CHAPTER XV

AT MOREL’S STUDIO

“I’ve just had a telephone message from the Contessa,” Cousin Beth said at breakfast Saturday morning. “She sends an invitation to us for this afternoon, a private view of paintings and sculpture at Henri Morel’s studio. She knew him in Italy and France, and he leaves for New York on Monday. There will be a little reception and tea, nothing too formal for you girls, so dress well, hold up your chins and turn out your toes, and behave with credit to your chaperon. It is your debut.”

Carlota looked at her quite seriously, thinking she was in earnest, but Jean always caught the flutter of fun in her eyes, and knew it would not be as ceremonious as it sounded. When she was ready that afternoon she slipped into Cousin Beth’s own little den at the south end of the house. Here were three rooms, all so different, and each showing a distinct phase of character. One was her winter studio. The summer one was built out in the orchard. This was a large sunny room, panelled in soft toned oak, with a wood brown rug on the floor, and all the treasures accumulated abroad during her years there of study and travel. In this room Jean used to find the girl Beth, who had ventured forth after the laurels of genius, and found success waiting her with love, back in little Weston.

The second room was a private sitting-room, all willow furniture, and dainty chintz coverings, with Dutch tile window boxes filled with blooming hyacinths, and feminine knick-knacks scattered about helterskelter. Here were framed photographs of loved ones and friends, a portrait of Elliott over the desk, his class colors on the wall, and intimate little kodak snapshots he had sent her. This was the mother’s and wife’s room. And the last was her bedroom. Here Jean found her dressing. All in deep smoke gray velvet, with a bunch of single petaled violets on her coat. She turned and looked at Jean critically.

“I only had this new serge suit,” said Jean. “I thought with a sort of fluffy waist it would be right to wear.”

The waist was a soft crinkly crepe silk in dull old gold, with a low collar of rose point, and just a touch of Byzantine embroidery down the front. Above it, Jean’s eager face framed in her brown hair, her brown eyes, small imperative chin with its deep cleft, and look of interest that Kit called “questioning curiosity,” all seemed accentuated.

“It’s just right, dear,” said Cousin Beth. “Go get a yellow jonquil to wear. Carlota will have violets, I think. She loves them best.”

There was a scent of coming spring in the air as they motored along the country roads, just a delicate reddening of the maple twigs, and a mist above the lush marshes down in the lower meadows. Once Carlota called out joyously. A pair of nesting bluebirds teetered on a fence rail, talking to each other of spring housekeeping.

“Ah, there they are,” she cried. “And in Italy now there will be spring everywhere. My father told me of the bluebirds here. He said they were bits of heaven’s own blue with wings on.”

“How queer it is,” Jean said, “I mean the way one remembers and loves all the little things about one’s own country.”

“Not so much all the country. Just the spot of earth you spring from. He loves this New England.”

“And I love Long Island. I was born there, not at the Cove, but farther down the coast near Montauk Point, and the smell of salt water and the marshes always stirs me. I love the long green rolling stretches, and the little low hills in the background like you see in paintings of the Channel Islands and some of the ones along the Scotch coast. Just a few straggly scrub pines, you know, and the willows and wild cherry trees and beach plums.”

“Somewhere I’ve read about that, girls; the old earth’s hold upon her children. I’m afraid I only respond to gray rocks and all of this sort of thing. I’ve been so homesick abroad just to look at a crooked apple tree in bloom that I didn’t know what to do. Each man to his ‘ain acre.’ Where were you born, Carlota?”

“At the Villa Marina. Ah, but you should see it.” Carlota’s dark face glowed with love and pride. “It is dull terra cotta color, and then dull green too, the mold of ages, I think, like the under side of an olive leaf, and flowers everywhere, and poplars in long avenues. My father laughs at our love for it, and says it is just a mouldy old ruin, but every summer we spend there. Some day perhaps you could come to see us, Jean. Would they lend her to us for a while, do you think, Mrs. Newell?”

“After the sick soldiers have all been sent home well,” said Jean. “I should love to. Isn’t it fun building air castles?”

