Chapter 6
They parted at the head of the stairs, where they found themselves among groups of students arriving from all parts of the place, and pausing for Synthesis gossip, which Cornelia could not have entered into yet if she had wished. She escaped, and walked home to her boarding-house with rather a languid pace, and climbed to her little room on the fifth story, and lay down on her bed. It was harder work than teaching, and her back ached, and her heart was heavy with the thought of five years in the Synthesis, when she barely had money enough for one winter. She was not afraid of the work; she liked that; she would be glad to spend her whole life at it; but she could not give five years to it, and perhaps ten. She was ashamed now to think she had once dreamed of somehow slipping through in a year, and getting the good of it without working for it. She tried to plan how she could go home and teach a year, and then come back and study a year, and so on; but by the end of the twenty years that it would take for ten years' study at this rate, she would be an old woman of forty, ready to drop into the grave. She was determined not to give up, and if she did not give up, there was no other end to it; or so it seemed at the close of her first day in the Synthesis.
She was very homesick, and she would have liked to give up altogether and go home. But she thought of what people would say; of how her mother, who would be so glad to see her, would feel. She would not be a baby, and she turned her face over in the pillow and sobbed.
XV.
Cornelia thought that perhaps Mr. Ludlow would feel it due to Mrs. Burton to come and ask how she was getting on; but if she did not wish him to come she had reason to be glad, for the whole week passed, and she did not see him, or hear anything from him. She did not blame him, for she had been very uncouth, and no doubt he had done his whole duty in meeting her at the depot, and seeing her safely housed the first night. She wished to appreciate his kindness, and when she found herself wondering a little at his not caring to know anything more about her, she made much of it. If it was not all that she could have imagined from his offer to be of use to her in any way he could, she reminded herself that he had made that offer a very long time ago, and that she never meant to use him. Beside, she was proud of having made her start alone, and she knew which way she wished to go, though the way seemed so hard and long at times. She was not sure that all the students at the Synthesis were so clear as to their direction, but they all had the same faith in the Synthesis and its methods. They hardly ever talked to her of anything else, and first and last they talked a good deal to her. It was against the rules to loiter and talk in the corridors, as much against the rules as smoking; but every now and then you came upon a young man with a cigarette, and he was nearly always talking with a group of girls. At lunch-time the steps and window-seats were full, and the passages were no longer thoroughfares. After the first day Cornelia came out with the rest; Charmian Maybough said that one could not get into the spirit of the Synthesis unless one did; and in fact those who wished to work and those who would rather have played, as it seemed to her, met there in the same aesthetic equality. She found herself acquainted with a great many girls whose names she did not know, in the fervor of the common interest, the perpetual glow of enthusiasm which crowned the severest ordeals of the Synthesis with the halo of happy martyrdom if not the wreath of victory.
They talked about the different instructors, how awful they were, and how they made you cry sometimes, they were so hard on your work; but if you amounted to anything, you did not mind it when you got to feel what they meant; then you _wanted_ them to be harsh. They said of one, "My! You ought to see him! _He_ can spoil your drawing for you! He just takes your charcoal, and puts thick black lines all over everything. It don't do to finish much for _him_." They celebrated another for sitting down in front of your work, and drooping in silent despair before it for awhile, and then looking up at you in cold disgust, and asking, "What made you draw it _that_ way?" as if it were inconceivable anybody should have been willing to do it so. There were other instructors who were known to have the idea of getting at the best in you by a sympathetic interest in what you had tried for, and looking for some good in it. The girls dramatized their manner of doing this; they did not hold them in greater regard than the harder masters, but they did not hold them in less, and some of them seemed to value an instructor as much for the way he squinted his eyes at your drawing as for what he said of it.
The young men did not talk so much of the instructors; they were more reticent about everything. But some had formed themselves upon them, and you could tell which each of these was studying under; or this was what Charmian Maybough said.
She led Cornelia all about through the quaint old rookery, with its wandering corridors, and its clusters of rooms distributed at random in the upper stories of several buildings which the Synthesis had gathered to itself as if by a sort of affinity, and she lectured upon every one and everything.
