Fairfax and His Pride: A Novel

In a few moments, the lame sculptor on one side and the flashy Slav on the other, she led them to the little dining-room, to an exquisite table, served by two men in livery.

There was an intimacy in the apartment shut in by the panelling from floor to ceiling of the walls. The windows were covered with yellow damask curtains and the footfalls made no sound on the thick carpet.

"Mr. Rainsford is a sculptor," his hostess told Potowski. "He has studied with Cedersholm, but we shall soon forget whose pupil he is when he is a master himself."

"Ah," murmured the young man, who was nevertheless thrilled.

"He is going to do a bas-relief of me, Potowski – that is, I hope he will not refuse to make my portrait."

"Ah, no," exclaimed Potowski, clasping his soft hands, "not a bas-relief, chère Madame, but a statuary, all of it. The figure, is not it, Mr. Rainsford? You hear people say of the face it is beautiful, or the hand, or the head of a woman. I think it is all of her. It should be the entirety always, I think. I think it is monstrous to dissect the parts of the human body even in art. When I go to the Museo and see a hand here, a foot there, a torso somewhere else – you will laugh, I am ridiculous, but it makes me think I look at a haccident.

"Therefore," exclaimed Potowski, gaily swimming toward the fruit and flowers with his soft hand, "begin, cher Monsieur, by making a whole woman! I never, never sing part of a hopera. I sing a lyric, a little complete song, but in its entirety."

"But, my dear Potowski," Mrs. Faversham laughed, "a bas-relief or a bust is complete."

"But why," cried the Pole, "why behead a lady? As for a profile, it is destruction to the human face." He turned to Fairfax. "You think I am a pagan. In France they have an impolite proverb, 'Stupid as a musician,' but don't think it is true. We see harmony and melody in everything."

Apparently Potowski's lunacy had suggested something to Fairfax, for he said seriously —

"Perhaps Mrs. Faversham will let me make a figure of her some day" – he hesitated – "in the entirety," he quoted; and the words sounded madness, tremendously personal, tremendously daring. "A figure of her standing in a long cloak edged with fur, holding a little statuette in her hand."

"Charming," gurgled Potowski – he had a grape in his mouth which he had culled unceremoniously from the fruit dish. "That is a very modern idea, Rainsford, but I don't understand why she should hold a statuette in her hand."

"For my part," said the hostess, "I only understand what I have been taught. I am a common-place public, and I prefer a classic bas-relief, a profile, just a little delicate study. Will you make it for me, Mr. Rainsford?"

The new name he had chosen, and which was never real to him, sounded pleasantly on her lips, and it gave him, for the first time, a personality. His past was slipping from him; he glanced around the oval room with its soft lights and its warm colouring. It glowed like a beautiful setting for the pearl which was the lady. The dinner before him was delicious. It ceased to be food – it was a delicate refreshment. The perfume of the flowers and wines and the cooking was intoxicating.

"You eat and drink nothing," Mrs. Faversham said to him.

"No," exclaimed Potowski, sympathetically, peering across the table at Rainsford. "You are suffering perhaps – you diet?"

Antony drank the champagne in his glass and said he was thinking of his bas-relief.

Potowski, adjusting a single eye-glass in his eye, stared through it at Rainsford.

"You should do everything in its entirety, Mr. Rainsford. Eat, drink, sculpt and sing," and he swam out again gently toward Rainsford and Mrs. Faversham, "and love."

Antony smiled on them both his radiant smile. "Ah, sir," he said, "is not that just the thing it is hard for us all not to do? We mutilate the rest, our art and our endeavours, but a young man usually once in his life loves in entirety."

"I don't know," said the Pole thoughtfully, "I think perhaps not. Sometimes it's the head, or the hands, or the figure, something we call perfect or beautiful as long as it lasts, Mr. Rainsford, but if we loved the entirety there would be no broken marriages."

Mrs. Faversham, whom the musician entertained and amused, laughed softly and rose, and, a man on each side of her, went into the drawing-room, to the fire burning across the andirons. Coffee and liqueurs were brought and put on a small table.

"Potowski is a philosopher, is he not, Mr. Rainsford? When you hear him sing, though, you will find that his best argument."