“They are very substantial things,” Cousin Beth returned, whimsically. “Hopes to me are so tangible. We just set ahead of us the big hope, and the very thought gives us incentive and endeavor and what Elliott calls in his boy fashion, ‘punch.’ Plan from now on, Jean, for one spring in Italy. I’m scheming deeply, you know, or perhaps you haven’t even guessed yet, to get you a couple of years’ study here, then at least one abroad, and after that, you shall try your own strength.”

“Wouldn’t it be awful if I turned out just ordinary!” Jean said with her characteristic truthfulness. “I remember one girl down at the Cove, Len Marden. We went through school together, and her people said she was a musical genius. She studied all the time, really and truly. She was just a martyr, and she liked it. They had plenty of means to give her every chance, and she studied harmony in one city abroad, and then something in another city, and something else in another. We always used to wonder where Len was trying her scales. Her name was Leonora, and she used to dread it. Why, her father even retired from business, just to give his time up to watching over Len, and her mother was like a Plymouth Rock hen, brooding over her. Well, she came back last fall, and just ran away and married one of the boys from the Cove, and she says she doesn’t give a rap for a career.”

Cousin Beth and Carlota both laughed heartily at Jean’s seriousness.

“She has all of my sympathy,” the former declared. “I don’t think a woman is able to give her greatest powers to the world if she is gifted unusually, until she has known love and motherhood. I hope Leonora finds her way back to the temple of genius with twins clinging to her wing tips.”

It was just a little bit late when they arrived at the Morel studio. Jean had expected it to be more of the usual workshop, like Daddy Higginson’s for instance, where canvases heaped against the walls seemed to have collected the dust of ages, and a broom would have been a desecration. Here, you ascended in an elevator, from an entrance hall that Cousin Beth declared always made her think of the tomb of the Pharoahs in “Aida.”

“All it needs is a nice view of the Nile by moonlight, and some tall lilies in full bloom, and someone singing ‘Celeste Aida,’” she told the girls when they alighted at the ninth floor, and found themselves in the long vestibule of the Morel studio. Jean had rather a confused idea of what followed. There was the meeting with Morel himself. Stoop shouldered and thin, with his vivid foreign face, half closed eyes, and odd moustache like a mandarin’s. And near him Madame Morel, with a wealth of auburn hair and big dark eyes. She heard Carlota say just before they were separated,

“He loves to paint red hair, and Aunt Signa says she has the most wonderful hair you ever saw, like Melisande.”

Cousin Beth had been taken possession of by a stout smiling young man with eyeglasses and was already the center of a little group. Jean heard his name, and recognized it as that of a famous illustrator. Carlota introduced her to a tall girl in brown whom she had met in Italy, and then somehow, Jean could not have told how it happened, they drifted apart. Not but what she was glad of a breathing spell, just a chance as Shad would have said, to get her bearings. Morel was showing some recent canvases, still unframed, at the end of the studio, and everyone seemed to gravitate that way.

Jean found a quiet corner near a tall Chinese screen. Somebody handed her fragrant tea in a little red and gold cup, and she was free to look around her. A beautiful woman had just arrived. She was tall and past first youth, but Jean leaned forward expectantly. This must be the Contessa. Her gown seemed as indefinite and elusive in detail as a cloud. It was dull violet color, with a gleam of gold here and there as she moved slowly towards Morel’s group. Under a wide brimmed hat of violet, you saw the lifted face, with tired lovely eyes, and close waves of pale golden hair. And this was not all. Oh, if only Helen could have seen her, thought Jean, with a funny little reversion to the home circle. She had wanted a princess from real life, or a contessa, anything that was tangibly romantic and noble, and here was the very pattern of a princess, even to a splendid white stag hound which followed her with docile eyes and drooping long nose.

“My dear, would you mind coaxing that absent-minded girl at the tea table to part with some lemon for my tea? And the Roquefort sandwiches are excellent too.”