It was against usage for students in the lower grades to visit the upper classes when they were at work; but Charmian contrived stolen glimpses of the still-life rooms and the rooms where they were working from the draped models. For the first time Cornelia saw the irregular hemicycle of students silently intent upon the silent forms and faces of those strange creatures who sat tranced in a lifeless immobility, as if the long practice of their trade had resolved them into something as impersonal as the innumerable pictures studied from them. She even penetrated with Charmian to the women's life-room, where you really could not go while the model was posing, and where they had to time their visit at the moment when the girls had left off for lunch, and were chattering over their chocolate. They had set it out on the vacant model-stand, and they invited their visitors to break bread with them: the bread they had brought to rub out their drawings with. They made Cornelia feel as much at home with them on the summit they had reached, as she felt with the timidest beginners in the Preparatory. Charmian had reported everywhere that she had genius, and in the absence of proofs to the contrary the life-class accepted her as if she had. Their talk was not very different from the talk of the students in the lower grades. They spoke of the Synthesis, and asked her how she liked it, but they did not wait for her to say. They began to descant upon their instructors, and the pictures their instructors had last exhibited at the Academy or the American Artists; and the things that the old Synthesis pupils had there. Cornelia learned here that even actual Synthetics had things in the exhibitions, and that in the last Academy a Preparatory girl had sold a picture; she determined that before the winter was over she would at least give the Academy a chance to refuse the picture of another Preparatory girl.
She got Charmian to point out the girl who had sold the picture; she was a little, quiet-looking thing; Cornelia saw some of her work in round hands and she did not think it was better than she could do herself. She took courage and dreamed of trying not to disappoint the hopes of immediate performance, which she knew her mother would be having in spite of her pretending the contrary. Her mother had written that she must not work herself down, trying to learn too fast, but must take the whole winter for it. Cornelia wondered what she would think if she knew how little a person could be expected to do in one winter, in the regular Synthesis way.
She was happier at the end of the first week than she had been at the end of the first day, though she was very tired, and was glad to stop at the earlier hour when most of the students left their work on Saturday afternoon. She had begun to feel the charm of the Synthesis, which every one said she would feel. She was already a citizen of the little republic where the heaviest drudgery was sweet with a vague, high faith and hope. It was all a strange happiness to her, and yet not strange. It was like a heritage of her own that she had come into; something she was born to, a right, a natural condition.
She did not formulate this, or anything; she did not ask herself why the frivolities and affectations which disgusted her in the beginning no longer offended her so much; she only saw that some of the most frivolous and affected of her fellow-citizens were the cleverest; and that the worst of them were better than they might have been where the ideal was less generous. She did not know then or afterwards just why some of them were there, and they did not seem to know themselves. There were some who could reasonably expect to live by their art; there were more who could hope to live by teaching it. But there were others who had no definite aim or purpose, and seemed to think their study would shape them to some design. They were trying it, they did not know clearly why, or at least were not able to say clearly why. There were several rich girls, and they worked from the love of it, as hard as the poorest. There were some through whom she realized what Ludlow meant when he spoke to her mother of the want that often went hand in hand with art; there were others even more pitiful, who struggled with the bare sufficiency of gift to keep within the Synthesis. But even among the girls who were so poor that they had to stint themselves of food and fire, for art's sake, there were the bravest and gayest spirits; and some of these who could never have learned to draw well if they had spent their lives in the Synthesis, and were only waiting till their instructor should find the heart to forbid them further endeavor, were so sweet and good that Cornelia's heart ached for them.
At first she was overawed by all the students, simply because they were all older students at the Synthesis than she was. Then she included them without distinction in the slight that she felt for the chatter and the airs of some. After that she made her exceptions among them; she begun to see how every one honored and admired the hard workers. She could not revert to her awe of them, even of the hardest workers; but she became more tolerant of the idlest and vaguest. She compared herself with the clever ones, and owned herself less clever, not without bitterness, but certainly with sincerity, and with a final humility that enabled her to tolerate those who were least clever.
XVI.
When she got home from the Synthesis the first Saturday afternoon, Cornelia climbed up the four flights of stairs that led to her little room, and lay down to rest, as she promised Mrs. Burton she would do every day; some days she did not. She had to lie on her bed, which filled two-thirds of the room. There was a bureau with a glass, which she could not see the bottom of her skirt in without jumping up; and a wash-stand with a shut-down lid, where she wrote her letters and drew; a chair stood between that and her trunk, which was next the door, and let the door open part way.
It seemed very cramped at first, but she soon got used to it, and then she did not think about it; but accepted it as she did everything else in the life that was all so strange to her. She had never been in a boarding-house before, and she did not know whether it was New York usage or not, that her trunk, which the expressman had managed to leave in the lower hall, should be left standing there for twenty-four hours after his escape, and that then she should be asked to take some things out of it so that it should not be too heavy for the serving-maids to carry up to her room. There was no man-servant in the place; but the landlady said that they expected to have a furnace-man as soon as it came cold weather.
