Part 9

The day was a fine one of sunlight less tempered with gray than most Paris sunshine. The model was a stout, red-haired woman with the milk-white skin of red-haired people. From the great expanse of the skylight, there poured upon her opulent nude body, as smooth and white as a newly peeled almond, a flood of light that was sparkling, in spite of the north exposure. The room rang with the high, clear brightness of that white flesh in that morning light.

Around the model sat the thirty or so disciples of the Master. While I waited for Angelica, I wandered around back of them, glancing at the canvases on their easels.

They had all painted the model the color of an old saddle. From one dim, cavernous sketch after another, a misty, smeary, dark-brown mass looked out waveringly from blue, or brown, or gray twilight. The red head glimmered faintly, attenuated by layers and layers of shadow. The disciples looked up at the gleaming white woman before them, reflecting the daylight as definitely as a sound tooth reflects it, and looked down happily and proudly on their dark, blurred canvases. You could see how pleased they were at the progress they were making. They had caught it, this time, they had caught what was the thing to catch.

“We’ll have some fireworks, all right, when ‘the Master’ gets here,” I thought to myself.

Presently he came. The door swung open, I caught a glimpse of the concierge performing the impossible in the way of holding the door open and effacing herself in one and the same gesture, and in came a dapper, immaculately dressed little old gentleman, with gray gloves and pearl-gray gaiters.

The disciples prostrated themselves, foreheads to the floor (or at least that is the impression they made on me in the first intense emotion of his entrance) and then stiffened to attention before their easels, not to miss a word of the down-dropping pearls and rubies.

The little old gentleman advanced with small, gentlemanly steps to the first of the easels, and contemplated the leather-brown South-Sea-Islander depicted on it. Every one of the students held her breath. So did I.

He looked at it a long time, his face imperturbable. Then with the traditional studio gesture I had seen all my life in studios--outstretched thumb, modeling in the air--he began saying what I had heard all my life in studios, “A little more shadow on the shoulder, I should say. And perhaps.... Yes, go into the modeling of that arm more deeply. On the whole very promising, very interesting.”

He passed on to the next easel. One felt another devout heart turn over with a rustle. “Good! Well _felt_, that knee. But lacking in distinction, perhaps, the treatment of the hair. Go into the modeling of the hands more deeply.”

He passed to the next. And the next. And the next. I heard a murmur of “Very promising ... very interesting ... deeper feeling about ... keep it flat ... subtle ... relations of planes not quite ... very promising ... very interesting.”

In half an hour it was over. He walked neatly back to the door, which the nearest student sprang to open, and with a courteous bow all around he disappeared, his face imperturbable to the last. If he lifted a cynical eyebrow in amusement, it was not till after the door had closed upon him.

Angelica and I were now free to go, and I proceeded to the difficult undertaking of cutting her out from the herd of art-students milling excitedly around and around before the canvases, “Did you hear what he said about my shoulder-blade?” “This was the plane he liked on my back.” “He didn’t object to the treatment of my ...”

The model, however, showed an imperturbability as complete as that of the Master. Like him, she had earned her pay for a morning’s work. As the door had closed on him, she had climbed down off the platform, and she was now calmly pulling her chemise on over her red head.

Angelica was still a little wild-eyed and emotional when we emerged on the street. “Isn’t he _won_derful?” she said, clutching at my arm. “Can’t you understand now what a privilege it is to ...” She took ten minutes to blow off this high-pressure steam and come down to little wandering puffs like, “It _means_ so much to have such precious contacts!” And, “You simply take it in through your _pores_ when you are in the real art atmosphere.”

Understand me, please, I do not venture to affirm that this is really all that took place. I am no art-student and never was. There may have been oceans more. But this is all that I saw.

COLONEL SHAYS

I dare say when you studied American history you read about Shays’ Rebellion, in Massachusetts, and duly learned that it was put down, and the instigators punished. But I am sure that you never knew, and never wondered, what became of Colonel Shays himself, of whom the history books say succinctly, “the leader himself, escaped.”

I have never seen in print anything about the latter part of his life beyond one or two scanty and inaccurate references in one or two out-of-date books of reference; but all the older people in our town were brought up on stories about him, for it was to the valley just over the mountain from us that he fled after his last defeat. And later on, as an old man, he lived for some years in our town, in a house still standing, and told many people what I am going to set down here.

At the time when he made his escape from the officers of the State in Massachusetts, Vermont was, quaintly enough, an independent republic, all by itself, and hence a sufficient refuge for men fleeing from the officers of any State in the Union. Furthermore it was still rather wild, sparsely settled, none too respectful of any authority, and distinctly sympathetic to strangers who came from the east, south, or west over the mountains on the run, with the manner of men escaping from sheriffs. Sheriffs were not popular persons in Vermont in 1787.

