Part 20 (2/2)
And the divine days with Josef by the sea! His wisdom, his temper, his splendid intolerance, his prophetic imaginings, as he stormed at the imbecility of his kind!
”It's this d.a.m.ned idea of realism that's killing art!” he shrieked one day, on the rocks at Concarneau. ”Who wants things natural? If Jones and Smith could be taught by reiterating life as it is, the race of fools would soon become extinct. My neighbor loves his neighbor's wife, and they go off together and there is murder done. Does the reading of this in book or paper stop my going off with the woman I love if I have the chance? Not a whit! Art must raise one's ideals. It's the only thing that helps you, me, any one!”
Or, again, and this was at twilight, waiting under the old crucifix for the herring-boats to come in: ”Anybody with eyesight can imitate the _actual_. The _real_! What has the creative mind to do with that? It is not one great and innocent-minded girl you are to represent in Marguerite, it is _all_ girlhood in its innocence and surrender.”
And another time, on the way home from Pont-Aven:
”Women of detail, women who indulge themselves in soul-wearying repet.i.tion of the little affairs of life, have driven more men to perdition than all the Delilahs ever created.”
And Katrine and he laughed together at his anathema, and went forward into a dusky French twilight, singing as they went.
Around her room she pinned the written slips which he gave at every lesson, Scripture which seemed perverted to uses other than its own:
”He that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved.
”Live with Goethe's Faust--learn it. You will understand Gounod's better.
”All art comes from the same kind of nature. If you didn't sing yours, you would paint it, carve it, write it, play it out; for, if it is in you to create something artistic, nothing human can stop your doing it.
”There are no mute, inglorious Miltons. Every one who has the qualifications for success succeeds.”
As time pa.s.sed the letters to her unknown benefactor became more and more intimate in tone by reason of her race and youth. No answer ever coming to any of them, it was as though her thoughts were written and cast into the eternal silence.
Upon the second anniversary of her farewell to Francis Ravenel, which was soon after her return from Brittany to Paris, she took from the depths of an old trunk the mementos of that time which seemed to her so far away. Such trifling things: a pine cross tied with blue ribbon; a gra.s.s ring which he had made for her once in the barley-field; a note or two; a book of collected poems, marked. Trifling things, indeed! but her heart throbbed with the sense of his presence as she held them in her hands.
In the next room Nora was clattering some tea things, making the plain, homely bustle that frequently keeps one sane. Out-of-doors it was one of Paris' divine gray days, with pinks and lavenders showing in the shadows; but neither the in-door noise nor the outside beauty held her.
She was back in the Carolinas with her first love; there was the odor of pine and honeysuckle in the Paris air, a harvest moon in the sky.
”To forgive and forget and understand.”
On the impulse of the moment she decided to write her story to the unknown with no names, telling the pain which haunted her always; the pain which she felt would be hers until the end. Having finished the narrative, she concluded:
”I am trying to make it very clear to you. You have been, you are, so kind. But I want you to know about me exactly as I am. The world would say that this man did not treat me well. He had faults; he had ignorances; we are none of us perfect; he was not a great man.
But he was just as I would have him.”
And, womanlike, she added a postscript:
”You send me too much money. Lessons in fencing, dancing, languages, music, cost a great deal. I have not been spending it all, although I have been helping an art student, who has almost starved himself to death in a room built on a roof, painting by candle-light.
”P.P.S.--Also a girl who tried to drown herself because she cannot sing, but she writes beautifully. I will send you one of her poems, to show you she is worth helping.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
”P.P.P.S.--Also a very poor rag-picker with, I think, twelve children. He looks even worse than this.”
The routine of her life having been thoroughly established the preceding winter, she fell easily again into the old lines. Every day she lunched with Madame de Nemours. Sometimes, when engagements left them both free, they dined together in quite a stately manner in the high, old tapestry room, and once in a fortnight she was bidden to dinner with friends of this great lady--Bartand, the dramatist; President Arnot; or Prince Ca.s.sini, with his terrible vitality and schemes for universal betterment.
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