Sinister Street

"I'm really awfully worried," he said aloud to himself, as through the stale city air the hansom jogged heavily along from Paddington to Charing Cross.

Michael arrived at Paris in the pale burning blue of an August morning, and arriving as he did in company with numerous c.o.c.kney holiday-makers, something of the spirit of Paris was absent. The city did not express herself immediately as Paris unmistakable, but more impersonally as the great railway-station of Europe, a center of convenience rather than the pulsing heart of pleasure. However, as soon as Michael had taken his seat in the bony fiacre and had ricocheted from corner to corner of half a dozen streets, Paris was herself again, with her green jalousies and gilded letterings, her prodigality of almost unvarying feminine types, those who so neatly and so gayly hurried along the pavements and those who in soiled dressing-jackets hung listlessly from upper windows.

Stella's address was near the Quai d'Orsay; and when Michael arrived he found she was living in rooms over a bookseller's shop with a view of the Seine and beyond of mult.i.tudinous roofs that in the foreground glistened to the sun like a pattern of enamel, until with distance they gradually lost all definition and became scarcely more than a woven damascene upon the irresolute horizon of city and sky.

Michael never surrendered to disillusion the first impression of his entrance that August morning. In one moment of that large untidy room looking over the city that most consciously of all cities has taken account of artists he seemed to capture the symbol of the artist's justification. Stella's chestnut hair streamed down her straight back like a warm drift of autumn leaves. She had not finished dressing yet, and the bareness of her arms seemed appropriate to that Hungarian dance she played. All the room was permeated with the smell of paint, and before an easel stood a girl in long unsmocked gown of green linen.

This girl Michael had never seen, but he realized her personality as somehow inseparably a.s.sociated with that hot-blooded Bacchante on whose dewy crimson mouth at the moment her brush rested. Geranium flowers, pierced by the slanting rays of the sun, stood on the window-sill of an inner room whose door was open. Stella did not stop to finish the dance she was playing, but jumped up to greet Michael, and in the fugitive silence that followed his introduction to her friend Clarissa Vine, he heard the murmur of ordinary life without which drowned by the lightest laugh nevertheless persisted un.o.btrusive and imperturbable.

Yet, for all Michael's relief at finding Stella at least superficially all right, he could not help disapproving a little of that swift change of plan which, without a word of warning to himself before the arrival of the telegram in Cornwall, had brought her from London to Paris. Nor could he repress a slight feeling of hostility toward Miss Clarissa Vine whose exuberant air did not consort well with his idea of a friend for Stella. He was certainly glad, whether he were needed or not, that he had come rather quickly. Clarie was going to paint all that morning, and Michael, who was restless after his journey, persuaded Stella to abandon music for that day and through the dancing streets of Paris come walking.

The brother and sister went silently for a while along the river's bank.

"Well," said Michael at last, "why did you wire for me?"

"I wanted you."

Stella spoke so simply and so naturally that he was inclined to ask no more questions and to accept the situation as one created merely by Stella's impetuousness. But he could not resist a little pressure, and begged to know whether there were no other reason for wanting him but a fancy for his company.

Stella agreed there might be, and then suddenly she plunged into her reasons. First, she took Michael back to last autumn and a postscript she had written to a letter.

"Do you remember how I said that academic perfection was not enough for an artist, that there was also life to be lived?"

Michael said he remembered

"I told you that a youth was painting me."

"But you also said he looked like a corpse," Michael quickly interjected. "You surely haven't fallen in love with somebody who looks like a corpse?"

"I'm not in love with his outside, but I am fascinated by his inside,"

Stella admitted.

Michael looked darkly for a moment, overshadowed by the thought of the fellow's presumption.

"I never yet met a painter who had very much inside," he commented.

"But then, my dearest Michael, I suppose you'll confess that your acquaintances.h.i.+p with the arts as practiced not talked about is rather small."

Michael looked round him and eyed all Paris with comprehensive hostility.

"And I suppose this chap is in Paris now," he said. "Well, I can't do anything. I suppose for a long time now you've been making a fool of yourself over him. What have you fetched me to Paris for?"

He felt resentful to think that his hope of Stella and Alan falling in love with one another was to be broken up by this upstart painter whom he had never seen.

"I've certainly not been making a fool of myself," Stella flamed. "But I thought I would rather you were close at hand."

"And who's this Clarissa Vine?" Michael indignantly demanded.

"She's the girl I traveled with to Paris."

"But I never heard of her before. All this comes of your taking that studio before we moved to Cheyne Walk."

By the token that Stella did not contradict him, Michael knew that all this had indeed come from that studio, and to show his disapproval of the studio, he began to rail at Clarissa.

