Part 11

The newspapers teemed with offers of work for women's hands. The caption "Domestic Service" of course removed a host of them from consideration, and the demand for stenographers, manicures, and like specialized wage-earners disposed of many others; but, these aside, opportunity still seemed to beckon from infinite directions. Thus, the paper-box industry clamored for girls to seam, strip, glue, turn in, top-label, close, and tie; the milliners wanted trimmers, improvers, frame-makers, and workers in plumage and artificial flowers; the manufacturers of shirt-waists and infants' wear called for feminine fingers to hemstitch, shirr, tuck, and press; deft needles might turn their skill toward every conceivable object from theatrical spangles to gas-mantles; nimble hands might dip chocolates, stamp decorated tin, gold-lay books, sort corks, tip silk umbrellas, curl ostrich feathers, fold circulars, and pack everything from Bibles to Turkish cigarettes.

But this prodigious demand, at first sight so promising, proved on close inspection to be limited. Beginners were either not wanted at all or, if taken on trial, were expected to subsist on charity or air. Experience was the great requisite. Day after day Jean toiled up murky staircases to confront this stumbling-block; day after day her resources dwindled.

Amy was keenly sympathetic and pored over the eye-straining advertisement columns as persistently as Jean herself.

"How's this?" she inquired, glancing up hopefully from one of these quests. "'Wanted: Girl or woman to interest herself in caring for the feeble-minded.'"

"I tried that yesterday."

"No good?"

"They only offered a home."

"And with idiots! They must be dotty themselves."

Then Jean, ranging another column, thought that she detected a glimmer of hope.

"Listen," she said. "'Wanted: Girl to pose for society illustrations.' Do you think there is anything in this?"

"Too much," returned Amy, sententiously. "Don't answer model ads. It isn't models those fellows want any more than they are artists. Real artists don't need to advertise. They can get all the models they want without it. I never thought to mention posing. Why don't you try it? You have got the looks, and it's perfectly respectable."

"Is it?" rejoined Jean, dubiously. "I thought this advertisement sounded all right because it says 'society illustrations.'"

"It's just as proper to pose nude, if that's what you're thinking about. I know the nicest kind of a girl who does. Her mother is paralyzed. But that's only one branch of the business, and it's all respectable. Why, you'll find art students themselves doing it to help along with their expenses. I know what I'm talking about, because I've posed."

"You!"

"Just a little. It was for an artist who boarded here a while before you came. He moved uptown when he began to get on, and now you see his pictures in all the magazines. I was a senator's daughter in one set of drawings and a golf-girl in a poster. It's easy work as soon as your muscles get broken in, and it stands you in fifty cents an hour at least. The girl I told you of sometimes makes twenty-five or thirty dollars a week, but she poses for life classes; they're in the schools, you know. I made up my mind to go into it once."

"Why didn't you?"

Amy laid a derisive finger on her tip-tilted nose.

"Here's why," she laughed. "It was this way: The artist who used to board here told me of another man who paid three or four models regular salaries. He did pictures about Greeks and Romans, and all those girls had to do, I heard, was to loaf round in pretty clothes, and once in awhile be painted. I went up there one day and it certainly was a lovely place, just like a house in a novel I'd read called 'The Last Days of Pompey-eye.' A girl was posing when I came, and, if you'll believe me, that man had rigged up a wind-machine that blew her clothes about just as though she was running a race. Well, I didn't stay long. The artist--he was seventy-five or eighty, I should say, and grumpy--turned me sideways, took one look at my nose, and said I was too old, nineteen hundred years too old! He thought he was funny. Somebody told me afterward that he was a has-been and couldn't sell his pictures any more."

With the idea that posing might answer as a stop-gap until she found some other means of support, Jean forthwith visited an agency whose address Amy furnished. She found the proprietor of this enterprise a jerky little man with a disquieting pair of black eyes which thoroughly inventoried her every feature, movement, and detail of dress.

"Chorus, front row, show-girl, or church choir?" he demanded briskly.

"I thought this was a model agency," Jean said; "I wish to try posing if--"

"Right shop. What line, please?"

