The Common Law

He began to laugh: "Valerie, you funny little thing! You funny, funny little thing!"

"Not in the slightest," she retorted, sedately. "I'm having a heavenly time for the first time in my life, and I have so wanted you to be part of it … of course you are part of it," she added, hastily—"most of it! I only meant that I—I'd like to be a little in your other life—have you enter mine, a little—just so I can remember, in years to come, an evening with you now and then—to see things going on around us—to hear what you think of things that we see together…. Because, with you, I feel so divinely free, so unembarrassed, so entirely off my guard…. I don't mean to say that I don't have a splendid time with the others even when I have to watch them; I do—and even the watching is fun—"

The child-like audacity and laughing frankness, the confidence of her attitude toward him were delightfully refreshing. He looked into her pretty, eager, engaging face, smiling, captivated.

"Valerie," he said, "tell me something—will you?"

"Yes, if I can."

"I'm more or less of a painting machine. I've made myself so, deliberately—to the exclusion of other interests. I wonder"—he looked at her musingly—"whether I'm carrying it too far for my own good."

"I don't understand."

"I mean—is there anything machine-made about my work? Does it lack—does it lack anything?"

"No!" she said, indignantly loyal. "Why do you ask me that?"

"People—some people say it does lack—a certain quality."

She said with supreme contempt: "You must not believe them. I also hear things—and I know it is an unworthy jealousy that—"

"What have you heard?" he interrupted.

"Absurdities. I don't wish even to think of them—"

"I wish you to. Please. Such things are sometimes significant."

"But—is there any significance in what a few envious artists say—or a few silly models—"

"More significance in what they say than in a whole chorus of professional critics."

"Are you serious?" she asked, astonished.

"Perfectly. Without naming anybody or betraying any confidence, what have you heard in criticism of my work? It's from models and brother painters that the real truth comes—usually distorted, half told, maliciously hinted sometimes—but usually the germ of truth is to be found in what they say, however they may choose to say it."

Valerie leaned back against the door, hands clasped behind her, eyebrows bent slightly inward in an unwilling effort to remember.

Finally she said impatiently: "They don't know what they're talking about. They all say, substantially, the same thing—"

"What is that thing?"

"Why—oh, it's too silly to repeat—but they say there is nothing lovable about your work—that it's inhumanly and coldly perfect—too—too—" she flushed and laughed uncertainly—"'too damn omniscient' is what one celebrated man said. And I could have boxed his large, thin, celebrated ears for him!"

"Go on," he nodded; "what else do they say?"

"Nothing. That's all they can find to say—all they dare say. You know what they are—what other men are—and some of the younger girls, too. Not that I don't like them—and they are very sweet to me—only they're not like you—"

"They're more human. Is that it, Valerie?"

"No, I don't mean that!"

"Yes, you do. You mean that the others take life in a perfectly human manner—find enjoyment, amusement in each other, in a hundred things outside of their work. They act like men and women, not like a painting machine; if they experience impulses and emotions they don't entirely stifle 'em. They have time and leisure to foregather, laugh, be silly, discuss, banter, flirt, make love, and cut up all the various harmless capers that humanity is heir to. That's what you mean, but you don't realise it. And you think, and they think, that my solemn and owlish self-suppression is drying me up, squeezing out of me the essence of that warm, lovable humanity in which, they say, my work is deficient. They say, too, that my inspiration is lacking in that it is not founded on personal experience; that I have never known any deep emotion, any suffering, any of the sterner, darker regrets—anything of that passion which I sometimes depict. They say that the personal and convincing element is totally absent because I have not lived"—he laughed—"and loved; that my work lacks the one thing which only the self-knowledge of great happiness and great pain can lend to it…. And—I think they are right, Valerie. What do you think?"

The girl stood silent, with lowered eyes, reflecting for a moment. Then she looked up curiously.

"Have you never been very unhappy?"

"I had a toothache once."

She said, unsmiling: "Haven't you ever suffered mentally?"

"No—not seriously. Oh, I've regretted little secret meannesses—bad temper, jealousy—"

"Nothing else? Have you never experienced deep unhappiness—through death, for example?"

"No, thank God. My father and mother and sister are living…. It is rather strange," he added, partly to himself, "that the usual troubles and sorrows have so far passed me by. I am twenty-seven; there has never been a death in my family, or among my intimate friends."

