Chapter THREE: I

Those days were gone now. There were no more of those Sunday afternoons in her mother’s kitchen. A sister had married well, and the whole family had migrated to Boston, where the unwilling and resentful son-in-law could “keep an eye” on them. Rosaleen had written two or three times to her mother, but had never had an answer. And with her sorrowful resignation, had given her up as lost.

But whenever a dark hour came, her memory flew back to that spot, recalled to her that time spent in the dreadful dirty old kitchen with her mother, a little bit intoxicated, seated before the table covered with oilcloth, and usually a neighbor or two, widow women, or married as it might be, all drinking tea and complaining. There was always a baby sister or brother crawling about the floor, and a cat; it was always warm, steamy, indescribably friendly. The depth of it, the vitality, the kind, consoling human flavour of it, of those slovenly women who were forever bearing children, whose talk was of life and death, of pain, sorrow and earthly joys! Compared with it, the hurried artificial conversation of Miss Amy and Mr. Humbert was like the talk of shadows....

She was thinking and thinking of it that night.

“All right!” she said, bitterly. “I won’t deny it! I’m common! I’m not happy here. I don’t belong here. I don’t appreciate it. I hate it! I wouldn’t be like Miss Amy for anything.... Of course _he’d_ soon see that. He’d find out that I’m--common....”

But she couldn’t bear the thought. She sat up in bed.

“Oh, but I haven’t had a chance!” she cried. “I’ve _never_ had a chance! Oh!... If I could just see him alone, I could show him that I’m....”

She could not explain to herself just what she knew herself to be, just what it was that she wished this young man to know. It was that pitiful secret thought of all human beings, whether a fallacy or a profound truth can never be demonstrated--the thought that if you know me, you will love me, that if you hold a poor opinion of me, it is because you misunderstand me.

Perhaps after all she would go, just this once, just see him, and trust to his comprehension....

She waked up the next morning, still undecided, her heart as heavy as lead. She dressed in the dismal twilight of her little cell, weighing and deliberating, hesitating miserably. At last it resolved itself into this bald alternative--which way would cause her the least pain--not to meet him, to lose him forever now, at the very beginning, to destroy this promise of the first interest any man had yet shown in her--or to let it go on, to let her starved and ardent affection rush out to him, to become fatally entangled in the web of her own making, only to have him find her out and despise her?

She went into the kitchen to get ready the breakfast, and in there, a back room looking out over little yards, the sun was beginning to enter. She could see a soft blue morning sky, with shadowy white clouds blown across it by a mild and steady wind. It cheered her marvellously. She was as easily made happy as she was easily hurt.

She started to grind the coffee, in itself a cheerful morning noise.

“Oh, nonsense!” she said to herself. “I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. Of course I’ll go and meet him. Why shouldn’t I? It’s just a lark. It won’t lead to anything, if I don’t want it to. There’s no need for me to be so serious about it. I’m _going_!”

She was well used to keeping her own counsel. She looked and she acted just the same as usual; when Miss Amy appeared she found breakfast on the table, as it should be, and Rosaleen occupying a few spare moments in dusting.

“Good morning, Miss Amy!” she said, in her gentle, her almost meek little voice.

Miss Amy answered curtly, and looked into the kitchen to see if all was in order. She was a stout grey haired woman with a face as dark as a gypsy’s and a long, sharp--an almost wolfish, nose. She had a perpetual smile, a smile which she had schooled her lips to assume, in her terrible efforts to subdue her own fierce nature. She was a woman of natural ferocity and violence, but controlled and dominated by a passionate desire to be good. So well did she rule herself that she very rarely spoke a sharp word, and though she had a deep-rooted and unshakable dislike for Rosaleen, she treated her with generosity. She made her work; that, she considered, was good for her, and in every way fitting and proper. But she likewise considered that she and her brother were morally responsible for this girl, and she paid out of her own pocket for Art Lessons, for an occasional Shakespearian matinée and other items of cultural importance.

Anyone who has experienced it will admit how immeasurably painful is the combination of hostility and gratitude. Rosaleen was obliged by her own heart to dislike Miss Amy, and by her soul to recognise her benefactions. They were in all things opposed and hostile. Rosaleen was a fool possessed of common sense and Miss Amy was a practical woman without any.

Rosaleen brought in Miss Amy’s little dish of prunes.

“Anything I can do for you downtown to-day, Miss Amy?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, of course! It’s your lesson day. No, thank you, Rosaleen, there is nothing.”

Mr. Humbert now appeared to be fed. He ate, pretending to be absent minded so that no one should bother him about anything, and went away to his office. Then Miss Amy began leisurely to get herself ready to go to market, while Rosaleen washed the dishes and made the beds.

“You’d better hurry!” she said. “You’ll be late, Rosaleen!”

But Rosaleen was only waiting for her to be gone, so that she could put on her best blouse and her white gloves.

