CHAPTER IX

The studio underwent something of a transformation. Dearborn devoted himself to its decoration. The crisp banknote was divided between the two companions.

Fairfax ordered a suit of clothes on trust, a new pair of boots on trust, and bought outright sundry necessaries for his appearance in the world.

And Dearborn spent too much in making the studio decent, and bought an outfit of writing materials, a wadded dressing-gown with fur collar and deep pockets, the cast-off garment of some elegant rastaquouere, in a second-hand clothing shop on the boulevard. He had no plans for enjoying Paris. He philosophically looked at the cast-off shoes that had gallantly limped with the two of them up and down the stairs and here and there in the streets on such devious missions. If he should be inclined to go out he would wear them. His slippers were his real comfort. He devoted himself to the interior life and to his play. He had the place to himself, and after a long day's work he would read or plan, looking out on the quays and the Louvre, biting his fingers and weaving new plots and making youthful reflections upon life.

In the evenings Fairfax would limp home. Five days of the week he went to Barye's studio and worked for the master. Twice a week he went to the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. Just how his friend spent his time when he was not in the studio Dearborn wondered vainly. The sculptor grew less and less communicative, almost morose. Tony took to smoking countless cigarettes and sitting in the corner of the big divan, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes fixed on some object which Dearborn could not see. He would listen, or appear to, whilst Dearborn read his play; or draw for him the scenario for a new play; or the young man would read aloud bits of verse or prose that he loved and found inspiring. And Antony, more than once, could hear his own voice as he had declaimed aloud to the little cousins on a winter's afternoon, "St. Agnes' Eve, how bitter chill it was," or some other favourite repeated to shining eyes and flushed attention. Very often what Dearborn read was neither familiar nor distinguishable, for Fairfax was thinking about other things. They were not always alone in the workroom. Dearborn had friends, and those of them who had not gone away on other quests or been starved out or pushed out, would come noisily in of an evening, bringing with them perhaps a man with a fiddle and a man with a flute, and they would dance and there would be beer and "madeleines" and gay amus.e.m.e.nt of a very inoffensive kind, of a youthful kind. There would be dancing and singing, and sometimes Fairfax would take part in it all and sing with them in his pleasant baritone and smile upon them; but he liked it best when they were alone, and Dearborn did too; and in Fairfax's silence and the other man's absorption they nevertheless daily grew firmer and faster friends.

"Bob," Fairfax said--and as he spoke he abruptly interrupted Dearborn in the most vital scene of his act--"I can't take a penny from her for this portrait."

Dearborn dropped his ma.n.u.script on his knee. His expression was that of a slightly hurt egotism, for he had sat up all night working over this scene and burned all day to read it to Fairfax.

"Well, anyhow, don't ask me to cough up the two hundred and fifty francs. That's all I ask," he said a little curtly.

"I shall give her some study, one of these other statuettes," Fairfax said moodily, "some kind of return for the five hundred francs."

"She wouldn't care for anything I have got, would she, Tony?" Dearborn put his hands in the ample pockets and displayed his voluminous wrapper.

"I'm crazy about this dressing-gown," he said affectionately. "It has warmed and sheltered my best thoughts. It has wrapped around and comforted my fainting heart. It's hatched ideas for me; it's been a plaidie to the angry airs. Tony, she wouldn't take the dressing-gown, would she?"

"Rot!" exclaimed his friend fiercely. "Don't be an a.s.s. Don't you see how I feel?"

"No, I don't," said the other simply. "I am not a mind reader. I'm an imaginator. I can make up a lot of stuff about your feeling. I daresay I do invent. You will see this in my play some day. You are really an inspiration, old man, but as for having an accurate idea of your feelings...! For three weeks, ever since that banknote fluttered amongst the crumbs of our table, you have scarcely said a word to me, not a whole paragraph." He shook his finger emphatically. "If I were not absorbed myself, no doubt I should be beastly, diabolically lonesome."

Antony seemed entirely unmoved by this picture. "I think I shall go to Rome, Bob," he began, then cried: "No, I mean to St. Petersburg."

"It will be less expensive," Dearborn suggested dryly, "and considerably less travel, not to go to the Bois de Boulogne."

"I shall finish this portrait this week," Fairfax went on. "Now I can't sc.r.a.pe it out and begin again. I have done it twice. It would be desecration, for it's mightily like her, and my reason for my going there is over."

"Well, how about that full-length figure of her in furs and velvets, holding a little statuette in her hands, that you used to rave about doing? If at first you make a bas-relief, begin and begin again! There are busts and statues, as there are odes and sonnets and curtain-raisers and five-act tragedies."

"Yes," returned Fairfax, "there are tragedies, no doubt about it."

Fairfax, smoking, struggled with the emotions rising in him and which he had no notion of betraying to his friend. In the corner where Dearborn had rolled it, for he made the whole studio pretty much his own now, was the statue Fairfax was making of his mother. It was covered with a white cloth which took the lines and form of the head and shoulders. It stood ghostly amongst the shadows of the room and near it, on a stool, were Antony's sculpting tools, his broad wooden knives and a barrel of plaster. His gaze wandered to these inanimate objects, nothing in themselves, but which suggested and made possible and real his art--the reason for his existence. Now, when he stopped modelling Mrs. Faversham, he would go on with the bust of his mother. He turned his eyes to Dearborn.

"I have been up there for five weeks; I have been entertained there like a friend; I have eaten and drunk; I have accepted her hospitality; I have gone with her to the plays and opera. I have pretty well lived on her money."