"In costume."

"You don't follow me. Fashion-plate, illustrating, lithography, or commercial photography."

"I'm not sure," she hesitated, bewildered by this unexpected broadening of the field. "What can I earn?"

The little man waved his arms spasmodically.

"Might as well ask me what the weather'll be next Fourth of July," he sputtered. "See that horse there?" pointing out of his window at a much-blanketed thoroughbred on its way to the smith's. "How fast can he trot? You don't know! Of course you don't. How much can you earn? I don't know. Of course I don't. You see my point? Same case exactly. Illustrators pay all the way from half a dollar to a dollar and a half an hour. Camera-models make from one dollar to three. And there you are."

"I've had no experience."

"That's plain enough. Sticks out like a sore thumb. But you don't need any. Fact, you don't. That's the beauty of the business. Appearance and gumption, they're the cards to hold. You've got appearance. A girl has to have the looks, or I don't touch her fee. Fair all round, you see. If a girl's face or get-up is against her, I've no business taking her money. If an illustrator says, 'Send me up a model who looks so and so,' that's just the article he gets. First-class models, first-class illustrators, there's my system."

"I need work at once," Jean stated. "What is my chance?"

"Prime. You ought to fill the bill for a man who 'phoned not two minutes before you walked through the door. High-class artist, known everywhere, liberal pay. There needn't have been any delay whatever, if you'd thought to bring your father or mother along."

Jean's rising spirits dropped dismally at this remark.

"My father is dead," she explained. "My mother lives in the country."

"Then get her consent in writing. Means time, of course, and time's money, but it can't be helped."

"Is it absolutely necessary?"

"You'll have to have it to do business with me," replied the agent, beginning to shuffle among his papers.

"But my mother knows I am trying to earn a living," she argued. "Besides, I'm nearly of age. I shall be twenty-one next week."

"Drop in when you get your letter," directed the little man, inflexibly. "Minor or not, I make it a rule to have parents' consent. Troubles enough in my line without papa and mamma. Good day."

Outside the door Jean decided upon independent action. This last resource was at once too attractive and too near to be relinquished lightly. The idea of obtaining Mrs. Fanshaw's consent was preposterous, even if she could bring herself to ask it--the term "artist's model" conveyed only scandalous suggestions to Shawnee Springs; but there was nothing to prevent her hunting employment from studio to studio. Amy had mentioned the address of the illustrator whom success had translated from Mrs. St. Aubyn's world, and to him Jean determined to apply first.

Her errand brought her to one of the innumerable streets from which wealth and fashion are ever in retreat before a vanguard of the crafts of which wealth and fashion are the legitimate quarry, and to a commercialized brownstone dwelling with a modiste established in its basement, a picture-dealer tenanting its drawing-room, and a mixed population of artists, architects, and musicians tucked away elsewhere between first story and roof. She found the studio of Amy's acquaintance readily, and obeying a muffled call, which answered her knock, pushed open the door of an antechamber that had obviously once done service as a hall-bedroom. Here she hesitated. The one door other than that by which she entered led apparently into the intimacies of the artist's domestic life, for the counterpane of a white iron bed, distinctly visible from her station, outlined a woman's recumbent form.

"In here, please," called the voice. "I'm trying to finish while the light holds."

On the threshold Jean had to smile at her own unsophistication. The supposed bedroom was a detail of the studio proper, the supposed wife a model impersonating a hospital patient who held the centre of interest in a gouache drawing, to which the illustrator was adding a few last touches by way of accent.

"I see you don't need a model," Jean said, with a smile inclusive of the girl in the bed.

He scrutinized her impersonally, transferred a brush from mouth to hand, and caught up a bundle of galley-proofs.

"No," he decided, more to himself than Jean. "It's another petite heroine, drat her! But I'd be glad to have you leave your name and address," he added, indicating a paint-smeared memorandum book which lay amidst the brushes, ink-saucers, and color-tubes littering a small table at elbow. "I may need your type any day."

Jean complied, thanked him, and turned to go.

"Try MacGregor, top floor--Malcolm MacGregor," he suggested. "Tell him I said to have a look at your eyes."