II

Miss Julie had always encouraged Rosaleen’s fondness for drawing. In fact, it may have been the drawing lessons she had given the little girl and her fervent talk of “art” which had given Rosaleen the idea of becoming an artist. But, whether the ambition was implanted by nature or by Miss Julie, the ability was born with her. She had an undoubted facility. In the long hours she had spent alone in the flat, she had comforted herself with her little talent, copying the covers of magazines and inventing romances around the imbecile beauties. And as time went on, and her companions at school admired her work, her pride and her hope increased. She saw in this career as an artist a chance of escape, for freedom.

When she was graduated from the High School, at eighteen, she said that she should like to study art seriously. Miss Amy had agreed at once, and Rosaleen had then showed her an advertisement in the Sunday paper which she had noticed for some weeks.

EUROPEAN ART TEACHER would accept one or two more young lady pupils. Very moderate terms. Address F. W.

They had addressed F. W., and in the due course of time received a letter signed “Faith Waters,” inviting them to call the next afternoon at four. They had discovered the European Art Teacher living in a dark, old-fashioned flat on Tenth Street, with one light room at the back which she had made into a studio by filling it with plaster casts on crooked shelves put up by her own hands. The teacher herself was a withered little woman in a crushed and dusty brown dress, with a black velvet bow in her cottony white hair, and she had the cultured voice of one who has been to Europe.

Rosaleen looked about at the photographs on the walls of various persons in stage costume, signed _A ma chère Miss--Bien à vous_--and so on. She supposed that these were artistic foreign friends of Miss Waters’, never suspecting that they were nothing more nor less than second rate stage people to whom she had taught English.

“I suppose you’ve lived abroad a long time?” said Miss Amy.

“Oh, dear me, yes!” said Miss Waters. “I studied in Brussels for _years_!”

She didn’t explain that this had been thirty years ago, and in a cheap _pension de demoiselles_, and that she had never seen the inside of a foreign art school, or studied under any master except the miserable old man who had taught drawing as an extra to the demoiselles.

“I’ll show you some of my work,” she had said. “I haven’t a proper place to hang them here. The light is so bad you’ll hardly be able to judge.... But still....”

She led the way to the dining-room, where her canvases hung in profusion. She specialised in animal life, kittens, puppies, and--timidly--horses. The horses were supernaturally stalwart and spirited, with tremendous chests and heads flung back splendidly, but Miss Waters was conscious of many weak points in them, grave deficiencies. She knew that sweet little kittens were more in her line. Horses were, after all, rather grossly big animals, and she did them only as an exercise in virtuosity.

Rosaleen and Miss Amy had been a trifle disappointed in Miss Waters’ work. They both had a feeling that animals were not truly artistic. Flowers, landscapes, women and children, were what they had expected and desired. Still, a group of six puppies in a row, astoundingly alike and yet each one in a different attitude, compelled their admiration.

“Of course,” said Miss Waters, “_this_ is my real work. The teaching is only a side line. But I do _love_ teaching. It is such a wonderful privilege to help in developing a talent. Some of my pupils are among the foremost artists in the country.”

She needn’t have gone on so recklessly, because her visitors were already in quite the frame of mind she desired. That, however, she couldn’t know.

“Portrait painters, landscape painters, painters of historical and religious subjects.... I’ve taught them all. And I’ve been--well,” she confessed, with a modest smile. “I’ve been very fortunate, I must say. My pupils are among the most celebrated artists in this country. Not always the best _known_,” she hastened to add. “Their _names_ might not be familiar to you.... But they _rank_ very high.”

All superfluous. For Rosaleen and Miss Amy the fact of her being an artist sufficed. They took it for granted that any artist knew all about art, just as they would have expected any blacksmith to understand all about horseshoeing. Then and there Rosaleen was put into her hands to be developed.

And she had been going faithfully, three days a week, for nearly two years, progressing steadily under the system which Miss Waters had found successful with her pupils in the past. A great deal of drawing in charcoal from casts at first, then watercolours, and then oils. When you began to work with oils, the drudgery was over; accuracy was no longer required, or outlines. The system also included what Miss Waters called “just a bit of the History of Art,” short talks and readings, which contained not a vestige of information about art and some very remarkable history. It was in fact nothing more than a collection of anecdotes about artists. Generally there was a king, who visited the artist in disguise, or came up behind him on tiptoe, and who was struck dumb by the verisimilitude of the painting before him. That was indeed the measure of an artist’s greatness--that a horse tried to eat his painted hay, a bird his fruit, that a man tried to sit upon his picture of a chair, or to smell his flowers. A picture was a picture.

Rosaleen had progressed beyond casts now, and was devoting herself to watercolours. She was learning the Rules of Perspective, and her suspicion was becoming confirmed, that Art was a sort of professional mystery to be learned as one learned law or medicine. She began to feel that she was getting a grasp of the thing.

She was an altogether satisfactory pupil and Miss Waters was proud of her; she was bright, docile, and very industrious.

But what was the matter with her on _this_ morning?

She sat before her patient little drawing of a ruined castle on a hilltop, unable to draw a line, making a weak little scratch now and then, and rubbing it out as soon as it had appeared.

