Robert Herrick

“ It was all so daintily, so coquettishly managed, Anthon thought with complacency. No London girl could rub you just the right way like that. It was delicious to feel yourself falling into such toils. But she would have to make them strong! If folly were to be his lot, it must be a long-drawn-out, sweet folly.
After they had left, Mrs. Wilbur lay quite still in her large wicker chair, watching the pale silver plain at her feet shimmer in the blinding flood of light from the western hills. The sea of heat seething in myriad lanes above the trees hypnotized her flickering will. ”

“ Miss Parker was quite wrong in imagining him hostile to the place or its people. He was wondering over them perpetually, as a man would wonder who is enabled by a powerful lens to take into his consciousness a new planet where he finds that his ideas of propriety have been entirely reversed. Such a novel discovery could cause in him neither pain nor pleasure. If some one should come along the shore of this new world and bellow at him that he was beholding the last utterance of creation, he would laugh good-humouredly at the newcomer’s provinciality. ”

“ I wish you women who long to be appeased cared for your good looks. A little vanity in a woman is a safe thing.” Yet she was glad to feel that her beauty existed, like the olive below the terrace, like the golden wave of hair in that picture in the Pitti; for it made the earth richer.
And Molly Parker’s last words came back to her. “I had rather you had run off with Erard,” Molly had remarked irritably. “At least they say a great passion is sometimes beyond control, but to slip off this way because you are bored!” ”

“ Money gives power and freedom, she told herself again and again. It had freed Wilbur. Instead of spending his days as a small lawyer or clerk, he was striding on, growing each month in shrewdness, in experience, in grasp. Money had freed Erard, assured him the priceless leisure for tranquil, unharassed work. Would it free her? enrich her? cut through circumstances so that the restless, savage beast in her could grow and possess and be satisfied? ”

“ Erard is quite the most interesting man I have ever met,” Miss Anthon pronounced dogmatically, irritated by the bearish atmosphere. “I can’t quite see why we Americans, who are always whooping for success, and pardon everything if it only leads to our ends, should have so many doubts about that same selfishness when used for other things than getting dollars or going into politics. We are dreadfully moral as soon as it comes to art or to anything that doesn’t give a bank account. If I were a man without a cent, I would do precisely what Mr. Erard has done—make the world support me.” ”

“ The household on Bello Sguardo had received her as a prodigal,—Luisa with loud exclamations of joy, Pina with roses, and Molly with a kiss. Yet she knew that the end was not yet. Erard would not let her slip so simply, and in a way that humiliating retreat from Rome had left her more powerless than ever. While she waited Walter Anthon came with real news: the divorce had been granted in chambers. Or, in Walter’s solemn words,—
“Your husband has taken the measure which society allows him. You are no longer Mrs. John Wilbur.” ”

“ An old, savage instinct surged up in him, the desire to kill what you could not keep in any other way. That she should calmly decide to walk out of his life after three years of marriage, for no provocation that any reasonable man would consider for a moment,—that was intolerable! And society merely enfeebled the men who had to stand, as he stood, passive. He would like to feel his arms about her, his hand at her throat, and to have her know that for hate as well as for love, she was his for ever. ”

“ It is better to live than to paint, some one said; it is best to make life your art.
Freedom! The very word had an impelling charm; freedom from this endless division of herself that present conditions imposed. How much Mrs. Anthon and Aix-les-Bains had to do with her decision it would be hard to say. For at last, as the still moments escaped while she faltered there before the intent man, all logical thoughts fled, and in their place came confused longings and impulses.
Wilbur rose and walked slowly over to the fireplace. ”

“ To be sure, old John Anthon had taught her that the laws of commercial morality were none other than those of private uprightness. [125] Yet the disgust she felt was more than moral; it was a loathing of the sordid, of the brutal, of the vulgar. Had she, Adela Anthon, with her high-strung ideals of man’s life, her wide-sweeping ambitions, come to be a party in such an affair? Had she exchanged her love of intellectual life, her longing for beauty, to share in a common swindle on the public, brought about by a dicker between a knave and a gang of venal country legislators? ”

“ Wilbur turned and swept haughtily down the stone stairs, lingering for a minute before the rushing Victory. Such art was naked as men were naked in the childhood of the race. That state of simplicity could never come again. The nakedness of Erard seemed to her like impotent curiosity.
She might come to accept this attitude, also, and see no mystery in man and woman more than the mystery of two sensual animals. But she shuddered at the idea. That would strip the world of one necessary covering for its sordidness. ”

“ His niece comprehended this wistful thought, and the desire to give Erard help even if he should make nothing of himself. As the old man got ready to die, the eternal desirability of success, of making a stir in this patchy world of ours, seemed less self-evident. To know something beautiful, to make others know it,—best of all to create a new beautiful thing, a bit of colour, a union of tones, a fine line, that was perhaps the only solace for much pain. ”

“ Here an enormous windowless wall of an armoury; next door the thin sides of a carriage factory; further on the spidery lines of a hotel. Thus for two miles until the sky-scrapers towered in the chill fog.
“Superb, superb,” he murmured to himself. “I must have walked five miles, and not a building, not a dog-hutch, where there is an idea expressed beyond size, convenience, and either the possession of money or the desire for it. It is a new race, a new world.”
It had roused his curiosity, this Chicago, from the first peep he had had on the train of the roaring city. ”