Jean turned at the sound of the new voice beside her. There on the same settee sat a robust, middle-aged late comer. Her satin coat was worn and frayed, her hat altogether too youthful with its pink and mauve butterflies veiled in net. It did make one think of poor Cynthy and her yearnings towards roses. Jean saw, too, that there was a button missing from her gown, and her collar was pinned at a wrong angle, but the collar was real lace and the pin was of old pearls. It was her face that charmed. Framed in an indistinct mass of fluffy hair, gray and blonde mixed, with a turned up, winning mouth, and delightfully expressive eyes, it was impossible not to feel immediately interested and acquainted.

Before they had sat there long, Jean found herself indulging in all sorts of confidences. They seemed united by a common feeling of, not isolation exactly, but newness to this circle.

“I enjoy it so much more sitting over here and looking on,” Jean said. “Cousin Beth knows everyone, of course, but it is like a painting. You close one eye, and get the group effect. And I must remember everything to write it home to the girls.”

“Tell me about these girls. Who are they that you love them so?” asked her new friend. “I, too, like the bird’s eye view best. I told Morel I did not come to see anything but his pictures, and now I am ready for tea and talk.”

So Jean told all about Greenacres and the girls there and before she knew it, she had disclosed too, her own hopes and ambitions, and perhaps a glimpse of what it might mean to the others still in the nest if she, the first to fly, could only make good. And her companion told her, in return, of how sure one must be that the spark of inspiration is really a divine one and worthy of sacrifice, before one gives up all to it.

“Yonder in France, and in Italy too, but mostly in France,” she said, “I have found girls like you, my child, from your splendid homeland, living on little but hopes, wasting their time and what money could be spared them from some home over here, following false hopes, and sometimes starving. It is but a will-o’-the-wisp, this success in art, a sort of pitiful madness that takes possession of our brains and hearts and makes us forget the daily road of gold that lies before us.”

“But how can you tell for sure?” asked Jean, leaning forward anxiously.

“Who can answer that? I have only pitied the ones who could not see they had no genius. Ah, my dear, when you meet real genius, then you know the difference instantly. It is like the real gems and the paste. There is consecration and no thought of gain. The work is done irresistibly, spontaneously, because they cannot help it. They do not think of so called success, it is only the fulfilment of their own visions that they love. You like to draw and paint, you say, and you have studied some in New York. What then?”

Jean pushed back her hair impulsively.

“Do you know, I think you are a little bit wrong. You won’t mind my saying that, will you, please? It is only this. Suppose we are not geniuses, we who see pictures in our minds and long to paint them. I think that is the gift too, quite as much as the other, as the power to execute. Think how many go through life with eyes blind to all beauty and color! Surely it must be something to have the power of seeing it all, and of knowing what you want to paint. My Cousin Roxy says it’s better to aim at the stars and hit the bar post, than to aim at the bar post and hit the ground.”

“Ah, so. And one of your English poets says too, ‘A man’s aim should outreach his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ Maybe, you are quite right. The vision is the gift.” She turned and laid her hand on Jean’s shoulder, her eyes beaming with enjoyment of their talk. “I shall remember you, Brown Eyes.”

And just at this point Cousin Beth and Carlota came towards them, the former smiling at Jean.

“Don’t you think you’ve monopolized the Contessa long enough, young woman?” she asked. Jean could not answer. The Contessa, this whimsical, oddly gowned woman, who had sat and talked with her over their tea in the friendliest sort of way, all the time that Jean had thought the Contessa was the tall lady in the temperamental gown with the stag hound at her heels.

“But this is delightful,” exclaimed the Contessa, happily. “We have met incognito. I thought she was some demure little art student who knew no one here, and she has been so kind to me, who also seemed lonely. Come now, we will meet with the celebrities.”

With her arm around Jean’s waist, she led her over to the group around Morel, and told them in her charming way of how they had discovered each other.

“And she has taught me a lesson that you, Morel, with all your art, do not know, I am sure. It is not the execution that is the crown of ambition and aspiration, it is the vision itself. For the vision is divine inspiration, but the execution is the groping of the human hand.”

“Oh, but I never could say it so beautifully,” exclaimed Jean, pink cheeked and embarrassed, as Morel laid his hand over hers.

“Nevertheless,” he said, gently, “success to thy finger-tips, Mademoiselle.”