A Puritan Bohemia/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
A Summer fragrance drifted through Anne Bradford's studio from the cedar branches nailed to the wall and the pine cones burning in the fireplace. The light of the fire and of the hanging lamp made curious effects in the great apartment. Spaces among the rafters were shadowy still. A Winged Victory, standing above a low partition that shut off another room, shone out in bold relief against the darkness.
It was odd and picturesque, with its irregular nooks and angles and its gallery on the east, reached by a winding stairway. Here two windows looked out upon the Square. An Indian hammock hung in one corner of the room. In another was a low divan, covered with a Bagdad curtain. The dull reds and olives of rugs and portières were relieved by a single bit of vivid colour, the scarlet robe of a cardinal in a picture on the easel.
The hostess was sitting by a white-fringed table, making coffee in a Turkish coffee-pot. On the wall, just above the gleaming glass and silver, hung a mask of Dante. The sneering face of a Nôtre Dame devil looked down from the corner.
"My conclusion is," Howard Stanton was remarking, "that, unless I can make my art express my best thought about life, I must abandon my art. And the sum and substance of that thought is this: that life is just a chance to enter into other people's lives and help develop them."
His face wore an expression unnecessarily heroic. Helen Wistar was looking at him with the old, rapt expression of the lecture-room. He always took himself seriously when she was near.
"Nobody must speak for a minute," begged Anne, "or I shall spill the water."
She slowly poured the coffee into tiny Sèvres cups and gave the tray to Annabel, who had just removed the salad plates and was anxiously waiting. Annabel wore her Sunday gown of blue nun's veiling. The unwonted responsibilities of her present task had deepened her care-worn expression.
"Now please," said Miss Bradford, coming back to the fire, "what were you talking about?"
"Oh, about living," answered Mrs. Kent. She was sitting in an old-fashioned arm-chair, the light falling softly on her smooth pale hair.
"Living? Is that all?" asked Anne with a laugh. "Life's just a chance to watch other people's lives and put down what you see. It is a stepping-stone to art."
"Isn't life," said Mrs. Kent slowly, "simply a chance to live?"
She said "live," but she meant "love."
Helen looked up from her seat on the divan and flushed slightly. Mr. Stanton was the only person who made her feel shy.
"I wonder," she said, "why one can't do one's work, and help people, and live besides?"
"O child, the gifts of the gods are more precious than that," cried Anne. "Wait until you find yourself rendering thanks for a fragment of any one of these things."
"Or a memory," said Mrs. Kent, so softly that no one heard.
Here Miserere crawled to Mr. Stanton's feet.
"Tell me your notions about life, Tabby," said the young man, picking the animal up.
"Tabby!" exclaimed Anne with indignation. "His name is Miserere. He is a fin-de-siècle cat, with a point of view. Miserere is the only pessimist in Bohemia. Life for him is a long pursuit of good things to eat, and he's unhappy because he can't have too many."
"Do you call this Bohemia?" asked Howard. "Where's the 'old hat stopping a chink in the roof'? The real thing has none of this elegance."
"It is Bohemia. It all began, my share of it at least, with that." Anne held up her white and gold cup. "I went out to Saint Cloud one day on one of the little steamers, les hirondelles. I walked down the Allée du Château to Sèvres and bought this cup. And then and there I planned my domestic life. Oh don't speak of Paris! It makes me homesick. I can see the leaf-shadows on those tree-trunks now."
Sitting by the fire they discussed many things, art, philanthropy, Paris, hopes, and aims. They spoke with the tremendous earnestness of those who consider their abstract views of value; they listened with eager interest to one another's opinions. They had talked themselves sleepy and ambitious when Mrs. Kent begged to know more of Mr. Stanton's theory.
"It is very simple," he replied, "only this, that art must learn to reflect the great teaching of the age, the reality of human brotherhood. It can no longer stand aloof, the plaything of a favoured few. Its selfishness is self-destruction. To my mind its only fortune lies in identifying itself with common life."
He scrutinized the faces of the two girls. It had never occurred to him before that Miss Wistar was so beautiful. She was thinking, as she had often thought, that he looked like some old, fair-haired Saxon hero.
He went on with growing vehemence, vainly trying to kindle in Anne's eyes the light that glowed in Helen's. His boyish manner had disappeared.
"This must be his academic air," thought Anne mournfully. "He is almost pompous. Yet he is ridiculously like himself at ten. That is partly because of the cleft in his chin."
The art of to-day has a threefold mission, he was saying. Its products must be shared with the people; art schools must be established to train the children of the poor, and to discover latent talent that now goes to waste; and the lives of the poor must be studied seriously.
"It is time for the Dresden china interpretation of human life to disappear. Art must enter the arena. It must partake of human struggle. It must show the beauty and the sadness, the hardship and the pathos, of common people's lives."
"Did you remark that you are going to say all this in your pictures?" asked Anne.
"I am going to try."
"People's lives are hard to understand," said Mrs. Kent slowly. "How can you find out really about the poor?"
"By going to live with them, sharing their conditions," he answered. "There is no other way. It is a problem, but the problem is all we have left."
"What do you mean?" asked Anne.
"I mean that the century has taken away our old illusions. The only thing we've got is a chance to make life more comfortable for other people."
"The century hasn't taken away my palette and brushes," murmured Anne.
"I don't feel quite lost while I have them. This seems like old times. When you were eight, you were going to be a missionary. Then you were artist, statesman, and great actor by turns."
"Where is Annabel?" asked Mrs. Kent. "She ought to go home. It is growing late."
Annabel, forgotten, had been amusing herself behind the screen with a scrap of drawing paper and a yellow crayon. Discovered, she held up her sketch.
"Ain't that a nice picture?" she demanded.
She had drawn, in wavering lines, a high stone wall, where a cat was sitting, gazing at the setting sun. The cat's whiskers and the sun's fierce rays met.
"There's a great deal of literature in that," commented Howard Stanton, "and it's modern, quite in the poster style."
"It is very much in your line," suggested Anne. "You ought to teach Annabel. I think that she would be a disciple."
"I should like to," replied the young man. "Do you want to learn to draw, Annabel?"
"Yes, please," responded the child.
"Now we shall see," said Anne gayly, "how Mr. Stanton carries out his theories about the discovery of latent talent. Run home, Annabel."
Here somebody put more pine cones upon the fire, and the subject of conversation shifted to pine cones.