"Have you any intimate friends?"

"Well—perhaps not—in the strict sense. I don't confide."

"Have you never cared, very much, for anybody—any woman?"

"Not sentimentally," he returned, laughing. "Do you think that a good course of modern flirtation—a thorough schooling in the old-fashioned misfortunes of true love would inject into my canvases that elusively occult quality they're all howling for?"

She remained smilingly silent.

"Perhaps something less strenuous would do," he said, mischievously—"a pretty amourette?—just one of those gay, frivolous, Louis XV affairs with some daintily receptive girl, not really improper, but only ultra fashionable. Do you think that would help some, Valerie?"

She raised her eyes, still smiling, a little incredulous, very slightly embarrassed:

"I don't think your painting requires any such sacrifices of you, Mr. Neville…. Are you going to take me somewhere to dinner? I'm dreadfully hungry."

"You poor little girl, of course I am. Besides, you must be suffering under the terrible suppression of that 'thorough talk' which you—"

"It doesn't really require a thorough talk," she said; "I'll tell you now what I had to say. No, don't interrupt, please! I want to—please let me—so that nothing will mar our enjoyment of each other and of the gay world around us when we are dining…. It is this: Sometimes—once in a while—I become absurdly lonely, which makes me a fool, temporarily. And—will you let me telephone you at such times?—just to talk to you—perhaps see you for a minute?"

"Of course. You know my telephone number. Call me up whenever you like."

"Could I see you at such moments? I—there's a—some—a kind of sentiment about me—when I'm very lonely; and I've been foolish enough to let one or two men see it—in fact I've been rather indiscreet—silly—with a man—several men—now and then. A lonely girl is easily sympathised with—and rather likes it; and is inclined to let herself go a little…. I don't want to…. And at times I've done it…. Sam Ogilvy nearly kissed me, which really doesn't count—does it? But I let Harry Annan do it, once…. If I'm weak enough to drift into such silliness I'd better find a safeguard. I've been thinking—thinking—that it really does originate in a sort of foolish loneliness …not in anything worse. So I thought I'd have a thorough talk with you about it. I'm twenty-one—with all my experience of life and of men crowded into a single winter and spring. I have as friends only the few people I have met through you. I have nobody to see unless I see them—nowhere to go unless I go where they ask me…. So I thought I'd ask you to let me depend a little on you, sometimes—as a refuge from isolation and morbid thinking now and then. And from other mischief—for which I apparently have a capacity—to judge by what I've done—and what I've let men do already."

She laid her hand lightly on his arm in sudden and impulsive confidence:

"That's my 'thorough talk.' I haven't any one else to tell it to. And I've told you the worst." She smiled at him adorably: "And now I am ready to go out with you," she said,—"go anywhere in the world with you, Kelly. And I am going to be perfectly happy—if you are."

CHAPTER III

One day toward the middle of June Valerie did not arrive on time at the studio. She had never before been late.

About two o'clock Sam Ogilvy sauntered in, a skull pipe in his mouth, his hair rumpled:

"It's that damn mermaid of mine," he said, "can't you come up and look at her and tell me what's the trouble, Kelly?"

"Not now. Who's posing?"

"Rita. She's in a volatile humour, too—fidgets; denies fidgeting; reproaches me for making her keep quiet; says I draw like a bum chimney—no wonder my work's rotten! Besides, she's in a tub of water, wearing that suit of fish-scales I had made for Violet Cliland, and she says it's too tight and she's tired of the job, anyway. Fancy my mental condition."

"Oh, she won't throw you down. Rita is a good sport," said Neville.

"I hope so. It's an important picture. Really, Kelly, it's great stuff—a still, turquoise-tinted pool among wet rocks; ebb tide; a corking little mermaid caught in a pool left by the receding waves—all tones and subtle values," he declared, waving his arm.

"Don't paint things in the air with your thumb," said Neville, coldly.

"No wonder Rita is nervous."

"Rita is nervous," said Ogilvy, "because she's been on a bat and supped somewhere until the coy and rosy dawn chased her homeward. And your pretty paragon, Miss West, was with the party—"

"What?" said Neville, sharply.

"Sure thing! Harry Annan, Rita, Burleson, Valerie—and I don't know who else. They feasted somewhere east of Coney—where the best is like the würst—and ultimately became full of green corn, clams, watermelon, and assorted fidgets…. Can't you come up and look at my picture?"

