Chapter II

I suppose once in every creative life there comes the sublime moment, the consecrated hour when, not from within but from without, there comes the onrush of true greatness. Then, out of paint or clay or whatever sordid material may lie to hand, the artist creates; beauty out of ugliness, purity out of filth.

A Baudelaire imagines his mistress dead and rotting, and writes a great poem: “Alors, o ma beauté . . . .”

And out of the scum of a Paris brothel poor Sidney Bush had built his Cynara.

He was no poet, God knows. I don’t even know how he had happened on the poem. But I had wandered into his studio at Saint Cloud one day to find Julie Termonde cowering in a corner and muttering that he had tried to kill her, and Sidney himself paying no attention to her—or to me, for that matter—but standing at a window with a book in his hand.

I don’t believe he had Anne Worthington in his mind at all at that time. All that lay pretty far behind him then, but it may have pleased his vanity and excited his imagination to fancy that he had been faithful to Anne, in his fashion, through the years.

Anyhow, he started the Cynara that day, and if the body and the face were Julie Termonde, the expression, the soul of the thing, was Anne . . .

It almost made an honest woman of Julie, did the Cynara. Almost, but not quite. But it did change her. She took to wearing about the studio, instead of the sketchy garments of the pre-Cynara period, a stiff black silk dress, a long gold chain and a crucifix, and as nearly as she could copy it the expression of the Cynara itself. But she only achieved a sort of hypocritical wistfulness for the pathos of the sculptured figure.

The Cynara itself, of course, is steadfastness and loyalty, the woman who rises in a man’s mind after a debauch and makes him groan. And seeing that little French guttersnipe assuming the pose, while she was both living with Sidney and deceiving him, made me sick. What was even worse was seeing Anne behind the thing. Seeing her eyes and her spirit breathe purity into that harlot body, and the whole thing perpetualised in marble.

For it was done in marble, finally, from one of those greyish blocks held by the French government for such purposes at the Dépôt des Marbres in Paris. Sidney was like a madman during the plaster casting, and Julie Termonde left him for a time, I doubt if he knew she was gone. But it came out very well.

It made him famous, of course. And when Anne came to Paris the next year he took her to see it. The Metropolitan was dickering for it at the time. I don’t believe even then that Sidney was in love with Anne, but he must have known that she stood behind his success. She had given him the memory on which he had built. Simplicity and purity, and a sort of humble steadfastness—that was Anne in those days.

But Anne was still in love with him.

Poor Anne. . . .