Potowski stirred six lumps of sugar into his small coffee cup, drank the syrup, drank a glass of liqueur with a sort of cheerful eagerness, and stood without speaking, dangling his eyeglass and looking into the fire. Mrs. Faversham took a deep chair and her dark, slim figure was lost in it, and Antony, who had lit his cigarette, leaned on the chimney-piece near her.

She glanced at him, at the deformed shoe, at his shabby clothes. He had made his toilet as carefully as he could; his linen was spotless, his cravat new and fashioned in a big bow. His fine, thoughtful face, lit now by the pleasure of the evening, where spirit and courage were never absent if other marks were there; his fine brow with the slightly curling blond hair bright upon it, and the profound blue of his eyes – he was different from any man she had seen, and she had known many men and been a great favourite with them. It pleased her to think that she knew and understood them fairly well. She was thinking what she could do for this man. She had wondered this suddenly, the day Fairfax had met her and left her in the Louvre; she had wondered more sincerely the evening she left him at his door. She had asked him to her house in a spirit of real kindness, although she had already felt his charm. Looking at him now, she thought that no woman could see him and hear him speak, watch him for an hour, and not be conscious of that charm. She wondered what she could do for Mr. Rainsford.

"Sit there, won't you?" – she indicated the sofa near her – "you will find that a comfortable place in which to listen. Count Potowski is the one unmaterial musician I ever knew. Time and place, food or feast, make no difference to him."

Potowski, without replying, turned abruptly and went toward the next room, separated from the salon by glass doors. In another moment they heard the prelude of Bohm's "Still as the Night," and then Potowski began to sing.

CHAPTER IX

The studio underwent something of a transformation. Dearborn devoted himself to its decoration. The crisp banknote was divided between the two companions.

Fairfax ordered a suit of clothes on trust, a new pair of boots on trust, and bought outright sundry necessaries for his appearance in the world.

And Dearborn spent too much in making the studio decent, and bought an outfit of writing materials, a wadded dressing-gown with fur collar and deep pockets, the cast-off garment of some elegant rastaquouère, in a second-hand clothing shop on the boulevard. He had no plans for enjoying Paris. He philosophically looked at the cast-off shoes that had gallantly limped with the two of them up and down the stairs and here and there in the streets on such devious missions. If he should be inclined to go out he would wear them. His slippers were his real comfort. He devoted himself to the interior life and to his play. He had the place to himself, and after a long day's work he would read or plan, looking out on the quays and the Louvre, biting his fingers and weaving new plots and making youthful reflections upon life.

In the evenings Fairfax would limp home. Five days of the week he went to Barye's studio and worked for the master. Twice a week he went to the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. Just how his friend spent his time when he was not in the studio Dearborn wondered vainly. The sculptor grew less and less communicative, almost morose. Tony took to smoking countless cigarettes and sitting in the corner of the big divan, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes fixed on some object which Dearborn could not see. He would listen, or appear to, whilst Dearborn read his play; or draw for him the scenario for a new play; or the young man would read aloud bits of verse or prose that he loved and found inspiring. And Antony, more than once, could hear his own voice as he had declaimed aloud to the little cousins on a winter's afternoon, "St. Agnes' Eve, how bitter chill it was," or some other favourite repeated to shining eyes and flushed attention. Very often what Dearborn read was neither familiar nor distinguishable, for Fairfax was thinking about other things. They were not always alone in the workroom. Dearborn had friends, and those of them who had not gone away on other quests or been starved out or pushed out, would come noisily in of an evening, bringing with them perhaps a man with a fiddle and a man with a flute, and they would dance and there would be beer and "madeleines" and gay amusement of a very inoffensive kind, of a youthful kind. There would be dancing and singing, and sometimes Fairfax would take part in it all and sing with them in his pleasant baritone and smile upon them; but he liked it best when they were alone, and Dearborn did too; and in Fairfax's silence and the other man's absorption they nevertheless daily grew firmer and faster friends.

"Bob," Fairfax said – and as he spoke he abruptly interrupted Dearborn in the most vital scene of his act – "I can't take a penny from her for this portrait."

