George Van Schaick

“ She shook her head, as if in despair at my pessimism.
"Don't be foolish, Dave. You have done a fine piece of work. Oh! You can smile, if you want to. I know I am nothing but a girl—I mean a woman—but since early girlhood I have lived in an atmosphere of art, which is nothing but truth expressed in all its beauty. I think I have always understood the big things in painting and in music, instinctively, and in this book I find a melody that uplifts me, a riot of splendid color which appeals to me, because it is all true."
"Gracious! My dear Frances!" ”

“ I can't for an instant reconcile myself to such an idea, for I hardly think that Miss Van Rossum is the sort of young woman who would inspire Gordon with a consuming love. Come to think of it, I have never known him to be in love with any one, so how can I know the kind of fair charmer that will produce in him what the French call the lightning stroke? And then, Willoughby Jones is known as an inveterate and notorious gossip. The whole matter, if not an utter invention, is simply based on Gordon's policy to cultivate the people who can afford to pay five thousand for a full-length portrait. ”

“ Her "Good-by, Dave" held all the charm of her song and the tenderness of her heart, I thought, and I answered it with a catch in my throat.
"You will never be anything but a big over-grown kid, David," Frieda had told me, a few days before. Ay! I realized it! I would never cease crying for that radiant moon. Sometimes, in silly dreams, I have seen myself standing before her, with her two hands in mine, with her lips near, with her heart ready to come into my keeping. But, when I waken, I remember the words she said last year, when Gordon made her so unhappy. ”

“ Good-by, Dave, old boy, give my kindest regards to—to Frieda."
I was glad when I reached the sidewalk again. I am no cynical detractor of the advantages of wealth, breeding, education and all the things that go towards refining away some of the dross which clings to the original man. Were it not for the hope of lucre, how many would be the works of art, how great would be the achievements of the world! Still, I felt that a man can have a little too much of the scent of roses, a surfeit of gilded lilies and gems in profusion. ”

“ The eyes bent upon the slumbering child, I felt, might at any moment be lifted to her friend Dave, the scribbler, who, for the first time in his life, was beginning to learn that a woman's loveliness may be beyond the power of a poet's imagining or even the wondrous gift of a painter. The scales had indeed fallen from my eyes! At first I had thought that Gordon had idealized her, mingling his fancy with the truth and succeeding in gilding the lily. ”

“ When the idea comes to me for a novel, I am apt to moon about, searching the recesses of my mind, digging in the depths of my experience, staring into a vacancy peopled only by faint shadows that begin to gather form and strength and, finally, I hope, some attributes of humanity. At such times I often fail to recognize friends on the street or, even, I may attempt to read books upside down. Is it possible that Gordon suffers from similar limitations and needs to muse and toil and delve before he can bring out the art that is in him? ”

“ In Gordon's studio a slight breeze had blown in and mingled with the scent of the flowers with which his table was adorned, and the behavior of my collar had been of the best. The ladies, secure in the absence of starched things such as we men throttle ourselves with, had been pictures of comfortable coolness. But in the street I plunged in an atmosphere of sodden heat and refused to obey the instinct that usually leads me to walk whenever I am not pressed for time. This happens often, for the productive hours of a writer are few, leaving many to be employed in alleged thoughts. ”

“ Once more I catch myself communing with my folly. After all, Madame Dupont is just a woman; her smile gives charm to her surroundings. When she sits in my old Morris chair, she converts it into the throne of beautiful motherhood and the place into a palace of grace. Why should I care for daubs, for splashes of paint never so cleverly put on, since I can see the model from time to time and rejoice that she counts me among her friends?
"You're the grumpiest old curmudgeon I ever knew," said Gordon, interrupting my cogitations. ”

“ As the trolley and ferryboat brought me home, I had the feeling that the night was far advanced and that I had been on a long journey which rendered the prospect of bed and slumber a highly desirable one. But once in the embrace of the big city, I realized that it was but the shank of the evening and that the hurried life of the town, maker of successes and destroyer of many hopes, was throbbing fast. My watch showed but ten o'clock when I reached my caravanserai, but I climbed up the last steps, carefully, anxious to avoid making any disturbance that might awaken Frances and her little one. ”

“ Nearly all men all over the world were fools, Gordon asserted. Coyotes and foxes had an instinctive dread of traps, but men walked into them so innocently that merely to behold them was enough to drive a man to drink.
After all, I don't care what O'Flaherty and such cattle think! As long as I can save Frances, or any other good woman, from shedding one more tear than has been ordained for her, I shall do so. I refuse to be envious of the intelligence of foxes and coyotes, and I will always resent uncouthness and mean thoughts. ”

“ Also to me, when I consider her hat, but, when she is bareheaded, I am more serious, for, then, she often looks like a real woman, possessing in her heart the golden casket wherein are locked the winged passions. Quien sabe? She is, perhaps, fortunate in that filmy goddesses and ethereal youths have so filled her thoughts that a mere man, to her, is only the gross covering of something spiritual that has sufficed for her needs. Poor, dear, fat Frieda! A big gold and crimson love bursting out from beneath the varnish covering her hazy pigments would probably appal and frighten her. ”

