Sybil did not think it quite right for her, aged seventeen, to pass judgment on the talent of a middle-aged man, so she merely murmured something vague and polite and positive; and Mr. Starr, taking the sketch pad from her, said, “Oh, I know — I’m not very good, yet. But I propose to try.” He smiled at her, and took out a freshly laundered white handkerchief, and dabbed at his forehead, and said, “Do you have any questions about posing for me, or shall we begin? — we’ll have at least three hours of daylight, today.”
“Three hours!” Sybil exclaimed. “That long?”
“If you get uncomfortable,” Mr. Starr said quickly, “—we’ll simply stop, wherever we are.” Seeing that Sybil was frowning, he added, eagerly, “We’ll take breaks every now and then, I promise. And, and—” seeing that Sybil was still indecisive, “—I’ll pay you for a full hour’s fee, for any part of an hour.” Still Sybil stood, wondering if, after all, she should be agreeing to this, without her Aunt Lora, or anyone, knowing: wasn’t there something just faintly odd about Mr. Starr, and about his willingness to pay her so much for doing so little? And wasn’t there something troubling (however flattering) about his particular interest in her? Assuming Sybil was correct, and he’d been watching her... aware of her... for at least a month. “I’ll be happy to pay you in advance, Blake.”
The name Blake sounded very odd in this stranger’s mouth. Sybil had never before been called by her last name only.
Sybil laughed nervously, and said, “You don’t have to pay me in advance — thanks!”
So Sybil Blake, against her better judgment, became a model, for Mr. Starr.
And, despite her self-consciousness, and her intermittent sense that there was something ludicrous in the enterprise, as about Mr. Starr’s intense, fussy, self-important manner as he sketched her (he was a perfectionist, or wanted to give that impression: crumpling a half-dozen sheets of paper, breaking out new charcoal sticks, before he began a sketch that pleased him), the initial session was easy, effortless. “What I want to capture,” Mr. Starr said, “—is, beyond your beautiful profile, Blake, — and you are a beautiful child! — the brooding quality of the ocean. That look to it, d’you see? — of it having consciousness of a kind, actually thinking. Yes, brooding!”
Sybil, squinting down at the white-capped waves, the rhythmic crashing surf, the occasional surfers riding their boards with their remarkable amphibian dexterity, thought that the ocean was anything but brooding.
“Why are you smiling, Blake?” Mr. Starr asked, pausing. “Is something funny? — am I funny?”
Quickly Sybil said, “Oh, no, Mr. Starr, of course not.”
“But I am, I’m sure,” he said happily. “And if you find me so, please do laugh!”
Sybil found herself laughing, as if rough fingers were tickling her. She thought of how it might have been... had she had a father, and a mother: her own family, as she’d been meant to have.
Mr. Starr was squatting now on the grass close by and peering up at Sybil with an expression of extreme concentration. The charcoal stick in his fingers moved rapidly. “The ability to laugh,” he said, “is the ability to live — the two are synonymous. You’re too young to understand that right now, but one day you will.” Sybil shrugged, wiping her eyes. Mr. Starr was talking grandly. “The world is fallen and profane — the opposite of ‘sacred,’ you know, is ‘profane.’ It requires ceaseless vigilance — ceaseless redemption. The artist is one who redeems by restoring the world’s innocence, where he can. The artist gives, but does not take away, nor even supplant.”
Sybil said, skeptically, “But you want to make money with your drawings, don’t you?”
Mr. Starr seemed genuinely shocked. “Oh, my, no. Adamantly, no.”
Sybil persisted, “Well, most people would. I mean, most people need to. If they have any talent” — she was speaking with surprising bluntness, an almost childlike audacity — “they need to sell it, somehow.”
As if he’d been caught out in a crime, Mr. Starr began to stammer apologetically, “It’s true, Blake, I... I am not like most people, I suppose. I’ve inherited some money — not a fortune, but enough to live on comfortably for the rest of my life. I’ve been traveling abroad,” he said, vaguely, “—and, in my absence, interest accumulated.”
Sybil asked doubtfully, “You don’t have any regular profession?”
Mr. Starr laughed, startled. Up close, his teeth were chunky and irregular, slightly stained, like aged ivory piano keys. “But, dear child,” he said, “this is my profession — ‘redeeming the world’!”
And he fell to sketching Sybil with renewed enthusiasm.
Minutes passed. Long minutes. Sybil felt a mild ache between her shoulder blades. A mild uneasiness in her chest. Mr. Starr is mad. Is Mr. Starr ‘mad’? Behind her, on the path, people were passing by, there were joggers, bicyclists — Mr. Starr, lost in a trance of concentration, paid them not the slightest heed. Sybil wondered if anyone knew her, and was taking note of this peculiar event. Or was she, herself, making too much of it? She decided she would tell her Aunt Lora about Mr. Starr that evening, tell Aunt Lora frankly how much he was paying her. She both respected and feared her aunt’s judgment: in Sybil’s imagination, in that unexamined sphere of being we call the imagination, Lora Dell Blake had acquired the authority of both Sybil’s deceased parents.
Yes, she would tell Aunt Lora.
After only an hour and forty minutes, when Sybil appeared to be growing restless and sighed several times, unconsciously, Mr. Starr suddenly declared the session over. He had, he said, three promising sketches, and he didn’t want to exhaust her, or himself. She was coming back tomorrow—?
“I don’t know,” Sybil said. “Maybe.”
Sybil protested, though not very adamantly, when Mr. Starr paid her the full amount, for three hours’ modeling. He paid her in cash, out of his wallet — an expensive kidskin wallet brimming with bills. Sybil thanked him, deeply embarrassed, and eager to escape. Oh, there was something shameful about the transaction!
Up close, she was able — almost — to see Mr. Starr’s eyes through the dark-tinted lenses of his glasses. Some delicacy of tact made her glance away quickly but she had an impression of kindness — gentleness.