Dearborn dropped his manuscript on his knee. His expression was that of a slightly hurt egotism, for he had sat up all night working over this scene and burned all day to read it to Fairfax.

"Well, anyhow, don't ask me to cough up the two hundred and fifty francs. That's all I ask," he said a little curtly.

"I shall give her some study, one of these other statuettes," Fairfax said moodily, "some kind of return for the five hundred francs."

"She wouldn't care for anything I have got, would she, Tony?" Dearborn put his hands in the ample pockets and displayed his voluminous wrapper. "I'm crazy about this dressing-gown," he said affectionately. "It has warmed and sheltered my best thoughts. It has wrapped around and comforted my fainting heart. It's hatched ideas for me; it's been a plaidie to the angry airs. Tony, she wouldn't take the dressing-gown, would she?"

"Rot!" exclaimed his friend fiercely. "Don't be an ass. Don't you see how I feel?"

"No, I don't," said the other simply. "I am not a mind reader. I'm an imaginator. I can make up a lot of stuff about your feeling. I daresay I do invent. You will see this in my play some day. You are really an inspiration, old man, but as for having an accurate idea of your feelings…! For three weeks, ever since that banknote fluttered amongst the crumbs of our table, you have scarcely said a word to me, not a whole paragraph." He shook his finger emphatically. "If I were not absorbed myself, no doubt I should be beastly, diabolically lonesome."

Antony seemed entirely unmoved by this picture. "I think I shall go to Rome, Bob," he began, then cried: "No, I mean to St. Petersburg."

"It will be less expensive," Dearborn suggested dryly, "and considerably less travel, not to go to the Bois de Boulogne."

"I shall finish this portrait this week," Fairfax went on. "Now I can't scrape it out and begin again. I have done it twice. It would be desecration, for it's mightily like her, and my reason for my going there is over."

"Well, how about that full-length figure of her in furs and velvets, holding a little statuette in her hands, that you used to rave about doing? If at first you make a bas-relief, begin and begin again! There are busts and statues, as there are odes and sonnets and curtain-raisers and five-act tragedies."

"Yes," returned Fairfax, "there are tragedies, no doubt about it."

Fairfax, smoking, struggled with the emotions rising in him and which he had no notion of betraying to his friend. In the corner where Dearborn had rolled it, for he made the whole studio pretty much his own now, was the statue Fairfax was making of his mother. It was covered with a white cloth which took the lines and form of the head and shoulders. It stood ghostly amongst the shadows of the room and near it, on a stool, were Antony's sculpting tools, his broad wooden knives and a barrel of plaster. His gaze wandered to these inanimate objects, nothing in themselves, but which suggested and made possible and real his art – the reason for his existence. Now, when he stopped modelling Mrs. Faversham, he would go on with the bust of his mother. He turned his eyes to Dearborn.

"I have been up there for five weeks; I have been entertained there like a friend; I have eaten and drunk; I have accepted her hospitality; I have gone with her to the plays and opera. I have pretty well lived on her money."

"All men of the world do that," Dearborn said reasonably. "It's an awfully nice thing for a woman to have a handsome young man whom she can call on when she likes."

Fairfax ignored this and went on. "I have met her friends, delightful and distinguished people, who have invited me to their houses. I have never gone, not once, not even to see Potowski. Now I shall go up next Sunday and finish my work, and then I'm going away."

Dearborn crossed his thin legs, his beloved knit slippers, a remnant of his mother's affection, dangling on the toe of his foot. He made a telescope of his manuscript and peered through it as though he saw some illumination at the other end.

"You are not serious, Tony?"

Antony left the sofa and came over to his friend. Five weeks of comparative comfort and comparative release from the anxiety of existence – that is, of material existence – had changed him wonderfully. His contact with worldly people, the entertainments of Paris, the stimulant to his mind and senses, his pleasures, had done him good. His face was something fuller. He had come home early from dining with Mrs. Faversham, and in his evening dress there was an elegance about him that added to his natural distinction. In the lapel of his coat drooped a few violets from the boutonnière that had been placed by his plate.

"Cedersholm is coming next week." He lit a fresh cigarette.

"Well," returned Dearborn, coolly, "he is neither the deluge nor the earthquake, but he may be the plague. What has he got to do with you, old man?"