"All men of the world do that," Dearborn said reasonably. "It's an awfully nice thing for a woman to have a handsome young man whom she can call on when she likes."

Fairfax ignored this and went on. "I have met her friends, delightful and distinguished people, who have invited me to their houses. I have never gone, not once, not even to see Potowski. Now I shall go up next Sunday and finish my work, and then I'm going away."

Dearborn crossed his thin legs, his beloved knit slippers, a remnant of his mother's affection, dangling on the toe of his foot. He made a telescope of his ma.n.u.script and peered through it as though he saw some illumination at the other end.

"You are not serious, Tony?"

Antony left the sofa and came over to his friend. Five weeks of comparative comfort and comparative release from the anxiety of existence--that is, of material existence--had changed him wonderfully.

His contact with worldly people, the entertainments of Paris, the stimulant to his mind and senses, his pleasures, had done him good. His face was something fuller. He had come home early from dining with Mrs.

Faversham, and in his evening dress there was an elegance about him that added to his natural distinction. In the lapel of his coat drooped a few violets from the _boutonniere_ that had been placed by his plate.

"Cedersholm is coming next week." He lit a fresh cigarette.

"Well," returned Dearborn, coolly, "he is neither the deluge nor the earthquake, but he may be the plague. What has he got to do with you, old man?"

"She is going to marry him."

"That," said Dearborn with spirit, "is rotten. Now, I will grant you that, Tony. It's rotten for her. Things have got so mixed up in your scenario that you cannot frankly go and tell her what a hog he is. That is what ought to be done, though. She ought to know what kind of a cheat and poor sort she is going to marry. In real life or drama the simple thing never happens." Dearborn smiled finely. "She ought to know, but you can't tell her."

"No," said his friend slowly, "nor would I. But neither can I meet him in her house or anywhere else. I think I should strike him."

"You didn't strike him, though," said Dearborn, meaningly, "when you had a good impersonal chance."

"I wish I had."

"I thought you told me they were all going to Rome?"

"Mrs. Faversham doesn't want to go."

"Ah," murmured Dearborn, nodding, "she doesn't."

"No." Fairfax did not seem to observe his friend's tone. "She is mightily set on having me meet Cedersholm. She wants to have him patronize me, help me!" He laughed dryly and walked up and down the studio into the cold, away from the fire, and then back to Dearborn in his dressing-gown and slippers. "Patronize me, encourage me, pat me on the back--put me in the way of meeting men of the world of art and letters, possibly work with him. She has all sorts of kindly patronizing schemes. But she doesn't know that I have been hungry and cold, and have been housed and fed by her money. Perhaps she does, though," he cried furiously to Dearborn. "No doubt she does. Do you think she does, Bob?"

"No, no--don't be an a.s.s, Tony, old man."

"You see, now don't you, that I can't stay in Paris, that I can't meet that man and knock him down--not tell her that I am not the poor insignificant creature that she thinks, that without me Cedersholm could not have whipped up his old brain and his tired imagination to have done the work that brought him so marked a success. I would have to tell her what I did, and that, crude and unschooled as I was, she would have to see that he was afraid of me, afraid of my future and my talent. Oh, Dearborn!" he cried, throwing up his arms.

Dearborn left his chair and went to Fairfax and put his hand on his shoulder.

"That's right," he said heartily, "blurt it all out, old man. Some day, when the right time comes, you will let it out to him."

Fairfax leaned on Dearborn's arm. "There were eight of us at dinner to-night," he said, "and Cedersholm was the general topic. He is much admired. He is to have the Legion of Honour. Much of what they said about him was just, of course, perfectly just and fair, but it sickened me. They were enthusiastic about his character, his generosity to his pupils, his sympathy with struggling artists, and one man, who had been at the unveiling of the Sphinx, spoke of my Beasts."

Dearborn felt Antony's hand trembling on his arm.

"The gall rose up in my throat, Bob. I saw myself working in a sacred frenzy in his studio, sweating blood, and my joy over my creations. I saw myself eager, hopeful, ardent, devoted, with a happy, cheerful belief in everybody. I had it then, I did indeed. Then I saw my ruined life, my wasted years as an engineer in Albany, my miserable, my cruel marriage, the things I stooped to and the degradation I might have known. My mother, whom I never saw again, called me--my wife, my child, pa.s.sed before me like ghosts. If I could have had a little encouragement from him then, only just my due, well.... I was thinking of all those things whilst they spoke of him, and then I looked over to her...." As he spoke Mrs. Faversham's name, Antony's voice softened. "... And she was looking at me so strangely, strangely, as though she felt something, knew something, and my silence seemed ungracious and proof of my jealousy; but I could not have said a warm word in praise of him to save my character in her eyes. When we were alone after dinner she asked me, in a voice different to any tone I have heard from her, 'Don't you like Mr. Cedersholm? You don't seem to admire him. I have never heard you speak his name, or say a friendly word about him,' and I couldn't answer her properly, and she seemed troubled."

Fairfax stopped speaking. The two friends stood mutely side by side.

Then Antony said more naturally--

"You see a little of how I feel, Bob."

And the other replied, "Yes, I see a little of how you feel"; but he continued with something of his old drollery: "I would like to know a little of how _she_ feels."

"What do you mean?"

Antony's voice was so curt, and his words were so short, that Dearborn was quick to understand that it would not be wise to touch on the subject of the woman.