But all this did not seem to make it a safe enough refuge to the man with a price set on his head, the man who had risked everything on the boldest of enterprises, and had lost everything. He passed by the rough scattered little hamlets and went into a remote, narrow, dark, high valley, which is to this day a place where a man might hide for years and never be seen. Colonel Shays, traveling at night, on foot, through the forests, came down into the Sandgate valley through the Beartown notch, over the mountains, and not a soul knew that he had come.

He made his first camp, which was also his permanent and last one, since he was never disturbed, high up on a shoulder of the mountain, overlooking the trail for a great distance, and densely surrounded with a thick growth of pine trees. Very cautiously, making no noise, using the ax and knife which were his only tools, he put up a rough shelter, and building a fire only at night in a hollow where rocks masked its flame, began cooking some of the game he caught. He lived in this way, all alone for years and years. Game was abundant; like most men of that time he was an adroit trapper, a good pioneer, and knew how to smoke and preserve the flesh of animals and to save their skins. For the first year he did not dare to let any one know that a man was living there, and literally saw not one soul.

Then one day about a year after he began this life, a little boy going fishing saw a tall, strong, black-haired stranger standing in the trail and holding a large packet of furs. He told the child to take the packet and ask his father for a bushel of seed-corn and a bag of salt. He specified that the man who brought it was to leave it just where they then stood and go away without waiting.

The child’s father was a rough, half-civilized, good-natured trapper, who had had troubles of his own with unreasonable officers of the law in York State. When the child told his story, the father laughed knowingly, took the skins, got the seed-corn and the salt, left them in the place indicated, and kept a neighborly shut mouth. He could not read or write, had never heard of Shays’ Rebellion, and supposed the man in hiding to be in the same situation as himself. Living as he did, it seemed no awful fate to make one’s living out of the woods, and he thought little of the fact that he had a new neighbor.

After this, Colonel Shays began a little cultivation of the ground, in scattered places, hidden behind screens of thick trees, in a few natural clearings in the forest. He used to say that life was infinitely more tolerable to him after the addition to his diet of salt and cereals. After some months he risked a little more, and, buying them with furs worth forty times their value, he secured a few tools and some gunpowder. The transactions were always carried on through the child, the only one to see the fugitive.

Nothing has come down to me of what this terrible dead halt in mid-career, and this grim isolation from the world meant to the active, intelligent, ambitious man at the height of his powers. None of the old people who heard him talk seem to have asked him about this, or to have had any curiosity on the subject. Only the bare facts are known, that he lived thus for many years, till the little boy grew up, till his own hair turned gray and then white, till the few families in that valley were quite used to the knowledge that a queer, harmless old man was living up in the woods near the northern pass of the mountains, miles from any neighbor. Once in a great while, now, some one saw him--a boy fishing, a hunter far on the trail of a deer, or a group of women picking berries. He occasionally exchanged a few words with his neighbors at such times, but he had almost forgotten how to speak aloud. All the stories about him mention the rough, deep, hoarseness of his unused voice.

One day his nearest neighbor, meaning to do him a kindness, told him with a rough good-will that he might as well quit hiding now, “Whatever ’tis you done, ’tis so long past now! And up here ... nobody from your part of the country, wherever ’tis, would ever be coming up here. And if they did they wouldn’t know you. Why, your own mother wouldn’t know you in them clothes, and with that white beard.”

It is said that Colonel Shays on hearing this, drew back and looked down at himself with a strange air of astonishment.

Apparently the advice stuck in his mind, for, some weeks after this, he decided to risk it, and to make the trip to Cambridge, the nearest town to those mountain settlements. Early one morning the people of the Sandgate valley were astonished to see the old man going down the trail of the valley which led into the State road going to Cambridge. Well, that was something to talk about! He was going to town at last like anybody else.

Now, this happened a good many years after Shays’ Rebellion had failed, and the bitterness of the feeling about it had died down. Although Colonel Shays could not know this, most people had even forgotten all about him, and as for looking for him to arrest him, nobody would have dreamed of doing it. There were many other things in the world to think of by that time and although to himself Colonel Shays was still the dramatically hunted fugitive with every man’s hand against him, to other people he had begun to sink into the history-book paragraph, which he has since remained. His family and friends in Massachusetts had waited till the occasion seemed favorable, and then petitioned for his pardon, on the ground that he must be, if still living, an old man now, quite harmless, and that it would be only decent to let him come back to spend his last days in his own home; and if he were dead, his pardon would clear his family name, and straighten out certain complications about his property. At first they had not succeeded. People still remembered too vividly the treasonable attempt to overturn the authority of the State, only just established and none too strong. But by and by, the pertinacity of the petitioners wore out the fading hostility to his name. He was proclaimed pardoned, and notices were sent to all American newspapers informing him that he could now return. This had happened a year before Colonel Shays had started down to Cambridge, but you may be sure that at that period no newspapers found their way to the Sandgate valley.