"She is going to marry him."

"That," said Dearborn with spirit, "is rotten. Now, I will grant you that, Tony. It's rotten for her. Things have got so mixed up in your scenario that you cannot frankly go and tell her what a hog he is. That is what ought to be done, though. She ought to know what kind of a cheat and poor sort she is going to marry. In real life or drama the simple thing never happens." Dearborn smiled finely. "She ought to know, but you can't tell her."

"No," said his friend slowly, "nor would I. But neither can I meet him in her house or anywhere else. I think I should strike him."

"You didn't strike him, though," said Dearborn, meaningly, "when you had a good impersonal chance."

"I wish I had."

"I thought you told me they were all going to Rome?"

"Mrs. Faversham doesn't want to go."

"Ah," murmured Dearborn, nodding, "she doesn't."

"No." Fairfax did not seem to observe his friend's tone. "She is mightily set on having me meet Cedersholm. She wants to have him patronize me, help me!" He laughed dryly and walked up and down the studio into the cold, away from the fire, and then back to Dearborn in his dressing-gown and slippers. "Patronize me, encourage me, pat me on the back – put me in the way of meeting men of the world of art and letters, possibly work with him. She has all sorts of kindly patronizing schemes. But she doesn't know that I have been hungry and cold, and have been housed and fed by her money. Perhaps she does, though," he cried furiously to Dearborn. "No doubt she does. Do you think she does, Bob?"

"No, no – don't be an ass, Tony, old man."

"You see, now don't you, that I can't stay in Paris, that I can't meet that man and knock him down – not tell her that I am not the poor insignificant creature that she thinks, that without me Cedersholm could not have whipped up his old brain and his tired imagination to have done the work that brought him so marked a success. I would have to tell her what I did, and that, crude and unschooled as I was, she would have to see that he was afraid of me, afraid of my future and my talent. Oh, Dearborn!" he cried, throwing up his arms.

Dearborn left his chair and went to Fairfax and put his hand on his shoulder.

"That's right," he said heartily, "blurt it all out, old man. Some day, when the right time comes, you will let it out to him."

Fairfax leaned on Dearborn's arm. "There were eight of us at dinner to-night," he said, "and Cedersholm was the general topic. He is much admired. He is to have the Legion of Honour. Much of what they said about him was just, of course, perfectly just and fair, but it sickened me. They were enthusiastic about his character, his generosity to his pupils, his sympathy with struggling artists, and one man, who had been at the unveiling of the Sphinx, spoke of my Beasts."

Dearborn felt Antony's hand trembling on his arm.

"The gall rose up in my throat, Bob. I saw myself working in a sacred frenzy in his studio, sweating blood, and my joy over my creations. I saw myself eager, hopeful, ardent, devoted, with a happy, cheerful belief in everybody. I had it then, I did indeed. Then I saw my ruined life, my wasted years as an engineer in Albany, my miserable, my cruel marriage, the things I stooped to and the degradation I might have known. My mother, whom I never saw again, called me – my wife, my child, passed before me like ghosts. If I could have had a little encouragement from him then, only just my due, well… I was thinking of all those things whilst they spoke of him, and then I looked over to her…" As he spoke Mrs. Faversham's name, Antony's voice softened. "… And she was looking at me so strangely, strangely, as though she felt something, knew something, and my silence seemed ungracious and proof of my jealousy; but I could not have said a warm word in praise of him to save my character in her eyes. When we were alone after dinner she asked me, in a voice different to any tone I have heard from her, 'Don't you like Mr. Cedersholm? You don't seem to admire him. I have never heard you speak his name, or say a friendly word about him,' and I couldn't answer her properly, and she seemed troubled."

Fairfax stopped speaking. The two friends stood mutely side by side. Then Antony said more naturally —

"You see a little of how I feel, Bob."

And the other replied, "Yes, I see a little of how you feel"; but he continued with something of his old drollery: "I would like to know a little of how she feels."

"What do you mean?"

Antony's voice was so curt, and his words were so short, that Dearborn was quick to understand that it would not be wise to touch on the subject of the woman.

"Why, I mean, Tony, that it is a valuable study for a playwright. I should like to understand the psychology of all characters."