The landlady was such an indistinct quality, that it could seldom be known whether she was at home or not, and when she was identifiably present, whether she had promised or had not promised to do this or that. People were always trying to see her for some reason or no reason, and it was said that the best time to find her was at table. This was not so easy; the meals had a certain range in time, and the landlady was nominally at the head of the table; but those who came early to find her made the mistake of not having come late, and if you came late you just missed her. Yet she was sometimes actually to be encountered at the head of the stairs from the kitchen, or evanescing from the parlor; and somehow the house was operated; the meals came and went, and the smell of their coming and going filled the hall-way from the ground floor to the attic. Some people complained of the meals, but Cornelia's traditions were so simple that she thought them a constant succession of prodigies, with never less than steak, fish and hash for breakfast, and always turkey and cranberry sauce for dinner, and often ice-cream; sometimes the things were rather burnt, but she did not see that there was much to find fault with. She celebrated the luxury in her letters home, and she said that she liked the landlady, too, and that they had got to be great friends; in fact the landlady reminded the girl of her own mother in the sort of springless effectiveness with which she brought things to pass, when you would never have expected any result whatever; and she was gentle like her mother, and simple-hearted, with all her elusiveness. But she was not neat, like Mrs. Saunders; the house went at loose ends. Cornelia found fluff under her bed that must have been there a long time. The parlor and the dining-room were kept darkened, and no one could have told what mysteries their corners and set pieces of furniture harbored. The carpets, where the subdued light struck them, betrayed places worn down to the warp. Mrs. Montgomery herself had a like effect of unsparing use; her personal upholstery showed frayed edges and broken woofs, which did not seriously discord with her nerveless gentility.
The parlor was very long and rather narrow, and it was crossed at the rear by the dining-room which showed the table in stages of preparation or dismantling through sliding-doors never quite shut. At intervals along the parlor walls were set sofas in linen brocade and yellow jute; and various easy and uneasy chairs in green plush stood about in no definite relation to the black-walnut, marble-topped centre-table. A scarf, knotted and held by a spelter vase to one of the marble mantles, for there were two, recorded a moment of the aesthetic craze which had ceased before it got farther amidst the earlier and honester ugliness of the room. The gas-fixtures were of the vine-leaf and grape-cluster bronze-age; some of the garlands which ought to have been attached to the burners, hung loose from the parent stem, without the effort on the part of any witness to complete the artistic intention. In the evening, the lady-boarders received their gentlemen-callers in the parlor; their lady-callers were liable at all times to be asked if they would not like to go to the boarders' rooms, and whether they expressed this preference or not, they were directed where to find them by the maid, who then rapidly disappeared down the kitchen stairs.
In fact, the door-service at Mrs. Montgomery's was something she would probably have deprecated if any one had asked her to do so. It was the charge of a large, raw-boned Irish girl, who made up by her athletic physique and her bass voice for the want of a man-servant on the premises. She brow-beat visitors into acceptance of the theory that the persons they came to see were not at home, especially if they showed signs of intending to wait in the parlor while she went upstairs to find out. Those who suffered from her were of the sex least fitted to combat her. The gentlemen boarders seldom had callers; when they had, their callers did not ask whether their friends were in or not; they went and saw for themselves.
The gentlemen at Mrs. Montgomery's were fewer than the ladies, and they were for several reasons in greater favor. For one thing they gave less trouble: they had a less lively fear of mice, and they were not so apt to be out of health and to want their meals sent up; they ate more, but they did not waste so much, and they never did any sort of washing in their rooms. Cornelia did not know who or what some of them were; but she made sure of a theatrical manager; two or three gentlemen in different branches of commerce; a newspaper writer of some sort, and an oldish gentleman who had been with Mrs. Montgomery a great while, and did not seem to be anything but a gentleman boarder, pure and simple. They were all very civil and quiet, and they bore with the amiable American fortitude the hardships of the common lot at Mrs. Montgomery's, which Cornelia underwent ignorantly as necessary incidents of life in New York.
She now fell asleep where she lay, and she was startled from her nap, but hardly surprised, to hear her name spoken in the hall far below, as if it were a theme of contention between the bass-voiced Irish girl and some one at the street door, who supported the other side of the question in low, indistinct, lady-like murmurs.
"No, she don't be in," said the Irish girl bluntly. The polite murmur insisted, and the Irish girl said, with finality, "Well, then, yous can go up yourselves and see; the room is right over the dure, four flights up."
Cornelia jumped up and tried to pull her hair into a knot before the glass. There came a tap at her door and the voice of Charmian Maybough asked, "May I come in, Miss Saunders,--Cornelia?"
"Yes," said Cornelia, and she opened the door as far as her trunk would let her.
Charmian pushed impetuously in. She took Cornelia in her arms and kissed her, as if they had not met for a long time.