Much encouraged, she mounted two more flights, knocked, and, as before, let herself in at an unceremonious hail. This time, however, she passed directly from hall to studio, coming at once into an atmosphere startling in its contrast to the life she left behind. MacGregor's Oasis, one of the illustrator's friends called it, and the phrase fitted happily. The rack of wonderfully chased small arms and long Arab flintlocks; the bright spot of color made upon the neutral background of the wall by some strange musical instrument or Tripolitan fan; the curious jugs, gourds, and leathern buckets of caravan housekeeping; the careless heaps of oriental stuffs and garments from which, among the soberer folds of a barracan or camel's-hair jellaba, one caught the red gleam of a fez or the yellow glow of a vest wrought with intricate embroideries; the tropical sun-helmet,--MacGregor's own,--its green lining bleached by the reflected light of Sahara sand; the antelope antlers above the lintel; the Soudanese leopard skins under foot--these and their like, in bewildering number and variety, recalled the charm and mystery of the African desert which this man knew, loved, and painted superlatively.

MacGregor himself, whom she found at his easel, was, despite his name, not Scotch, but American, with seven generations of New England ancestors behind him. Tall, thin-featured, alert, and apparently in his late thirties, he had the quizzical, shrewdly humorous eye which passes for and possibly does express the Connecticut Yankee's outlook upon life. In nothing did he suggest the artist.

"I'll be through here in no time, if you'll take a chair," he said, when Jean had repeated the other artist's message.

Her wait was fruitful, for it emphasized most graphically the dictum of the agent that gumption was fundamental in the successful model's equipment. The man now posing for MacGregor in the character of an aged Arab leading a caravan down a rocky defile, was mounted upon nothing more spirited than an ingenious arrangement of packing-cases, but he bestrode his saddle as if he rode in truth the barb which the canvas depicted. He dismounted presently and disappeared in an adjacent alcove from which he shortly issued a commonplace young man in commonplace occidental garb, who pocketed his day's wage and went whistling down the stairs.

MacGregor turned to Jean.

"I do want a model," he said. "I want one bad. By rights I should be painting over yonder,"--his gesture broadly signified Africa,--"but my market, the devil take it! is here. So I'm hunting a model. I have had plenty come who look the part (which you don't) even Arabs from a Wild West show; but I've yet to strike one who has any more imagination than a rabbit. I tell you this frankly because it's easy to see you're not the average model. That is why I asked you to wait. The model I'm looking for must work under certain of the Arab woman's restrictions. Out there"--his hand again swept the Dark Continent--"you never see her face, as you probably know. You glimpse her eyes, if they're not veiled; you try to read their story. If even the eyes are hidden, you find yourself attempting to read the draperies. Do you grasp my difficulty? I want some one who can express emotions not only with the eyes, but without them. Now you," he ended, with a note of enthusiasm, "you have the eyes. Don't tell me you haven't the rest."

Jean laughed.

"I won't if I can help it," she assured him.

He caught up a costume which lay upon a low divan, and ransacked a heap of unframed canvases that leaned backs outward against the wall.

"This sketch will give you a notion how the dress goes," he said, and carried his armful into the alcove.

When she reëntered the studio, MacGregor was arranging a screen of a pattern Jean had never seen.

"It was made from an old lattice," he explained, placing a chair for her behind it. "I picked it up in Kairwan. This little door swings in its original position. You are looking now from a window--a little more than ajar, so--from which generations of women, dressed as you are dressed, have watched an Arab street."

He passed round to the front of the screen and studied her intently.

"Eyes about there," he said, indicating a rose-water jar upon a low shelf. "Expression," he paused thoughtfully. "How shall I tell you what I want you to suggest from the lattice? Don't think of those women of the Orient. You can't truly conceive their life. Think of something nearer home. Imagine yourself in a convent--no, that won't do at all. Imagine yourself a prisoner, an innocent prisoner, peering through your grating at the world, longing--"

"Wait," said Jean.