"I can't bear that overblown type of girl. I suppose every night she'll sit and talk hot air till three o'clock in the morning. I shall go mad,"

Michael exclaimed, aghast at the prospective futility of the immediate future.

Stella insisted that Clarissa was a good sort, that she had had an unhappy love-affair, that she thought nothing of men but only of her art, that she made one want to work and was therefore a valuable companion, and, finally, to appease if possible Michael's mistrust of Clarie by advertising her last advantage, Stella said that she could not stand George Ayliffe.

Michael announced that, as Miss Vine had scarcely condescended to address a single word to him in the quarter of an hour he was waiting for Stella to dress, it was impossible for him to say whether he could stand her or not, but that he was still inclined to think she was thoroughly objectionable.

"Well, to-night at our party, you shall sit next to her," Stella promised.

"Party?" interrogated Michael, in dismay.

"We're having a party in our rooms to-night."

"And this fellow Ayliffe is coming, I suppose?"

She nodded.

"And I shall have to meet him?"

She nodded again very cheerfully.

They went back to fetch Clarie out to lunch, but rather decently, Michael was bound to admit, she made some excuse for not coming, so that he and Stella were able to spend the afternoon together. It was a jolly afternoon, for though Stella had closed her lips tightly to any more confidences, she and Michael enjoyed themselves wandering in a light-hearted dream, grasping continually at those airy bubbles of vitality that floated upward sparkling from the debonair streets.

The party at the girls' rooms that evening seemed to Michael, almost more than he cared to admit to the side of him conscious of being Stella's brother, a recreation of ideal Bohemia. He knew the influence of the rich August moon was responsible for most of the enchantment and that the same people encountered earlier in the day in the full glare of the sunlight would have seemed to him too keenly aware of the effect at which they were aiming. But to resist their appeal, coming as they did from the heart of Paris to this long riverside room with its lamps and shadows, was impossible. Each couple that entered seemed to relinquish slowly on the threshold a mysterious intimacy which set Michael's heart beating in the imagination of what alt.i.tudes it might not have reached along the path of romantic pa.s.sions. Every young woman or young man who entered solitary and paused in the doorway, blinking in search of familiar faces, moved him with the respect owed by lay worldlings to great artists. Masterpieces brooded over the apartment, and Michael tolerated in his present mood of unqualified admiration personalities so pretentious, so vain, so egotistical, as would in his ordinary temper have plunged him into speechless gloom.

Oxford after this a.s.sembly of frank opinions and incarnate enthusiasms seemed a colorless shelter for unfledged reactionaries, a nursery of callow men in the street. Through the open windows the ponderous and wise moon commented upon the scintillations of the outspread city whose life reached this room in sound as emotionally melodious, as romantically real as the sea-sound conjured by a sh.e.l.l. Here were gathered people who worked always in that circ.u.mfluent inspiration, that murmur of liberty, that whisper of humanity. What could Oxford give but the bells of out-worn beliefs, and the patter of aimless footsteps? How right Stella had been to say that academic perfection was vain without the breath of life. How right she was to find in George Ayliffe someone whose artistic sympathy would urge her on to achievements impossible to attain under Alan's admiration for mere fingers and wrists.

Michael watched this favorite of his sister all through the evening. He tried to think that Ayliffe's cigarette-stained fingers were not so very unpleasant, that Ayliffe's cadaverous exterior was just a n.o.ble melancholy, that Ayliffe's high pointed head did not betray an almost insufferable self-esteem, and, what was the hardest task of all, he tried to persuade himself that Ayliffe's last portrait of Stella had not transformed his splendidly unconcerned sister into a self-conscious degenerate.

"How do you like George's picture of Stella?"

The direct inquiry close to his ear startled Michael. He had been leaning back in his chair, listening vaguely to the hum of the guests'

conversation and getting from it nothing more definite than a sense of the extraordinary ease of social intercourse under these conditions.

Looking round, he saw that Clarissa Vine had come to sit next to him and he felt half nervous of this concentrated gaze that so evidently betokened a determination to probe life and art and incidentally himself to the very roots.

"I think it's a little thin, don't you?" said Clarie.

Michael hated to have his opinion of a painting invited, and he resented the painter's jargon that always seemed to apply equally to the subject and the medium. It was impossible to tell from Miss Vine's question whether she referred to Stella's figure or to Ayliffe's expenditure upon paint.

"I don't think it's very like Stella," Michael replied, and consoled himself for the absence of subtlety or cleverness in such an answer by the fact that at least it was a direct statement of what he thought.

"I know what you mean," said Clarissa, nodding seriously.

Michael hoped that, she did. He could not conceive an affirmation of personal opinion delivered more plainly.