After a year had gone by, and no sign came from the fugitive, people generally thought him dead. But a fellow-townsman who had known him well by sight and who, some years after his flight, had married his youngest sister, volunteered to try to spread the news more widely than by newspaper. There had been a faint notion among his kinspeople that he had fled to Vermont, although they had taken care to keep this to themselves as long as he was an outlaw, and had now almost forgotten about it. Acting on this notion, Shays’ brother-in-law took the long journey on horseback up into Vermont. He entered the state at Bennington and slowly worked his way north, branching off at every practicable road. But nowhere did he find any one who had ever heard of any such man as his wife’s brother. Colonel Shays had hidden himself only too well.

The Massachusetts man began to think his errand a futile one, and prepared to turn back. But on a chance he rode down to Cambridge, just over the New York line. Cambridge was the nearest town to a number of small valley settlements in Vermont. He would ask there if any one had seen or heard of the man he was seeking. He knew that men from the remote outlying settlements came to Cambridge to do their trading. He arrived rather late one evening and as he was no longer young, and very much tired by his long and fruitless journey, he slept that night in the Cambridge Inn.

For the rest of the story there are plenty of details, for Colonel Shays told over and over exactly what happened and just how he felt, and why he acted as he did. It seared deep into him, and to the end of his days, he always showed a consuming agitation in speaking of it.

He walked along the road, the first road he had seen since the night so many years ago when he had fled along the roads in Massachusetts. It seemed like iron to his buckskin-shod feet. He walked slowly for this and other reasons. Every house which came into view along the road brought him up short with a jerk like a frightened horse. The instinct to hide, to trust himself in no man’s sight, had deformed his whole nature so that the bold leader of men halted, trembling and white-faced, at the sight of an ordinary farm-house. He forced himself to go on, to pass those sleeping homes, but after he had passed each one with his silent, stealthy wood-dweller’s tread, he quickened his pace and looked fearfully over his shoulder, expecting to see men run out after him with warrants for his arrest.

By the time he approached Cambridge, the nervous strain was telling on him. He was wet with sweat, and as tired as though he had been four times over the mountains. Only a few people were abroad as it was the breakfast hour. Partly from the old fear of years, partly from the mere habit of total isolation, every strange face was startling to him. He felt his knees weak under him and sat down on a bench in front of the kitchen door of the Cambridge Inn to get his breath. He had been a man of powerful will and strong self-control or he never could have lived through those terrible years of being buried alive, and he now angrily told himself there was nothing to fear in this remote little hamlet, where everybody was used to the sight of men in buckskins coming down to trade their furs for gunpowder and salt. At the sight of all those human faces taking him back to the days of his human life, a deep yearning had come upon him to get back into the world of living men. He could have wept aloud and taken them into his arms like brothers. He was determined to master his tense nerves, to learn to move about among his fellow-men once more. In a moment, just a moment, he decided he would stand up and move casually over to the general store across the street where a lad was then unlocking the door. He would go in and make a purchase--the first in so many years!

He turned his head to glance into the kitchen of the Inn, and as he did so, the door opened, and a man came in, a traveler with a face familiar to him in spite of gray hair and wrinkles, a man he had known in Massachusetts, who knew him, and no friend of his, a man who had been on the other side in the Rebellion.

Colonel Shays’ heart gave a staggering leap. He caught at the door-jamb and shrank out of sight. He heard the other voice say, “I stepped in to ask if any of you know whether Colonel Shays was ever heard of in this....”

And then the old man, running madly for his life, fled back to his den in the woods.

A whole decade passed after this, before he happened to learn in a conversation overheard between two trappers, that for eleven priceless, irreplaceable years, he had been a free man.

A GREAT LOVE

When my pretty young cousin and god-daughter, Flossie, fell in love with Peter Carr, we all felt rather apprehensive about her future. But Flossie faced the facts with an honest, even a rather grim resolution which surprised us. She said with only a little tremor in her voice that she never expected to occupy the place in Peter’s heart which Eleanor Arling had taken forever, but that she loved him so much she was willing to take whatever he could give her. It wasn’t _his_ fault, she said, with the quaintest chivalric defiance of us, if poor Peter hadn’t more to give. She thought a great love like that “was a noble thing in any one’s life, even if it did make them perfectly miserable.” If Miss Arling felt that personal happiness must be sacrificed for her art, why, that was an exalted attitude to take, and Peter’s sorrow was “sacred in her eyes”; and so on and so forth--the usual things that are said in such cases by people who are in sympathy with that sort of thing.