She threw herself into his conception, closed her mental vision upon the studio and its trophies, erased the bustling city from her thoughts. She was again a resentful inmate of Cottage No. 6, lying in her cell-like room at twilight, while the woods called to her with a hundred tongues. There were flowers in the sheltered places; arbutus, violets--

"You've got it!" MacGregor's exultant voice brought her back. "You've got it! We'll go to work to-morrow at nine."

"No admission, Mac?" asked a man's voice from the doorway. "I gave the regulation knock, but you seemed--" He stopped and gazed hard into the eyes which met his with answering wonder from the lattice.

"I've found her, Atwood," MacGregor hailed him jubilantly. "I've found her at last."

The newcomer took an uncertain step forward, halted again, then strode suddenly toward the screen.

"I think I have, too," he said, at the little window now. "It's Jack, isn't it?"

XIX

And Jean?

It was as if she still dwelt in fancy in that unforgettable past. She had burst her bars; she had come, a fugitive, to the birch-edged shore of a lonely lake; her knight of the forest stood before her.

The astonished MacGregor, having waited a decent interval for some rational clew to the situation, recalled his own existence by the simple expedient of folding the screen.

"Step inside, won't you?" he invited with a dry grin. "You may take cold at the window."

Atwood turned an illumined face.

"It's been years since we met," he explained. "I was not sure at first--the costume, the place."

MacGregor's eye lingered upon him in humorous meditation.

"Perhaps you'll see your way in time to introduce me," he suggested. "This has been a business session, so far. We hadn't come to names."

The younger man floundered, glowing healthily, but Jean retained her wits.

"Miss Fanshaw," she supplied promptly. "I should have mentioned it before."

She vanished into the alcove, questioned her unfamiliar image in the little mirror, and began to resume her street-dress with fingers not under perfect control. There came an indistinct murmur of talk from the studio in which MacGregor's incisive tones predominated. His companion's responses were few and low. When she reëntered, Atwood stood waiting by the outer door.

"At nine, then," reminded MacGregor. "So-long, Craig, if you must go."

"So-long," answered the other, absently.

On the stair they faced each other with the wonder of their meeting still upon them.

"You are not a professional model," he said; "I should have come across you before, if you were."

"You have seen me get my first engagement."

"And with MacGregor! Was it chance?"

"Just chance."

"Jove!" he ejaculated. "It might have been myself. Yet it's strange enough as it is. MacGregor in there was the chap I was to camp with, you remember? The man whose grandmother--"

"Great-grandmother, wasn't it?" she smiled.

"You do remember!"

A silence fell upon them for a little moment and they assayed each other shyly, he keenly aware of the fuller curves which had made a woman of her, she searching rather for reminders of the youth whose image had gone back with her through the gatehouse into bondage. He was more grave, as became a man now looking back upon his golden twenties, with thoughtful lines about the eyes, and a clearer demarcation of the jaw, which was, as of old, shaven, and pale with the pallor of a dweller in cities. The mouth was the mouth of the youth, sensitive, unspoiled; and the direct eyes had lost nothing of their friendliness, though she divined that he weighed her, questioning what manner of woman she had become.

"You went back," he broke the pause, "you went back to that inferno because of what I said. You saw it through. Plucky Jack!"

"Jean," she corrected.

"Why?"

"Jack was another girl, a girl I hope I've outgrown."

"Don't say that," he protested. "I knew her. But this Jean of the staircase--"

"Well?" she challenged, avid for his mature opinion.

"Makes me wonder," he completed, "whether I've not been outgrown, too."

It was not a satisfying answer. She remembered that growth may be other than benign.

"You!" she said.

"Why not? I was young, preposterously young. Had I been older, I should never have dared meddle with your life."

"Meddle!" she repeated, his self-reproach rang so true; "you gave me the wisest advice such a girl could receive. That girl could not appreciate how wise it was, but this one does and thanks you from the bottom of her heart."

Atwood drew a long breath.

"You can say that!" he exclaimed. "You knew what it meant to return; I did not. Since I have realized the truth, the thought of my folly has given me no peace. I imagined--God knows what I haven't imagined! To see you here, as you are; to have you thank me, when I thought I deserved your undying hate, is like a reprieve."