Neville got up, frowning, and followed Ogilvy upstairs.

Rita Tevis, swathed in a blanket from which protruded a dripping tinselled fish's tail, sat disconsolately on a chair, knitting a red-silk necktie for some party of the second part, as yet unidentified.

"Mr. Neville," she said, "Sam has been quarrelling with me every minute while I'm doing my best in that horrid tub of water. If anybody thinks it's a comfortable pose, let them try it! I wish—I wish I could have the happiness of seeing Sam afloat in this old fish-scale suit with every spangle sticking into him and his legs cramped into this unspeakable tail!"

She extended a bare arm, shook hands, pulled up her blanket wrap, and resumed her knitting with a fierce glance at Ogilvy, who had attempted an appealing smile.

Neville stood stock-still before the canvas. The picture promised well; it was really beautiful—the combined result of several outdoor studies now being cleverly worked up. But Ogilvy's pictures never kept their promise.

"Also," observed Rita, reproachfully, "I posed en plein air for those rainbow sketches of his—and though it was a lonely cove with a cunningly secluded little crescent beach, I was horribly afraid of somebody coming—and besides I got most cruelly sun-burned—"

"Rita! You said you enjoyed that excursion!" exclaimed Ogilvy, with pathos.

"I said it to flatter that enormous vanity of yours, Sam. I had a perfectly wretched time."

"What sort of a time did you have last evening?" inquired Neville, turning from the picture.

"Horrid. Everybody ate too much, and Valerie spooned with a new man—I don't remember his name. She went out in a canoe with him and they sang 'She kissed him on the gangplank when the boat moved out.'"

Neville, silent, turned to the picture once more. In a low rapid voice he indicated to Ogilvy where matters might be differently treated, stepped back a few paces, nodded decisively, and turned again to Rita:

"I've been waiting for Miss West," he said. "Have you any reason to think that she might not keep her appointment this morning?"

"She had a headache when we got home," said Rita. "She stayed with me last night. I left her asleep. Why don't you ring her up. You know my number."

"All right," said Neville, shortly, and went out.

When he first tried to ring her up the wire was busy. It was a party wire, yet a curious uneasiness set him pacing the studio, smoking, brows knitted, until he decided it was time to try again.

This time he recognised her distant voice: "Hello—hello! Is that you, Mr. Neville?"

"Valerie!"

"Oh, it is you, Kelly? I hoped you would call me up. I knew it must be you!"

"Yes, it is. What the deuce is the matter? Are you ill?"

"Oh, dear, no.'"

"What, then?"

"I was so sleepy, Kelly. Please forgive me. We had such a late party—and it was daylight before I went to bed. Please forgive me; won't you?"

"When I called you a few minutes ago your wire was busy. Were you conversing?"

"Yes. I was talking to José Querida."

"H'm!"

"José was with us last evening…. I went canoeing with him. He just called me up to ask how I felt."

"Hunh!"

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Are you annoyed, Louis?"

"No!"

"Oh, I thought it sounded as though you were irritated. I am so ashamed at having overslept. Who told you I was here? Oh, Rita, I suppose. Poor child, she was more faithful than I. The alarm clock woke her and she was plucky enough to get up—and I only yawned and thought of you, and I was so sleepy! Are you sure you do forgive me?"

"Of course."

"You don't say it very kindly."

"I mean it cordially," he snapped. He could hear her sigh: "I suppose you do." Then she added:

"I am dressing, Kelly. I don't wish for any breakfast, and I'll come to the studio as soon as I can—"

"Take your breakfast first!"

"No, I really don't care for—"

"All right. Come ahead."

"I will. Good-bye, Kelly, dear."

He rang off, picked up the telephone again, called the great Hotel Regina, and ordered breakfast sent to his studio immediately.

When Valerie arrived she found silver, crystal, and snowy linen awaiting her with chilled grapefruit, African melon, fragrant coffee, toast, and pigeon's eggs poached on Astrakan caviar.

"Oh, Louis!" she exclaimed, enraptured; "I don't deserve this—but it is perfectly dear of you—and I am hungry!… Good-morning," she added, shyly extending a fresh cool hand; "I am really none the worse for wear you see."