“ Erard had shown her the famous new picture by Degas; what was more exciting, had presented the painter himself. One clear day he had taken her out to a quiet studio at Passy, where she had seen a great master at work on a fresco for an American building. Again, they had visited old Sader at work on his marvellous gates, which had been on the way for a dozen years. Sader seemed to her a very undistinguished person,—thickset, with a long grizzled beard, and like a tradesman in his cotton blouse. ”

“ Erard paused, leaning over the back of a chair and searching her face. “That is the distressing part of us Americans; we all apologize for such emotions, as if we should be ashamed of having them.”
“I shall not have them long. I am a woman and take on the colour of my habitation.”
“You are a woman and will die hard—unless you make a dash for the open air, for freedom.” He spoke tranquilly, with calculation. Mrs. Wilbur started as though he had blundered upon a secret, not confessed even to herself.
“Freedom! I have been making disturbances all my life to be free. ”

“ Wilbur’s little epic had excited her; only, with this difference: here was a creed, a consistent valuation of facts. And this creed seemed grander, vaguer, with limitless ends. It demanded more faith from its believers, but for that reason it was not unacceptable to a woman.
“The world must believe in you, like a prophet without works, at present. Success is its own justification. Yet that is a brutal doctrine,” the girl mused.
“It is a great law of life,” Erard asserted, “both for the despot and the stock-broker.” ”

“ This last development, however, is sporadic; hence as a whole the first impression Chicago gives is that of a huge garment made of heterogeneous materials,—here a square of faded cotton, next door a patch let in of fine silk. For the order of life is first existence, then comfort, then luxury, and last—when the human mind begins to suffer ennui—a little beauty for a plaything.
The complex quality of this wonderful city is best seen as the stranger shoots across the prairie in a railroad train, penetrating layer after layer of the folds. ”

“ Animation returned once more to the party. Erard led them from the studio—a fine old room, with open-timbered ceiling, left almost ostentatiously bare—into the adjoining salon. In the sombre studio there had been only the warm woodwork; here were many living qualities,—the lofty windows hung with dark stuffs, the fireplace adorned by a delicate relief of nymphs. In one corner was a spinet, and along the sides of the room couches, with a few low tables and aristocratic chairs. ”

“ Life spins there; man there is handling existence as you knead bread in a pan. The city is made of man; that is the last word to say of it. Brazen, unequal, like all man’s works, it stands a stupendous [104] piece of blasphemy against nature. Once within its circle, the heart must forget that the earth is beautiful. “Go to,” man boasts, “our fathers lived in the fear of nature; we will build a city where men and women in their passions shall be the beginning and end. Man is enough for man.” ”

“ Wilbur answered indifferently. “Anyway, I shall be going away soon.”
“So you have made up your mind. What are you going to do with yourself?”
“How do I know? What can a woman who has dabbled in life all round do with herself, except begin over and dabble all round again?”
“Why don’t you make a profession of freedom, now you have given up trying the straddle?”
She did not like the phrase, “profession of freedom”: it sounded like a fine way of saying “abandon yourself.” Just then some one touched her elbow, and Erard was swallowed up in the surrounding hubbub. She never saw him again in Chicago. ”

“ She appealed to him audaciously, clinging to his strength. “And I—what shall I do?”
“Is it all over—the joy and the venture?”
“I seem to have died, instead of gaining freedom.”
“That word! How it deceives us! You have chased a shadow.”
“You mean?”
“There is no freedom and every one is free. It is all a matter of feeling. And that feeling you cannot command.” ”

“ At the great brasseries along the boulevards men and women were seated before their untasted bock or café, luxuriating in the popular street theatre that could be had for a few sous. Some men with silk hats pushed back on their heads were scribbling letters or journalistic copy, in the casual fashion of Parisian life. There were other little groups of twos, a man and a woman, one of the two generally talking earnestly, while the other listened dumbly. In a way Mrs. Wilbur felt that she and Simeon Erard ought to be seated at such a table, bound together as they were by some kind of a tie. ”

“ I haven’t any time for silly scruples—for money-getting. That faculty of scraping up dollars is an inferior one, and those who have it must contribute to me. The world shall support me; it shall give me my time—that’s the great luxury—and my peace, too, until in my own way I have completed my work. Some century hence your uncle will be known by a footnote in my biography. And one should not grudge a heavy payment for fame, however it may come or however modest it may be.”
Miss Anthon was impressed by the fervour of the man’s passion for his own life, by his unbounding egotism, by his force. ”

“ You have no time to make compromises with life, to spend your strong, creative years earning your freedom. You are right!”
Her sympathy, always so ready to go out to anything which promised relief from triviality, invested Erard with the interest of a hero. What he might accomplish ultimately, its value to himself, to others, intrinsically, was a small matter. He despised the world, treated it haughtily, and that was enough for her. It was pleasant, too, to know that she might possibly have a share in this large venture, just as she had taken part in Wilbur’s crisis. ”

“ The afternoons were too precious to spend in the city. The surrounding hilltops from San Miniato to Bello Sguardo, from Fiesole to Cappa Monte, called her. One solitary villa near the brow of Bello Sguardo, with a broad terrace hanging over the valley, took her fancy, and she resolved to rent it. From its lofty terrace under the solemn row of cypresses she would hold Florence in her arms. And across the black-ribboned Arno the hills of Fiesole beckoned her eyes on to the Apennines. ”