“Less than that,” he replied quickly, “surely much less. I should say two thousand would be ample. That’s forty dollars a week.” Then he added, a little awkwardly, “Of course, if there really is a chance of your helping me out, you would want to find out if I’m likely to deserve it. I haven’t much stuff, a few figures and a group or two, but if you could come down some day and look at them...”
It wasn’t much of a studio — a small room with an alcove on the top floor of an old house in one of those obscure streets west of Seventh Avenue, below Fourteenth. Apparently he both worked and slept there, and perhaps ate too. Clay and plaster figures were scattered about; there were two marble groups, one, quite large, of workmen lifting a beam. It seemed to you very big and impressive.
“I worked nearly two years on that,” Paul said, “and it’s all wrong. See, look here.”
You listened attentively and nodded your head from time to time. After he had finished talking about it you still thought the group big and smooth and impressive. He brought out some portfolios.
“By the way,” he said suddenly, “I almost forgot. Here’s a letter from Mother.”
You opened and read it. She thanked you, and said she knew she need never worry about her son, and bade you goodbye.
You looked at him in surprise. “Where is she? She hasn’t gone?”
He nodded. “Back to Chicago. Yesterday. You see she only had a week off.”
He opened one of the portfolios and began turning over the sketches, pointing and explaining.
He finished with the portfolios and stood in front of you.
“Mother suggested something before she left,” he said doubtfully, “but I don’t know whether you’d care about it. She thought I ought to stay on a month or two and do a bust of you. You have a fine head and a strong face, not at all ordinary. Quite interesting.”
The sittings began the following Monday.
You told no one about Paul, not even Jane, though you were at that time seeing more of her than you had for years, on account of the recent illness and death of your mother, the journey to the funeral in Ohio, and Margaret’s difficulties.
You and Jane and Margaret and Rose had gone out on the same train, and Larry came from Idaho, his first trip east since his departure, five years before. Everything was done before you arrived, nothing was left but the dismal role of polite mourner.
So on the evening after the funeral you all left for New York. You had engaged a drawing-room for the three girls and a compartment for yourself and Larry, who, having got as far east as Ohio, had been persuaded by Jane to come on to New York for a visit.
“What’s up between Rose and Margaret?” asked Larry. “They act as if they’d like to bite chunks out of each other.”
“They would,” you replied. “There’s a hell of a row on. Margaret’s going to be a corespondent and Rose doesn’t want her to.”
Larry, stooping to get a magazine from his bag, straightened up to stare at you.
“Don’t ask me,” you went on hastily. “I really don’t know an awful lot about it, but we’re both due to find out. Jane asked me to come back, and bring you, as soon as we got settled.”
Your ring at the door of the drawingroom, and your entrance in response to Jane’s summons, evidently interrupted Rose in the middle of a speech. Margaret, on one of the cross-seats, made room for Larry beside her, and then turned her eyes again on Rose.
“Say it again, so the head of the family can hear you,” she drawled with a glance at you. She turned to Larry. “I don’t really know you, though you’re my brother, but you look like a nice man.”
“Count me out,” said Larry so hastily that everybody laughed.
“As far as that’s concerned, me, too,” you put in. “There’s no occasion to dig at me, Margaret. I’m the head of nobody’s family. We came back because Jane asked us to.”
“Bill may not be the head of the family,” said Jane, “but he’s got a better head than any of us.”
“Thanks,” you said. “I don’t know what it’s all about anyway, except that somebody’s wife is going to get a divorce by proving that Margaret stole her husband, and Rose is sore, because if her sister’s name is dragged in the mire, she may have trouble marrying a noble scion of the wholesale leather trade.”
This produced a double explosion. Rose shouted above the train’s roar that her fiancé wasn’t a businessman at all, but that he was of an old and fastidious family; while Margaret declared that she had stolen nobody’s husband, and that he wasn’t just somebody. Dr. Oehmsen was an internationally known scientist and a great man.
“Sure,” agreed Rose, “that’s why it’s such a mess. What the tabloids won’t do!”
“They make the mire, we don’t,” returned Margaret.
“They put you in it, and me too,” Rose appealed to all of you. “I’m not asking her to give up her great man. Though if you could see him...”
Margaret exploded, “You’re a selfish outrageous little beast!” and began to cry.
You marvelled at the turmoil and fury. In a way you envied them. Do you envy them now? Ah, that would be more than tolerable now, that would be blessed, to be again frozen with indifference! What will Rose and her fastidious family say when they hear of this? What will Margaret and Larry? What if they were all here now, what if they suddenly appeared on the stairs around you?
VI
He stopped, and again stood still, and his lips moved as though he were talking to the little parchment-shaded lamp, and pronouncing Jane’s name.
He turned and looked behind him, downstairs, and started at sight of a dark form against the wall in the hall below, but saw at once that it was the side of the high black frame of the mirror and coat rack. He had avoided looking into the mirror as he passed, and he wished now that he hadn’t; he wanted to know what his face looked like; in the street he had felt that people were staring at him.
There were still sounds of Mrs. Jordan in the basement, but now he thought he heard another noise, above, and he turned quickly to look at the door facing the first landing. It was closed; there was no light under it. Those girls, he reflected, were always out at night. That was one of the things he had counted on.
You counted on, a bitter voice said to him; yes, you might count on that; you might count on anything except yourself...
You have always betrayed yourself, most miserably at those moments when you most needed the kind of fortitude that can neither be borrowed nor simulated. Yet it was not fear, exactly; more an avoidance and a denial. Certainly you weren’t afraid of Lucy, nor were you afraid of the delights she gave and promised.
You felt pretty sure you were going to marry Lucy, that day while the train roared its way through the flat fields towards Dayton, where she was to meet you. She had left Cleveland twelve days before, and they had been empty days for you.
She, alone, met you at the Dayton station, and in a little dark blue roadster drove you west, into the setting sun, some fifteen miles from the city. You were surprised at the extent of the farmhouse and buildings; you knew that Lucy’s father, publisher and editor of a newspaper somewhere, had at middle age suddenly given it up and purchased a farm and begun raising thoroughbred stock, but you hadn’t expected to see anything so elaborate.
Of all the people you have known, you have understood Lucy’s father and mother least. They were obviously healthy and happy, on excellent terms with life, yet they gave the impression of having no contact with it. Their attitude towards Lucy had none of that rubbing intimacy which is always associated with parenthood. She might have been a privileged summer boarder. You were courteously made welcome; beyond that you were strictly Lucy’s business, it seemed no affair of theirs.