That was plain enough. In her fresh and youthful beauty the only sign of the night's unwisdom was in the scarcely perceptible violet tint under her thick lashes. Her skin was clear and white and dewy fresh, her dark eyes unwearied—her gracefully slender presence fairly fragrant with health and vigour.

She seated herself—offered to share with him in dumb appeal, urged him in delicious pantomime, and smiled encouragingly as he reluctantly found a chair beside her and divided the magnificent melon.

"Did you have a good time?" he asked, trying not to speak ungraciously.

"Y-yes…. It was a silly sort of a time."

"Silly?"

"I was rather sentimental—with Querida."

He said nothing—grimly.

"I told you last night, Louis. Why couldn't you see me?"

"I was dining out; I couldn't."

She sipped her chilled grapefruit meditatively:

"I hadn't seen you for a week," she laughed, glancing sideways at him, "and that lonely feeling began about five o'clock; and I called you up at seven because I couldn't stand it…. But you wouldn't see me; and so when Rita and the others came in a big touring car—do you blame me very much for going with them?"

"No."

Her expression became serious, a trifle appealing:

"My room isn't very attractive," she said, timidly. "It is scarcely big enough for the iron bed and one chair—and I get so tired trying to read or sew every evening by the gas—and it's very hot in there."

"Are you making excuses for going?"

"I do not know…. Unless people ask me, I have nowhere to go except to my room; and when a girl sits there evening after evening alone it—it is not very gay."

She tried the rich, luscious melon with much content, and presently her smile came back:

"Louis, it was a funny party. To begin we had one of those terrible clambakes—like a huge, horrid feast of the Middle Ages—and it did not agree with everybody—or perhaps it was because we weren't middle-aged—or perhaps it was just the beer. I drank water; so did the beautiful José Querida…. I think he is pretty nearly the handsomest man I ever saw; don't you?"

"He's handsome, cultivated, a charming conversationalist, and a really great painter," said Neville, drily.

She looked absently at the melon; tasted it: "He is very romantic … when he laughs and shows those beautiful, even teeth…. He's really quite adorable, Kelly—and so gentle and considerate—"

"That's the Latin in him."

"His parents were born in New York."

She sipped her coffee, tried a pigeon egg, inquired what it was, ate it, enchanted.

"How thoroughly nice you always are to me, Kelly!" she said, looking up in the engagingly fearless way characteristic of her when with him.

"Isn't everybody nice to you?" he said with a shrug which escaped her notice.

"Nice?" She coloured a trifle and laughed. "Not in your way, Kelly. In the sillier sense they are—some of them."

"Even Querida?" he said, carelessly.

"Oh, just like other men—generously ready for any event. What self-sacrificing opportunists men are! After all, Kelly," she added, slipping easily into the vernacular, "it's always up to the girl."

"Is it?"

"Yes, I think so. I knew perfectly well that I had no business to let Querida's arm remain around me. But—there was a moon, Kelly."

"Certainly."

"Why do you say 'certainly'?"

"Because there was one."

"But you say it in a manner—" She hesitated, continued her breakfast in leisurely reflection for a while, then:

"Louis?"

"Yes."

"Am I too frank with you?"

"Why?"

"I don't know; I was just thinking. I tell you pretty nearly everything. If I didn't have you to tell—have somebody—" She considered, with brows slightly knitted—"if I didn't have somebody to talk to, it wouldn't be very good for me. I realise that."

"You need a grandmother," he said, drily; "and I'm the closest resemblance to one procurable."

The imagery struck her as humorous and she laughed.

"Poor Kelly," she said aloud to herself, "he is used and abused and imposed upon, and in revenge he offers his ungrateful tormentor delicious breakfasts. What shall his reward be?—or must he await it in Paradise where he truly belongs amid the martyrs and the blessed saints!"

Neville grunted.

"Oh, oh! such a post-Raphaelite scowl! Job won't bow to you when you go aloft, Kelly. Besides, polite martyrs smile pleasantly while enduring torment…. What are you going to do with me to-day?" she added, glancing around with frank curiosity at an easel which was set with a full-length virgin canvas.

"Portrait," he replied, tersely.

"Oh," she said, surprised. He had never before painted her clothed.

From moment to moment, as she leisurely breakfasted, she glanced around at the canvas, interested in the new idea of his painting her draped; a trifle perplexed, too.