“What _is_ the trouble, Rosaleen?” asked Miss Waters. “Don’t you feel well?”

“Oh, yes, thank you, Miss Waters! I feel well. Only ... I don’t know how it is ... but--I don’t feel like drawing a bit to-day.”

“I know, my dear child!” said Miss Waters. “I’m the same way myself. It’s the beautiful autumn weather. It’s hard to concentrate on work. It puts me in mind of my student days, in Brussels.”

She sighed. Those long years, in Paris and Brussels, trotting about from one English family to another, teaching drawing, from one jolly demi-mondaine to another, teaching English; the bare little rooms she had shivered in, the dismal _pensions_, the dreadful straits in which she had so often found herself, poor solitary muddle-headed little foreigner! And yet she had loved it, that illusion of an artistic life; friendless and poor as she was, she had had her pleasures, had dined at the little restaurants where she could at least _see_ artists, had spent hours and days in the picture galleries, had felt gay and adventurous and irresponsible.

“I’ll tell you what, Rosaleen!” she cried suddenly. “Suppose we both go out and take a turn round the square? It might do us both good--freshen our brains!”

Rosaleen looked at the clock. Half past two; her lesson didn’t end till three, and she had allowed herself half an hour to get up to the Library. She couldn’t think what to say.

Miss Waters believed that she hesitated because she didn’t want to waste any of her lesson time.

“We’ll go out, just for a ‘blow’,” she said. “And then you can come back and work extra late, and we’ll have tea together. I haven’t any pupils this afternoon.”

“But--I have to stop at the Library and get a book for Miss Amy,” said Rosaleen. “And--I promised to take it home early.”

Miss Waters looked a trifle disappointed.

“Well, then,” she said. “Go ahead working until your time’s up, and then I’ll walk up to the Library with you.”

Aghast, horrified, Rosaleen pretended to draw, thinking desperately of some means of getting rid of Miss Waters. While all the time she could hear Miss Waters getting ready, scrabbling about in her bedroom, dropping things, and hunting for other things in bureau drawers. Presently she came out, and in spite of the mild October day, she was wearing her dreadful old sealskin coat with the high, puffed shoulders that made her look so huddled, and perched high on her cottony hair, the small fur hat that always blew off. It was always an infliction for Rosaleen to walk with this poor old scarecrow, and on this day it was nothing short of torture.

Sedately, arm in arm, they walked along Tenth Street and turned up Fifth Avenue, Miss Waters leaning heavily upon Rosaleen and chattering with youthful exuberance, roguishly aware of the glances that followed her. And her hat did blow off, and bowled along ahead of them, like a dusty, terrified little animal, until a man stopped it with his foot and with disdain and in silence returned it to the dishevelled artist. She thanked him, giggling, gathering her cottony hair in both hands to stuff it back under the hat.

“I thought I had a pin in it,” she explained.

After this, she looked wilder than ever, and the rough October wind swirling about her skirts revealed a hole in each of her stockings. And presently she gave a dismayed shriek, and clutched her sealskin coat about her.

“Oh!” she cried. “The button’s just come off!”

“What button?” asked Rosaleen.

“The button on my coat. Have you a pin, my dear?”

“I’m sorry, but I haven’t. Does it matter much?”

“Of course! How can I keep my coat together?” Miss Waters demanded, plaintively.

“But--you must have more than _one_ button!”

“No, I really didn’t bother about sewing on the others.... _Oh!_ ... My _hat_!”

And as she grasped after the hat with both hands the coat flew wide open, to reveal its tattered rose coloured lining, hanging in shreds, and the crushed and dusty old dress.

“Hadn’t we better go back?” said Rosaleen. “And I’ll come in and sew your coat for you.”

Anything would be better than to meet _him_ with this companion; better to lose him forever.

“Oh, no, thank you, my dear. As long as I’ve gone this far, I’ll go the rest of the way. I’ll fix it in the library.”

So there was no escape possible. Arm in arm with Miss Waters she must ascend the imposing flight of steps, enter the library, and advance along the lofty corridors.

She saw him! Sitting on a bench, reading a magazine with a sort of severe preoccupation. But Rosaleen knew that he had seen them and was only pretending he hadn’t. They drew nearer and nearer. She was thinking frantically. Should she speak to him _anyway_, or was he annoyed at her for coming with Miss Waters? Or was he simply being tactful, desiring to avoid embarrassing her with his unsanctioned presence? She couldn’t decide. They drew nearer and nearer ... they were abreast of him.... She threw him one anguished glance, but he did not look up from his magazine.... They passed him, and went into the circulating room.

This was too awful!

“Would you just please ask if they have ‘Some Colonial Chairs’?” she cried hastily to Miss Waters. “I think I see someone I know....”

And rushed out. But he was no longer sitting on the bench. She caught a glimpse of him, vanishing round the corner.

She went back to Miss Waters, and had to carry home a huge, heavy volume which she remembered Miss Amy having had from the library some years ago.

She got into the bus with it, waved a cheerful good-bye to Miss Waters, and went off home.