CHAPTER VI

“ARROWS OF LONGING”

Jean slept late the next morning, late for a Greenacre girl at least. Kit’s alarm clock was warranted to disturb anybody’s most peaceful slumbers at 6 A. M. sharp, but here, with curtains drawn, and the studio as warm as toast, Jean slept along until eight when Justine came softly into the large room to pull back the heavy curtains, and say chocolate and toast were nearly ready.

“Did you close the big house at the Cove?” Jean asked, while they were dressing.

“Rented it furnished. With Brock away at college and me here at the Academy, Mother thought she’d let it go, and stay with me. She’s over at Aunt Win’s while I’m at classes. They’ve got an apartment for the winter around on Central Park South because Uncle Frank can’t bear commuting in the winter time. We’ll go over there before you go back home. Aunt Win’s up to her ears this year in American Red Cross work, and you’ll love to hear her talk.”

“Do you know, Bab,” Jean said suddenly, “I do believe that’s what ails Gilead. Nobody up there is doing anything different this winter from what they have every winter for the last fifty years. Down here there’s always something new and interesting going on.”

“Yes, but is that good? After a while you expect something new all the time, and you can’t settle down to any one thing steadily. Coming, Justine, right away.”

“Good morning, you lazy kittens,” said Mrs. Crane, laying aside her morning paper in the big, chintz-cushioned rattan chair by the south window. “I’ve had my breakfast. I’ve got two appointments this morning and must hurry.”

“Mother always mortgages tomorrow. I’ll bet anything she’s got her appointment book filled for a month ahead. What’s on for today, dear?”

“Dentist and shopping with your Aunt Win. I shall have lunch with her, so you girls will be alone. There are seats for a recital at Carnegie Hall if you’d enjoy it. I think Jean would. It’s Kolasky the ’cellist, and Mary Norman. An American girl, Jean, from the Middle West, you’ll be interested in her. She sings folk songs beautifully. Bab only likes orchestral concerts, but if you go to this, you might drop in later at Signa’s for tea. It’s right upstairs, you know, Bab, and not a bit out of your way. Aunt Win and I will join you there.”

“Isn’t she the dearest, bustling Mother,” Bab said, placidly, when they were alone. “Sometimes I feel ages older than she is. She has as much fun trotting around to everything as if New York were a steady sideshow. Do you want to go?”

“I’d love to,” Jean answered frankly. “I’ve been shut up away from everything for so long that I’m ready to have a good time anywhere. Who’s Signa?”

“A girl Aunt Win’s interested in. She’s Italian, and plays the violin. Jean Robbins, do you know the world is just jammed full of people who can do things, I mean unusual things like painting and playing and singing, better than the average person, and yet there are only a few who are really great. It’s such a tragedy because they all keep on working and hoping and thinking they’re going to be great. Aunt Win has about a dozen tucked under her wing that she encourages, and I think it’s perfectly deadly.”

Bab planted both elbows on the little square willow table, holding her cup of chocolate aloft, her straight brows drawn together in a pucker of perplexity.

“Because they won’t be great geniuses, you mean?”

“Surely. They’re just half way. All they’ve got is the longing, the urge forward.”

Jean smiled, looking past her at the view beyond the yellow curtains and box of winter greens outside. There was a little courtyard below with one lone sumac tree in it, and red brick walks. A black and white cat licked its paws on the side fence. From a clothes line fluttered three pairs of black stockings. The voices of the little Vatellis floated up as they played house in the sunshine.

“Somebody wrote a wonderful poem about that,” she said. “I forget the name, but it’s about those whose aims were greater than their ability, don’t you know what I mean? It says that the work isn’t the greatest thing, the purpose is, the dream, the vision, even if you fall short of it. I know up home there’s one dear little old lady, Miss Weathersby. We’ve just got acquainted with her. She’s the last of three sisters who were quite rich for the country. Doris found her, way over beyond the old burial ground, and she was directing some workmen. Doris said they were tearing down a long row of old sheds and chicken houses that shut off her view of the hills. She said she’d waited for years to clear away those sheds, only her sisters had wanted them there because their grandfather had built them. I think she was awfully plucky to tear them down, so she could sit at her window and see the hills. Maybe it’s the same way with Signa and the others. It’s something if they have the eyes to see the hills.”