"Louis," she said, "I don't quite see how you're ever going to find a purchaser for just a plain portrait of me."

He said, irritably: "I don't have to work for a living every minute, do I? For Heaven's sake give me a day off to study."

"But—it seems like wasted time—"

"What is wasted time?"

"Why just to paint a portrait of me as I am. Isn't it?" She looked up smilingly, perfectly innocent of any self-consciousness. "In the big canvases for the Byzantine Theatre you always made my features too radiant, too glorious for portraits. It seems rather a slump to paint me as I am—just a girl in street clothes."

A singular expression passed over his face.

"Yes," he said, after a moment—"just a girl in street clothes. No clouds, no sky, no diaphanous draperies of silk; no folds of cloth of gold; no gemmed girdles, no jewels. Nothing of the old glamour, the old glory; no sunburst laced with mist; no 'light that never was on sea or land.' … Just a young girl standing in the half light of my studio…. And by God!—if I can not do it—the rest is worthless."

Amazed at his tone and expression she turned quickly, set back her cup, remained gazing at him, bewildered by the first note of bitterness she had ever heard in his voice.

He had risen and walked to his easel, back partly turned. She saw him fussing with his palette, colours, and brushes, watched him for a few moments, then she went away into the farther room where she had a glass shelf to herself with toilet requisites—a casual and dainty gift from him.

When she returned he was still bending over his colour-table; and she walked up and laid her hand on his shoulder—not quite understanding why she did it.

He straightened up to his full stature, surprised, turning his head to meet a very clear, very sweetly disturbed gaze.

"Kelly, dear, are you unhappy?"

"Why—no."

"You seem to be a little discontented."

"I hope I am. It's a healthy sign."

"Healthy?"

"Certainly. The satisfied never get anywhere…. That Byzanite business has begun to wear on my nerves."

"Thousands and thousands of people have gone to see it, and have praised it. You know what the papers have been saying—"

Under her light hand she felt the impatient movement of his shoulders, and her hand fell away.

"Don't you care for it, now that it's finished?" she asked, wondering.

"I'm devilish sick of it," he said, so savagely that every nerve in her recoiled with a tiny shock. She remained silent, motionless, awaiting his pleasure. He set his palette, frowning. She had never before seen him like this.

After a while she said, quietly: "If you are waiting for me, please tell me what you expect me to do, because I don't know, Kelly."

"Oh, just stand over there," he said, vaguely; "just walk about and stop anywhere when you feel like stopping."

She walked a few steps at hazard, partly turned to look back at him with a movement adorable in its hesitation.

"Don't budge!" he said, brusquely.

"Am I to remain like this?"

"Exactly."

He picked up a bit of white chalk, went over to her, knelt down, and traced on the floor the outline of her shoes.

Then he went back, and, with his superbly cool assurance, began to draw with his brush upon the untouched canvas.

From where she stood, and as far as she could determine, he seemed, however, to work less rapidly than usual—with a trifle less decision—less precision. Another thing she noticed; the calm had vanished from his face. The vivid animation, the cool self-confidence, the half indolent relapse into careless certainty—all familiar phases of the man as she had so often seen him painting—were now not perceptible. There seemed to be, too, a curious lack of authority about his brush strokes at intervals—moments of grave perplexity, indecision almost resembling the hesitation of inexperience—and for the first time she saw in his gray eyes the narrowing concentration of mental uncertainty.

It seemed to her sometimes as though she were looking at a total stranger. She had never thought of him as having any capacity for the ordinary and lesser ills, vanities, and vexations—the trivial worries that beset other artists.

"Louis?" she said, full of curiosity.

"What?" he demanded, ungraciously.

"You are not one bit like yourself to-day."

He made no comment. She ventured again:

"Do I hold the pose properly?"

"Yes, thanks," he said, absently.

"May I talk?"

"I'd rather you didn't, Valerie, just at present."

"All right," she rejoined, cheerfully; but her pretty eyes watched him very earnestly, a little troubled.

When she was tired the pose ended; that had been their rule; but long after her neck and back and thighs and limbs begged for relief, she held the pose, reluctant to interrupt him. When at last she could endure it no longer she moved; but her right leg had lost not only all sense of feeling but all power to support her; and down she came with a surprised and frightened little exclamation—and he sprang to her and swung her to her feet again.