"Oh," she said, whirling about, so as to sweep the whole room with her glance, before sinking down on Cornelia's trunk, "why can't _I_ have something like this? Well, I shall have, I hope, before I die, yet. What made her say you weren't in? I knew you were." She rose and flew about the room, and examined it in detail. She was very beautifully dressed, in a street costume of immediate fashion, without a suggestion of the aestheticism of the picturesque gown she wore at the Synthesis; that had originality, but Cornelia perceived with the eye trained to see such differences, that this had authority. Charmian could not help holding and carrying herself differently in it, too. She was exquisitely gloved, and Cornelia instinctively felt that her hat was from Paris, though till then she had never seen a Paris hat to know it. She might have been a little overawed by it, if the wearer had not abruptly asked her what she thought of it.
"Well," said Cornelia, with her country directness, which was so different from the other's abruptness, "I think it's about the most perfect thing I ever saw."
Charmian sighed. "I saw you looking at it. Yes, it _is_ a dream. But it's a badge of slavery. So's the whole costume. Look how I'm laced!" She flung open the jacket and revealed a waist certainly much smaller than she had earlier in the day. "That's the way it goes through my whole life. Mamma is dead set against the artistic, and I'm dead set against the fashionable. As long as I'm at the Synthesis, I do as the Synthetics do. I dress like the Synthesis, and I think like it, and I act like it. As soon as I get home in the afternoon, I have to be of the world worldly. I put on a Worth frock, and mamma would make me put on a Worth spirit, if she could. I do my best to conform, because it's the bargain, and I'll keep my word if it kills me. _Now_ you see what a double life I lead! If I could only be steeped in hopeless poverty to the lips! If I could have a room like this, even! Sometimes I'm so bewildered by the twofold existence I'm leading, I don't really know what I'm saying. Those your things, of course?" She sprang from Cornelia's trunk, which she had sank down upon again, and swiftly traversed the sketches Cornelia had pinned about the wall. "What touch! Yes, you merely have to live on, to be anything you like. It'll do itself for _you_. Well, I suppose you'll have to see her." She turned about to Cornelia with an air of deprecation. "Mamma, you know. She's down stairs waiting for us. She thinks it right to come with me always. I dare say it is. She isn't so very bad, you know. Only she insists upon knowing all the girls I take a fancy to, herself. You needn't be afraid of her."
"I don't know why I should be afraid of anybody," said Cornelia.
The darker corner of the long parlor was occupied by a young couple in the earnest inquiry into each other's psychological peculiarities which marks a stage of the passion of love. It obliged them to get very close together, where they sat, she on a lounge and he in the chair, which he kept pulling nearer and nearer; they fulfilled these conditions and exchanged their observations with a freedom that ignored the presence of the lady sitting somewhat severely upright between the two long, front windows, exactly midway of the dingy lace curtains, trained fan-wise on the carpet. They were not disturbed when Cornelia and Charmian appeared; the young lady continued to dangle the tassel of a cushion through her fingers, and the young man leaned toward her with his face in his hand, and his elbow sunk in the arm of the lounge; but the other lady rose at once and came quickly forward, as if escaping from them. Beside the tall girls she looked rather little, and she was decidedly blonde against their brunette color. She wore a veil that came just between her upper and her lower lip, and that stirred lightly when she spoke. She was dressed with the same authoritative fashion as Charmian, but not so simply.
She did not wait for her daughter to speak, but took Cornelia's hand, and said in a soft voice, "Miss Saunders? I am very glad we found you at home. My daughter has been speaking to me about you, and we hoped to have come sooner, but we couldn't manage together before."
"Won't you sit down?" asked Cornelia.
"No, I thank you," Mrs. Maybough returned, with a velvety tenderness of tone that seemed to convey assent. "We shall be rather late, as it is. I hope you're comfortably situated here."
"Oh, very," said Cornelia. "I've never been away from home before, and of course it isn't like home."
"Yes," said Mrs. Maybough, "one misses the refinements of home in such places." She turned and swept the appointments of the room, including the students of psychology, with a critical eye.
"I wish _I_ could come here," sighed the daughter. "If I could have a room like Cornelia's, mamma! I _wish_ you could see it."
"I'm glad you're pleasantly placed, Miss Saunders. I hope you're not working too hard at the Synthesis. I understand the young ladies there are so enthusiastic."
"Oh, no," Cornelia protested.
"Of course she is!" said Charmian. "Everybody works too hard at the Synthesis. It's the ideal of the place. We woke her out of a nap, and I know she was tired to death."
Cornelia could not deny it, and so she said nothing.
"Oh!" said Mrs. Maybough, non-committally; "that won't do." She paused, without intermitting the scrutiny which Cornelia felt she had been subjecting her to from the first moment through her veil. "You mustn't wear yourself out." She paused again, and then while Charmian turned away with an effect of impatience, she asked, "Do you ever go out on Sundays?"