“Maybe so,” Bab said briskly. “Maybe I can’t see them myself, and it’s just a waste of money keeping me at the Academy. I’m not a genius, and I’ll never paint great pictures, but I am going to be an illustrator, and while I’m learning I can imagine myself all the geniuses that ever lived. You know, Jean, we were told, not long ago, to paint a typical city scene. Well, the class went in for the regulation things, Washington Arch and Grant’s Tomb, Madison Square and the opera crowd at the Met. Do you know what I did?” She pushed back her hair from her eager face, and smiled. “I went down on the East Side at Five Points, right in the Italian quarter, and you know how they’re always digging up the streets here after the gas mains or something that’s gone wrong? Well, I found some workmen resting, sitting on the edge of the trench eating lunch in the sunlight, and some kiddies playing in the dirt as if it were sand. Oh, it was dandy, Jean, the color and composition and I caught it all in lovely splashes. I just called it ‘Noon.’ Do you like it?”

“Splendid,” said Jean.

Bab nodded happily.

“Miss Patmore said it was the best thing I had done, the best in the class. You can find beauty anywhere if you look for it.”

“Oh, it’s good to be down talking to you again,” Jean exclaimed. “It spurs one along so to be where others are working and thinking.”

“Think so?” Bab turned her head with her funny quizzical smile. “You ought to hear Daddy Higginson talk on that. He’s head of the life class. And he runs away to a little slab-sided shack somewhere up on the Hudson when he wants to paint. He says Emerson or Thoreau wrote about the still places where you ‘rest and invite your soul,’ and about the world making a pathway to your door, too. Let’s get dressed. It’s after nine, and I have to be in class at ten.”

It was now nearly a year since Jean herself had been a pupil at the art school. She had gone into the work enthusiastically when they had lived at the Cove on Long Island, making the trip back and forth every day on the train. Then had come her father’s breakdown and the need of the Robbins’ finding a new nest in the hills where expenses were light. As she turned the familiar street with Bab, and came in sight of the gray stone building, she couldn’t help feeling just a little thrill of regret. It represented so much to her, all the aims and ambitions of a year before.

As they passed upstairs to Bab’s classroom, some of the girls recognized her and called out a greeting. Jean waved her hand to them, but did not stop. She was too busy looking at the sketches along the walls, listening to the familiar sounds through open doors, Daddy Higginson’s deeply rounded laugh; Miss Patmore’s clear voice calling to one of the girls; Valleé, the lame Frenchman, standing with his arm thrown about a lad’s shoulders, pointing out to him mistakes in underlay of shadows. Even the familiar smell of turpentine and paint made her lift her nose as Princess did to her oats.

“Valleé’s so brave,” Bab found time to say, arranging her crayons and paper on her drawing board. “Do you remember the girl from the west who only wanted to paint marines, Marion Poole? Well, she joined Miss Patmore’s Maine class last summer and Valleé went along too, as instructor. She’s about twenty-four, you know, older than most of us, but Miss Patmore says she really has genius. Anyway, she was way out on the rocks painting and didn’t go back with the class. And the tide came in. Valleé went after her, and they say he risked his life swimming out to save her when he was lame. They’re married now. See her over there with the green apron on? They’re giving a costume supper Saturday night and we’ll go.”

“I haven’t anything to wear,” Jean said hastily.

“Mother’ll fix you up. She always can,” Bab told her comfortably. “Let’s speak to Miss Patmore before class. She’s looking at you.”

Margaret Patmore was the girls’ favorite teacher. The daughter of an artist herself, she had been born in Florence, Italy, and brought up there, later living in London and then Boston. Jean remembered how delightful her noon talks with her girls had been of her father’s intimate circle of friends back in Browning’s sunland. It had seemed so interesting to link the past and present with one who could remember, as a little girl, visits to all the art shrines. Jean had always been a favorite with her. The quiet, imaginative girl had appealed to Margaret Patmore perhaps because she had the gift of visualizing the past and its great dreamers. She took both her hands now in a firm clasp, smiling down at her.

“Back again, Jean?”

“Only for a week or two, Miss Patmore,” Jean smiled, a little wistfully. “I wish it were for longer. It seems awfully good to be here and see you all.”

“Have you done any work at all in the country?”

Had she done any work? A swift memory of the real work of Greenacres swept over Jean, and she could have laughed.

“Not much.” She shook her head. “I sort of lost my way for a while, there was so much else that had to be done, but I’m going to study now.”

“Sit with us and make believe you are back anyway. Barbara, please show her Frances’s place. She will not be here for a week.”