So they were married, with the understanding that Peter could still go on worshiping the very sound of Eleanor Arling’s name and turning white when he came across a mention of her or of her pictures in the cabled news of the art world in Paris. Flossie was, so we all agreed, a good sport if there ever was one, and she stuck gamely to her bargain. She had transferred the big silver-framed photograph of Miss Arling from Peter’s bachelor quarters to the wall of their new living room, and she dusted it as conscientiously as she did the Botticelli Spring which I gave her for a wedding present. It was not easy for her. I have seen her flush deeply and set her lips hard as Peter looked up at the dusky brooding eyes shadowed by the casque of black braids. Flossie is one of the small, quick, humming-bird women, with nothing to set against Miss Arling’s massive classic beauty, and by her expression at such moments, I know she felt her defenselessness bitterly. But she never let Peter see how she felt. She had taken him, the darkness of his unrequited passion heavy on him, and if she ever regretted it, she gave no sign.

She flashed about the house, keeping it in perfect order, feeding Peter the most delicious food, and after the twins came, caring for them with no strain or nervous tension, with only a bright thankful enjoyment of them that was warm on your heart like sunshine. Peter enjoyed his pretty home and devoted wife and lively babies and excellent food. He began to lay on flesh, and to lose the haggard, gray leanness which, just after Miss Arling had gone away, had made people turn and look after him in the street. Architecture is, even when you are busy and successful as Peter is, a rather sedentary occupation, offering no resistance to such cooking as Flossie’s. Peter’s skin began to grow rosy and sleek, his hair from being rough and bristling, began to look smooth and glossy. It was quite beautiful hair as long as it lasted; but as the years went on and the twins began to be big children, it, unlike the rest of Peter, began to look thinner. Peter with a bald spot was queer enough, but before he was thirty-five it was not a mere spot, but all the top of his head. We thought it very becoming to him as it gave him a beneficent, thoughtful, kindly look, like a philosopher. And his added weight was also distinctly an improvement to his looks. We often said to each other that nobody would ever have thought that crazy-looking boy would make such a nice-looking man.

Flossie had not changed an atom. Those tiny, slight women occasionally remain stationary in looks as though they were in cold storage. She continued to worship Peter, and as he had made a good husband, we had nothing to say, although of course you never can understand what an excessively devoted wife sees in her husband, year after year. Flossie never mitigated in the least the extremity of her attention to Peter’s needs. When he was called away on a business trip she always saw that his satchel was packed with just what he would need; and she would have risen from her grave to put exactly the right amount of cream and sugar into his coffee.

The rest of us had forgotten all about Miss Arling’s connection with Peter, and had grown so used to the big photograph of the big, handsome woman that we did not see it any more, when one morning I found Flossie waiting for me as I came downstairs. She was very pale, with dark circles under her eyes. She was holding a newspaper in her clenched hand--the New York newspaper they had always taken on account of its full, gossipy “Happenings in the World of Art” column. Flossie opened it to that column now, and read in a dry voice: “American art lovers are promised a treat in the visit of the famous Eleanor Arling who arrives on the _Mauretania_. Miss Arling plans an extensive trip in her native country from which she has been absent for many years. She will visit New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Denver and San Francisco. Her keen artistic memory is shown by her intention of breaking her trip for a few days at ...” Flossie’s voice broke.... “She’s coming _here_!” she gasped. Then collecting herself, she continued reading, “Miss Arling told our interviewer that she once passed some weeks there and remembers with pleasure a composition of cliff, water, and pine trees. She wishes to see it again.”

“Cliff, water, and pine trees,” repeated Flossie, her eyes blazing. “Of course _we_ know it is nothing in the way of a _landscape_ she is coming to see here!” I saw that her little fists were clenched. “I won’t stand it!” she cried, “I won’t stand it!”

But she looked horribly frightened all the same.

“What can you do?” I asked, sympathizing painfully with the poor little thing.

“I shall go to her the minute she reaches town.”

This threw me into a panic, “What good would _that_ do?” I cried, alarmed at the prospect of scenes and goings-on.

“I don’t know! I don’t know! If I see her, I can think of some way to make her go away and not ...” she said wildly.

I hoped devoutly that she would settle down from this hysterical state of unreason, but three days after this she darted in, her face pinched, and told me that the time was now, and that she wanted me to be with her.... “I must have _some_body there,” she said piteously.

I was thoroughly alarmed, protested, tried desperately to back out, but found myself in Flossie’s car driving at a dangerous rate of speed towards Miss Arling’s hotel.