Jean's face went radiant. "Yet you say you knew her!"

Their eyes met an instant; then they laughed together happily.

"You're right," he acknowledged. "It seems I don't know either of you. But we can't talk here, can we? We need--" He paused, then, "Give me this day," he entreated. "We're not strangers. Say you will!"

As they issued upon the pavement, the driver of a passing cab raised an interrogative whip. Atwood nodded, and a moment afterward they had edged into the traffic of one of the avenues and were rolling northward. To Jean, reveling silently in her first hansom, it seemed that they had scarcely started before they turned in at one of the entrances of Central Park, and for a time followed perforce the flashing afternoon parade before striking into a less frequented roadway, where they dismounted. Atwood, too, had said nothing amidst the jingling ostentation of the avenue and main-traveled drives, and he was silent now as they forsook the asphalt walks for quiet paths, where their feet trod the good earth, and the odor of leaf mold rose pungently.

Presently he halted.

"Will you shut your eyes for a little way?" he asked. "It's my whim."

She assented, and they went forward slowly, her hand upon his sleeve. She felt the path drop, by gentle slopes at first, then with sharp turns past jutting rocks, where there seemed no path at all. Her sense of direction failed her, and with it went her recollection of the city's nearness. The immediate sounds were all sylvan. She heard the call of a cat-bird, the bark of a squirrel, the laughing whimper of a brook among stones, which she guessed, if her ear had not lost its woodcraft, merged its peevish identity in some neighboring lake or pool.

"Now," said her guide, pausing.

She looked, started, and rounded swiftly upon Atwood to find him beaming at her instant comprehension.

"It might be the very same!" she exclaimed.

"Mightn't it? The birches, the shore-line--"

"And the stream, even the little stream! Could I find watercress _there_, I wonder?"

The man laughed.

"Ah, it is real to you! I, too, forgot New York when I first stumbled on it. I even _looked_ for watercress. But it knows no such purity, poor little brook! I've had to pretend with it, as I've pretended with the lake. The landscape-gardener was a clever fellow. He makes you believe there are distances out there--winding channels, unplumbed depths; he cheats you into thinking you have a forest at your back. Sometimes he has almost persuaded me to cast a clumsy line into that thicket yonder."

Jean's look returned to him quickly. He was smiling, but with an undercurrent of gravity.

"You know it well," she said.

"I ought. It was here, the summer after we met, that I came to realize something of what I had asked you to do. I began to study refuges. I went to such as I could, boys' places, mainly; I even tried to get sight or word of you. Somehow, though, I never came at the right official, and it seemed that men weren't welcome. I learned a few things, however. I grubbed among reports; I found out what your daily life was like, what your companions must be, and once I saw a newspaper account of a riot. But of you I heard nothing. How could I? I did not even know your name--I, your judge!"

The girl moved toward the border of the lake and for a space stood looking dreamily into its tranquil counterfeit of changing foliage and September sky. To the miracle of their meeting was added the revelation that even as he had filled her thoughts in the dark days, so had she possessed his.

"Will you sit here?" he asked, again beside her. "I want to hear the whole story--the story which began back among the other birches."

"It began farther back than there."

"Not for me."

"But it should. If you thought about me at all, you must have wondered how I came to be in a refuge uniform."

"I wondered, yes; but I never really cared. I could see with my own eyes what you were."

She searched his face with the skepticism which the world had taught, then, with a swift intake of breath, looked believing away.

"We must begin at the beginning," she said.

She told him her story as she had told it to the dentist that hideous night of explanations at the Lorna Doone, but where Paul's black silence had stifled her, lamed her speech, made her almost doubt herself, this listener's faith leaped before her words, bridged the difficult places where she faltered, spread the cloak of chivalry in the miry way. Yet, with all his sympathy, it hurt her, so senseless always seemed the reckoning for her follies, so poignant were her regrets, and once, when she began to speak of Stella and the riot, he stopped her.

"Don't go on," he begged. "I see what it costs you."

"I'd rather you heard it all," she replied. "It's your due."