Part 10 (1/2)
I poured out the tea and produced a small box of vanilla wafers, which Frieda is ever so fond of.
”I wonder Gordon didn't get mad, when Baby Paul began to scream,” she said.
”My dear,” I remarked, ”a man generally gets angry only at the unexpected. He had made up his mind that the weather would be squally and would have been rather disappointed if no shower had come. Before I had the pleasure of Master Paul's acquaintance, I mistakenly thought that every interval between waking and feeding, in a baby's life, must be taken up with l.u.s.ty shrieking. I'm positively frightened and hopeless, sometimes, when I think of how much there is for me to learn.
I know I'll never catch up.”
”You know good tea, for one thing,” answered Frieda. ”Give me another cup.”
I complied, and, presently, Frances, at our urging, sat down to the old piano and played something that was very pretty and soft. And then the old desire to sing must have come upon her, suddenly, for her low and husky voice brought forth a few words of a sweet, old French song. This, all at once, must have evoked some of the memories that weighed so heavily upon her heart. Her hands went up to her face and she sobbed.
Frieda rose, swiftly and silently, and put her big, able hand upon the girl's shoulder.
”I--I can't even sing to my baby!” Frances moaned.
What a cry from the heart! All else would have amounted to so little, if she could only have poured out some of the melody in her soul to the poor little mite. She was brave; working for Baby Paul was of small moment; even the loss of the gallant soldier lad who had poured his stream of life for the motherland was not for the moment the paramount source of her distress. No! She could not sing for the diminutive portrait of himself, the man had left behind!
As usual, in the presence of a woman's tears, I was mute and incapable of giving comfort. I feared to utter some of the plat.i.tudes which cause the sorrowing to revolt against the futility of wordy consolation.
Frieda's kindly touch was worth more than all I could have said in a dog's age. Soon, the streaming eyes had been dabbed again to dryness, but the smile I had hoped for did not return.
”I--I am sorry I was so weak,” said Frances, and ran away to her room, possibly for the powder surely invented by a great benefactor of humanity, since it may serve to obliterate the traces of women's tears and enables them to look at you again, hopefully and with courage renewed.
After this, three weeks went by. The literary agent upon whose kindly head I pour my short stories announced the sale of my virtuous dog's tale, on the strength of which I took Frieda and Frances to a moving-picture theatre, one Sat.u.r.day night. The latter's posing for Gordon was always a subject of conversation. The picture, it appeared, was now quite finished, and we were moving heaven and earth in our endeavors to find something wherewith a woman with a young baby might earn a few dollars. Frances spoke little of her experiences at the studio, except to gratify our curiosity. It was always the same thing.
Baby was generally ever so good and Mr. McGrath fairly patient with his occasional relapses from slumbering silence. An impression made its way in my mind to the effect that Gordon rather awed his model. She had watched the picture's growth and this process of creation, utterly new to her, seemed to fill her with some sort of amazement.
”Tell me just what it is like,” I asked her, as we sat on the stoop, waiting for Frieda to turn up.
”I suppose it looks like me,” she said, doubtfully, ”but then, it isn't a portrait, of course. I--I don't think I look just like that. Sometimes he stands in front of me for the longest time and glares, looking more and more disappointed, and all at once he says I've got a Sphynx of a face or a deuce of a mouth, or something just as complimentary. Then he turns to the picture again and changes something, with merely a touch of one of those big brushes, and plasters on another dab of paint and moves off to look at it. After this, he says it's much better, or declares he's spoiled everything, and he lights his pipe and goes to work again.
Sometimes he wears the expression of a bulldog worrying a bone, and a minute later he'll be just as nice as nice can be. He's a strange man.”
”He certainly is,” I a.s.sented. ”At any rate, I am glad that your experience with him, on the whole, has not proved a disagreeable one.”
”Indeed, sometimes I have rather enjoyed it. Yesterday, I didn't. He began, _a propos_ of nothing, to tell me about one of your books, and said that your idea about a girl called Laura was so silly he had no patience with you, because you had idealized her until it was rather a caricature than a portrait, and you didn't know any more about women than the baby did. So, of course, I got angry at him and he looked at me, with a smile that was half a sneer, and told me to keep on looking just like that. It seems that I had just the expression he wanted to bring out. When you look too long at the baby,' he said, 'you get the likeness of a girl who's been scolded at table and is going to cry into the soup. I thought I'd wake you up!' I was ever so provoked, and he painted right along without minding me in the least. When he was through, he put on his most polite air and told me that all he had said about that Laura was nonsense, and that she was just a fool girl like any other. As for the picture, he said it would make some fellows sit up and take notice. He appeared to be intensely pleased with it and thanked me for being so patient with him.”
”I am not surprised,” I told her. ”When our good little friend, Dr.
Porter, who is the best-hearted chap you'll meet in a long day's journey, becomes very interested in some dreadful malady and wants to make experiments, I am sure he considers guinea-pigs and rats in the light of mere material. Gordon will not have the slightest compunction about vivisecting a model, if it suits his purpose.”
”But he can be ever so kind. He very often is,” declared Frances. ”On the very first day he told me not to allow myself to get overtired, and he's kept on asking me ever since, if I didn't want to take a rest.
Sometimes he made me stop, when I could very well have kept on.”
Frieda appeared, coming around the corner under full steam, and we got in the car and went off to the movies. The services of Eulalie had been obtained, to mind the baby for a couple of hours. She likes to do it, and it gives her an opportunity to go into my room and rummage in my bureau drawers, where she hunts for missing b.u.t.tons with the eagerness of a terrier looking for rats.
When we returned, satiated with picturesque tragedy and second-rate vaudeville, Frances, as usual, flew upstairs, obsessed with the idea that obviously grease-painted and false-whiskered villains such as we had seen on the screen must have penetrated the citadel and stolen her baby. Frieda had left us at the door, and I climbed up in more leisurely fas.h.i.+on, meeting Eulalie on the stairs, loaded with my soiled linen, who bade me good evening, pleasantly.
Frances was waiting for me on her door-sill.
”Paul is all right. Nothing has happened,” she confided to me. ”Good night, Mr. Cole, and thank you ever so much.”