“ A few minutes later I reached the house, which, like the Milliken woman, has seen better days. The frittering brownstone and discolored brick suit me as naturally as a hole in the sand befits a prairie dog. I let myself in, softly, with due regard to the slumbers of people compelled by the tragedy of life to go to bed at the behest of a clock, and trod the creaking stairs in utter darkness, guided by a friendly but shaky balustrade. Then I reached my landing, opened my door, turned on the light, put on my slippers and fired my coat on the bed. ”

“ To some extent they spoke a jargon of their own, to which Frances and I listened with little understanding.
"And what do you think of it, Dave?" he asked, turning abruptly to me.
"It is a beautiful thing," I answered. "If I had Frieda's imagination and her sense of beauty, I should be the great, undiscovered American novelist. She makes one believe that the world is all roses and violets and heliotropes, touched by sunshine and kissed by soft breezes. It is tenanted only by sprites and godlings, according to her magic brush."
"The world is no such thing," he retorted, sharply. ”

“ We listened to the orgy of sound from steam-whistles and tin horns. There floated to us, through the din, a pealing of faraway chiming bells. When I closed the window again, Frieda took the chafing-dish for a housewifely cleaning. Baby Paul had been sleeping on my bed and Frances was kneeling beside him, looking at the sleeping tot. For a moment she had forgotten us and the trivialities of the entertainment, and was breathing a prayer for her man-child. ”

“ He would miss it as a man misses the dead woman, who has held his heart in the hollow of her hand; he was raging at the helplessness that had come upon him. And all this he translated into his usual cynicism. I would have given anything to have seen him break down and weep, so that I might have put my arm around his shoulders and sought to comfort him with love and affection.
We got out at the big building, and he nodded to the colored boy who stood at the door of the elevator, as if he had been gone but a day. ”

“ I am afraid so, Frances, and I think she is a very fine and good woman, and—and I am sorry for her. He can never have really loved her, of course, but you know that Gordon was always a schemer, that he had mapped out all his life like a man planning the building of a house. And then, all of a sudden, he found out that nature was too strong for him, that hearts and minds can't be shut within metes and bounds, and that the real love in him was paramount. ”

“ I would give anything to know that he is desperately in love with Miss Van Rossum. It would exalt him in my eyes. Her wealth means nothing. True love comes in spite of iron bars or golden ingots. In his attractive personality and wonderful talent he has fully as much to offer as the young woman can bestow upon him. The question before me is whether he is really giving her all he has; his heart as well as his genius ”

“ My old piano was there, upon which she played softly and sang exercises that were perfectly beautiful, and songs beyond compare. The very atmosphere of her was still in the place and things of hers were yet on the dressing table, including the button hook, which I pocketed. They made me think of saintly relics to be worshipped. Baby Paul's crib appealed to me. She had so often bent over it, wistfully, as I watched her, admiring the wondrous curve of her neck, the sunlit glory of her hair. ”

“ Gordon was thinking deeply. His expression, the abandonment shown in the looseness of his limbs and the falling forward of his head, were instinct with something that represented to me a forgetting of pose and calculated conduct.
"I've seen so much suffering," he suddenly said. "That sort of thing either hardens a man into stone or softens his heart till he can cry out in hatred of the idea of inflicting pain that can be spared." ”

“ Is Frances destined to become a great singer again? Will her life, after a time, be led away from humbler surroundings, from her modest friends, and is her personality to become in my memory but one of those dear and charming recollections every man stores away in his heart, as some hide away faded flowers, a scented note, or perchance the glove that has touched a beloved hand? ”

“ Her faithful, but temporary, retainer was always there, exuding an atmosphere of robust health and lending propriety to my visits. She was generally darning socks.
The hungry one snatches at any morsel presented to him, while those who are dying of thirst pay little heed to the turbidity of pools they may chance upon. The poor Murillo-girl, perforce, had to be content with such friendship and care as her two new friends could give her. Frieda always came in once a day, but she was tremendously busy with her Orion. ”

“ To Pygmalion his sculptured beauty came to life, but from the young lady's standpoint I think that the purchased beauty that is to be changed into limned or chiselled grace must be already considered to have turned to paint or stone. If I had declared that a model was probably a thing of pulsing blood and quivering nerves, it is likely that she would have opened her fine blue eyes in surprise. But then, most of us, subconsciously, are apt to feel that those we deem beneath us in position or talent or virtue can really possess but the outward semblance of humanity. ”

“ And I, like a fool, worried on account of a man perpetually scented with gasoline and spotted with transmission grease who had taken the infernal liberty of winking at me because of my being with poor Frances, taking the air on a proletarian pier.
"The world," Gordon had told me, one day, "utterly refuses to permit a man and woman to be merely good friends. Since the days of Noah's Ark, it has been recognized as an impossibility, and, therefore, society has ever frowned down upon any attempt in so foolish a direction." ”