So just for one short week, Jean could make believe it was all true, that she was back as a “regular.” Every morning she went with Bab, and joined the class, getting inspiration and courage even from the teamwork. Late afternoons there was always something different to take in. That first day they had gone up to the recital at Carnegie Hall. Jean loved the ’cello, and it seemed as if the musician chose all the themes that always stirred her. Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat; one of the Rhapsodies, she could not remember which, but it always brought to her mind firelight and gypsies; and a tender, little haunting melody called “Petit Valse.” Up home she had played it often for her father at twilight and it always made her long for the unfulfilled hopes. And then the “Humoreske,” whimsical, questioning, it seemed to wind itself around her heart and tease her about all her yearnings.

Miss Norman sang Russian folk songs and some Hebrides lullabies.

“I’m not one bit crazy over her,” said Bab in her matter-of-fact way. “She looks too wholesome and solid to be singing that sort of music. I’d like to see her swing into Brunhilde’s call or something like that. She’d wake all the babies up with those lullabies.”

“You make me think of Kit,” Jean laughed. “She always thinks out loud and says the first thing that comes to her lips.”

“I know.” Bab’s face sobered momentarily as they came out of the main entrance and went around to the studio elevator. “Mother says I’ve never learned inhibition, and that made me curious. Of course, she meant it should. So I hunted up what inhibition meant in psychology and it did rather stagger me. You act on impulse, but if you’d only have sense enough to wait a minute, the nerves of inhibition beat the nerves of impulse, and reason sets in. I can’t bear reason, not yet. The only thing I really enjoyed in Plato was the death of Socrates.”

“That’s funny. Kit said something about that a little while ago, the sunset, and his telling someone to pay for a chicken just as he took the poisoned cup.”

“I’d like to paint it.” Bab’s gray eyes narrowed as if she saw the scene. “Why on earth haven’t the great artists done things like that instead of spotted cows and windmills.”

Before Jean could find an answer, they had reached Signa Patrona’s studio. It seemed filled with groups of people. Jean had a confused sense of many introductions, and Signa herself, a tall, slender girl in black with a rose made of gold tissue fastened in her dusky, low coiled hair. She rarely spoke, but smiled delightfully. The girls found Mrs. Crane and her sister in a corner.

“Aunt Win,” said Bab. “Here’s your country girl. Isn’t she blooming? Talk to her while I get some tea.”

“My dear,” Mrs. Everden surveyed her in a benevolent, critical sort of fashion, “you’re improved. The last time I saw you, was out at Shady Cove. You and your sisters were in some play I think, given by the Junior Auxiliary of the Church. You live in the country now, Barbara tells me. I have friends in the Berkshires.”

“Oh, but we’re way over near the Rhode Island border,” Jean said quickly. It seemed as if logically, all people who moved from Long Island must go to the Berkshires. “It’s real country up there, Gilead Centre. We’re near the old Post Road to Boston, from Hartford, but nobody hardly ever travels over it any more.”

“We might motor over in the spring, Barbara would enjoy it. Are the roads good in the spring, my dear?”

Visions of Gilead roads along in March and April flitted through Jean’s mind. They turned into quagmires of yellow mud, and where the frost did take a notion to steal away, the road usually caved in gracefully after the first spring rains. Along the end of April after everybody had complained, Tucker Hicks, the road committeeman, would bestir himself leisurely and patch up the worst places. No power in Gilead had ever been able to rouse Tucker to action before the worst was over.

“Mother’d dearly love to have you come,” she said. “The only thing we miss up there is the friendship of the Cove neighbors. If you wouldn’t mind the roads, I know you’d enjoy it, but they are awful in the spring. But nobody seems to mind a bit. One day down at the station in Nantic I heard two old farmers talking, and one said the mud up his way was clear up to the wheel hubs. ‘Sho,’ said the other. ‘Up in Gilead, the wheels go all the way down in some places.’ Just as if they were proud of it.”

Mrs. Everden shook her head slowly, and looked at her sister.

“I can’t even imagine Bess Robbins living in such a forsaken place.”

“Oh, but it isn’t forsaken,” protested Jean loyally. “And Mother really enjoys it because it’s made Father nearly well.”

“And there’s no society at all up there?”

“Well, no, not exactly,” laughed Jean, shaking her head, “but there are lots of human beings.”

“I could never endure it in this world.”

Jean thought privately that there are many things one has to learn to endure whether or no, and someway, just that little talk made her feel a wonderful love and loyalty towards the Motherbird holding her home together up in the hills.