Fairfax shrugged impatiently. "Confound you, you are a brute. All artists are, I reckon. You drive your chariot over human hearts in order to get a dramatic point."

Here the post came and with it a blue letter whose colour was familiar to Dearborn now, and he busied himself with his own mail under the lamp. Fairfax opened his note. It had no beginning.

"If it does not rain to-morrow, will you take me to Versailles? Unless you send me word that you cannot go, I will call for you at ten o'clock. We will drive through the Bois and lunch at the Reservoirs."

For a moment it seemed as though Antony would hand over his note to Dearborn, as he had handed Mrs. Faversham's first letter the night it came. But he replaced it in its envelope and put it in his pocket.

CHAPTER X

He wrote her that he should not be able to go to Versailles. He deserted his day's work at Barye's and remained at home modelling. And Dearborn, seeing Fairfax's distraction, went out early and did not return until dark. Fairfax found himself alone again, alone with his visions, alone with his pride, alone with powerful and new emotions.

Sometimes in January, in the middle of the month, days come that surprise the Parisians with their inconstancy and their softness. The sun shone out suddenly and the sky was as blue as in Italy.

Fairfax could see the people strolling along the quays, with coats open, and the little booksellers did a thriving business and the "bateaux mouche" shot off into the sunlight bound toward the suburbs which Fairfax had learned in the summer time to know and love. Versailles would be divine on such a day.

His hours spent at the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne must have been impersonal. His first essay he destroyed and began again. He did not want to bring these intimate visits suddenly to an end. But when his sitter very courteously began to question him, he was uncommunicative. He could not tell her the truth. He did not wish to romance or to lie to her. Mrs. Faversham, both sensitive and "fine," respected his reticence. But she found out about him. They talked of art and letters and life in general, circling around life in particular, and Fairfax revealed himself more than he knew, although of his actual existence he told nothing. He enjoyed the charm of the society of a worldly woman, of a clever woman. He fed his mind and cultivated his taste, delighted his eyes with the graceful picture she made, sitting, her head on her hand, posing for her portrait. Her features were not perfect, but the ensemble was lovely and he modelled with tenderness and pleasure until the little bas-relief was magically like her. He was forced to remember that the study was intended as a present for Cedersholm. He was very silent and very often wondered why she asked him so constantly to her house, why she should be so interested in so ungracious a companion. This morning, in his studio on the Quai, he unwrapped his statue of his mother. It was a figure sitting in her chair, a book in her hand, as he had seen her countless times on the veranda of the New Orleans house, dreaming, her face lifted, her eyes looking into the distance. He went back to his work with complicated feelings and a heart at which there was a new ache. He had hardly expected that this statue, left when he had gone to take up the study of another woman, would charm him as it did. He began to model. As he worked, he thought the face was singularly like Bella's – a touch to the head, to the lips, and it was still more like the young girl. Another year was gone. Bella was a woman now. Everything, as he modelled, came back to him vividly – all the American life, with its rush and struggle. So closely did it come, so near to him, that he threw down his tools to walk up and down in the sunlight pouring through the big window. He took up his tools and began modelling again. The statuette was tenderly like his mother. He smoothed the folds at her waist – and saw under the clay the colour of the violet lawn with its sprinkling flowers of darker violet. He touched the frills he had indicated around the throat – and felt the stirring of the Southern breeze across his hand and smelled the jasmine. He paused after working for two hours, standing back, resting his lame limb and musing on the little figure. It grew to suggest all womanhood: Molly, as he had seen her under the lamp-light – Mrs. Faversham, as he had watched her leaning on her hand – not Bella. He looked and thought. Bella was a child, a little girl. There was nothing reposeful or meditative about Bella, yet he had seen her pore over a book, her hair about her face. Would she ever sit like this, tranquil, reposeful, reading, dreaming? The face was like her, but the resemblance passed.

CHAPTER XI

Mrs. Faversham's dresses and jewels, her luxuries, her carriages and her horses, the extravagance of her life, had not dazzled Antony; his eyes had been pleased, but her possessions were a distinct envelope surrounding her and separating them. After watching Potowski's natatorial gestures, Fairfax had longed to swim out of the elegance into a freer sea.