, in the glamourous past, when she had been hung in the Salon, and sold her pictures, and was an artist people spoke of who would some day “arrive.” From those radiant days of youth and hope, things had been gradually declining to this—one by one stand-bys failing and her old patrons leaving, rich Americans who ordered copies growing scarcer and scarcer. Finally no money to hire models, bad food, and, in consequence, declining health, poor work that failed to find a market; pride coming to her aid and withdrawing her from the help of friends; furtive visits to the Mont de Piete, and more dreaded ones to the dealers on the Rue Bonaparte; and to-night the end of all things.
It was late when she slept. Waking in the gray dawn she found herself lying cramped and cold in front of the white ashes of the fire, and crept shivering to bed. There she slept on till after midday. She felt weak and stupid when she rose, and her dressing took a long time. She began to realize that her state was nearly as bad physically as it was financially.
It was better to walk about the streets till the hour for tea than to freeze in the studio. She put on her hat and jacket, relics of better days to which she desperately clung, and went forth. In the night the thermometer had fallen and the rain had turned to snow. She buried her chin in her collar and tried to walk briskly. She thought she would go to the Louvre, which was warm, and sit there till four, when she could come back to the Girls’ Club. Both walks were long, but the hour’s rest at the Louvre would strengthen her, and there was still the faint possibility of meeting some one she knew who would order a copy.
She felt singularly tired when the long flank of Catharine de’ Medici’s part of the old palace came into view with the river sucking at the wall. All the surroundings were gray and motionless like a picture, and in the midst of this dead immobility the swift, turbulent tide rolled on, a thing of sinister life, calling to her as it sped. Midway across the bridge she stopped to look down on it, and then stood gazing, fascinated, unable to tear herself away.
Close to her, on the coping of the wall, an image-seller had set out his wares. They were a dream of fair women, classic and modern. The solemn majesty of the great Venus was contrasted with Phryne hiding her eyes in a spasm of modesty. Clytie, with the perfect fall of her shoulders, rising from the lily leaves that fold back as if unwilling to hide so much beauty, stood droopingly beside the proud nakedness of Falguière’s Diane. The boy who presided over this gallery of loveliness—a meagre Italian, his face nipped with frost—stood a hunched-up, wretched figure, his eyes questioning the passers-by.
Presently one of these halted in the hurrying march with an eye on Clytie. The boy drew his hands from his pockets, and with piteous eagerness held out the bust. The tones of his voice penetrated Celia’s dark musings, and she looked that way.