Part 10 (1/2)
She would give up any sitting to come and sit to her three English friends. Even Durien had serious cause for complaint.
Then her affection was exacting: she always wanted to be told one was fond of her, and she dearly loved her own way, even in the sewing on of b.u.t.tons and the darning of socks, which was innocent enough. But when it came to the cutting and fas.h.i.+oning of garments for a toreador's bride, it was a nuisance not to be borne!
”What could _she_ know of toreadors' brides and their wedding-dresses?”
the Laird would indignantly ask--as if he were a toreador himself; and this was the aggravating side of her irrepressible Trilbyness.
In the caressing, demonstrative tenderness of her friends.h.i.+p she ”made the soft eyes” at all three indiscriminately. But sometimes Little Billee would look up from his work as she was sitting to Taffy or the Laird, and find her gray eyes fixed on him with an all-enfolding gaze, so piercingly, penetratingly, unutterably sweet and kind and tender, such a brooding, dovelike look of soft and warm solicitude, that he would feel a flutter at his heart, and his hand would shake so that he could not paint; and in a waking dream he would remember that his mother had often looked at him like that when he was a small boy, and she a beautiful young woman untouched by care or sorrow; and the tear that always lay in readiness so close to the corner of Little Billee's eye would find it very difficult to keep itself in its proper place--unshed.
And at such moments the thought that Trilby sat for the figure would go through him like a knife.
She did not sit promiscuously to anybody who asked, it is true. But she still sat to Durien; to the great Gerome; to M. Carrel, who scarcely used any other model.
It was poor Trilby's sad distinction that she surpa.s.sed all other models as Calypso surpa.s.sed her nymphs; and whether by long habit, or through some obtuseness in her nature, or lack of imagination, she was equally unconscious of self with her clothes on or without! Truly, she could be naked and unashamed--in this respect an absolute savage.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”THE SOFT EYES”]
She would have ridden through Coventry, like Lady G.o.diva--but without giving it a thought beyond wondering why the streets were empty and the shops closed and the blinds pulled down--would even have looked up to Peeping Tom's shutter with a friendly nod, had she known he was behind it!
In fact, she was absolutely without that kind of shame, as she was without any kind of fear. But she was destined soon to know both fear and shame.
And here it would not be amiss for me to state a fact well known to all painters and sculptors who have used the nude model (except a few senile pretenders, whose purity, not being of the right sort, has gone rank from too much watching), namely, that nothing is so chaste as nudity.
Venus herself, as she drops her garments and steps on to the model-throne, leaves behind her on the floor every weapon in her armory by which she can pierce to the grosser pa.s.sions of man. The more perfect her unveiled beauty, the more keenly it appeals to his higher instincts.
And where her beauty fails (as it almost always does somewhere in the Venuses who sit for hire), the failure is so lamentably conspicuous in the studio light--the fierce light that beats on this particular throne--that Don Juan himself, who has not got to paint, were fain to hide his eyes in sorrow and disenchantment, and fly to other climes.
All beauty is s.e.xless in the eyes of the artist at his work--the beauty of man, the beauty of woman, the heavenly beauty of the child, which is the sweetest and best of all.
Indeed it is woman, lovely woman, whose beauty falls the shortest, for sheer lack of proper physical training.
As for Trilby, G----, to whom she sat for his Phryne, once told me that the sight of her thus was a thing to melt Sir Galahad, and sober Silenus, and chasten Jove himself--a thing to Quixotize a modern French masher! I can well believe him. For myself, I only speak of Trilby as I have seen her--clothed and in her right mind. She never sat to me for any Phryne, never bared herself to me, nor did I ever dream of asking her. I would as soon have asked the Queen of Spain to let me paint her legs! But I have worked from many female models in many countries, some of them the best of their kind. I have also, like Svengali, seen Taffy ”trying to get himself clean,” either at home or in the swimming-baths of the Seine; and never a sitting woman among them all who could match for grace or finish or splendor of outward form that mighty Yorks.h.i.+reman sitting in his tub, or sunning himself, like Ilyssus, at the Bains Henri Quatre, or taking his running header _a la hussarde_, off the spring-board at the Bains Deligny, with a group of wondering Frenchmen gathered round.
Up he shot himself into mid-air with a sounding double downward kick, parabolically; then, turning a splendid semi-demi-summersault against the sky, down he came headlong, his body straight and stiff as an arrow, and made his clean hole in the water without splash or sound, to reappear a hundred yards farther on!
”Sac a papier! quel gaillard que cet Anglais, hein?”
”A-t-on jamais vu un torse pareil!”
”Et les bras, donc!”
”Et les jambes, nom d'un tonnerre!”
”Matin! J'aimerais mieux etre en colere contre lui qu'il ne soit en colere contre moi!” etc., etc., etc.
Omne ignotum pro magnifico!
If our climate were such that we could go about without any clothes on, we probably should; in which case, although we should still murder and lie and steal and bear false witness against our neighbor, and break the Sabbath day and take the Lord's name in vain, much deplorable wickedness of another kind would cease to exist for sheer lack of mystery; and Christianity would be relieved of its hardest task in this sinful world, and Venus Aphrodite (_alias_ Aselgeia) would have to go a-begging along with the tailors and dress-makers and boot-makers, and perhaps our bodies and limbs would be as those of the Theseus and Venus of Milo; who was no Venus, except in good looks!
[Ill.u.s.tration: ILYSSUS]
At all events, there would be no cunning, cruel deceptions, no artful taking in of artless inexperience, no unduly hurried waking-up from Love's young dream, no handing down to posterity of hidden uglinesses and weaknesses, and worse!