An Officer and a Lady (20 page)

He had decided to wait till four o’clock before beginning operations, but half an hour before that time arrived, he was frightfully impatient; and he kept listening fearfully for indications of the discovery of his plot upstairs. At length he could bear it no longer. He made his way, with a strange reluctance, to the door of the third-floor front. There he hesitated, then raised his hand and knocked sharply. The Italian’s voice came:

“Come in!”

As he opened the door, Mr. Chidden couldn’t help sending a quick glance toward the rear corner, and he gave a little sigh of relief as he saw that the table and its cloth-covered statue were in their normal position. He turned to Mr. Comicci, who stood in an attitude of polite inquiry.

“My sister Maria sent me up,” said he. “She’s got some lady friends visiting, and she wants to know if she can bring them up to look at your things.”

Of course, Mr. Comicci made no difficulty about it. He said it would make him very happy to show the ladies his poor things, only the room was very untidy—But that was to be expected of an artist.

“Sure,” Mr. Chidden agreed. “They’ll be right up.”

He turned and went back downstairs. At the parlor door, he did not hesitate. Time was precious now. The Italian might begin to uncover things. His knock brought Maria herself to the door.

“What do you want?” she demanded impatiently, when she saw her brother.

“Mr. Comicci sent me,” he replied, “to ask if you would like to bring the ladies up to look at his things. I think he expects he might sell something. Trashy stone!”

“Why, certainly,” she replied, after a second’s thought. “Of course! It’s very kind of him. Tell him we’ll be up—let’s see—in half an hour.”

Mr. Chidden was ready for this.

“He said,” he continued calmly, “that he has to go out right away, and would be obliged if you’d come at once.”

“Well—I don’t know—” Miss Maria hesitated; then added: “All right. Tell him we’ll be up right away.”

Mr. Chidden remounted the stairs. His heart was thumping violently.

“Subtle mashination,” he breathed to himself. “Machiavelli. Italian work. I’ll show the dago!”

He found Mr. Comicci trying to straighten up the room, throwing pieces of clothing into the wardrobe, picking bits of paper and clay from the floor, hiding the disreputable grate with a still more disreputable square of drapery. Mr. Chidden pitched in to help him. He brought a broom from the closet in the hall and swept the floor, while the Italian wiped off the chairs with a rag. Then together they arranged the objects for display on two boxes placed together in the middle of the room. There were dozens of them—clay models, plaster casts, white and mongrel marble, in all stages approaching completion. They had not quite finished emptying the bottom drawer of the wardrobe when they heard steps and voices on the stairs.

“They’re coming!” whispered Mr. Chidden, throwing the broom under the bed and retreating precipitately to a corner—the one farthest away from the table with the cloth-covered statue. The Italian threw on his coat, opened the door, and stood bowing on the threshold as the ladies approached, led by Miss Maria. He met her eyes with a tender glance.

“This is so kind of you, Mr. Comicci!” said she meltingly.

They entered. What a crew! Confusion! There was Mrs. Rankin, gray, but aggressive, with quick, dark eyes that darted continually; Mrs. Manger, with humble air and sharp tongue; the three Misses Bipp, echoes of the past and of one another; Mrs. Paulton, who had once lived on Riverside Drive; Mrs. Judson, grandmotherly sweet; and a dozen others. Mr. Chidden watched them from his corner as they trooped in, jostling one another at the door, and standing foolishly still when they got in, just as they do in a street car. He wanted to cry: “Move forward; plenty of room in front!” but he was occupied principally with speculations of his own.

They grouped themselves around the two boxes, after a general introduction to Mr. Comicci, with little ejaculations of pleasure and foolish remarks. Mrs. Rankin asked if they might handle, and picked up a piece before Mr. Comicci had time to reply. The others followed suit. They carried the things nearer the windows, for a better light, and pointed out to one another the more subtle excellences. But Mr. Chidden chuckled to himself as he observed that certain figures—those without drapery—remained untouched and uncriticized.

“Now, this tiger!” said Mrs. Paulton. “Such beautiful lines!”

“It is very fine,” agreed some one, “but the tail appears to be elongated.”

They gathered around the tiger.

“It
is
a long tail,” said Mrs. Rankin.

“Tigers have long tails,” retorted Miss Maria in the tone of a champion.

“Still, this tail is so
very
long!”

“Quite too long, I should say.”

“It
is
a long tail.”

“For a tail, it
does
seem too long.”

“A
little
too long,” said Mrs. Paulton, with finality, and they passed to something else.

As time passed, and the fire of appreciation and criticism began to die down, Mr. Chidden began to get worried. Was it possible that Mr. Comicci did not intend to show his masterpiece? It began to look that way. Mr. Chidden made a resolution; he would wait five minutes, then go and speak to one of the ladies about it. He began to count the seconds.

He was saved by a little woman in light blue, one of the younger ones, who had begun wandering about in search of things. Her voice suddenly sounded above hubbub:

“Mr. Comicci! What is this? May I see?”

Mr. Chidden began to tremble as he saw that her hand was on the dark cloth. Would it work?

The Italian, who was gesticulating excitedly in an effort to explain the secrets of his art to Miss Maria and Mrs. Judson, glanced across, with a look of uneasiness.

“Why—I don’t know—” he said.

“You see—you might not like—”

“Why not?” demanded Mrs. Rankin.

“I don’t know—” he stammered.

“But yes—why not? Of course. You may look. No! Wait! Let me remove eet, signora. Eet verra easy fall.”

The ladies gathered around the table in a close group as the sculptor approached and laid his hands on the cloth. They would seem to have foreseen in some mysterious way what was to follow. From his corner, Mr. Chidden watched them, and noted, with satisfaction, that Maria, with Mrs. Rankin and the Misses Bipp, were together in the front rank, up against the table.

“Eet is the true beauty,” the Italian was saying. “The line—the form—so pure and beautiful—nothing so beautiful—”

He removed the cloth.

After all, perhaps the good ladies saw only what they expected to see, as far as the sculpture was concerned. But the effect of nudity that came from that statue suddenly uncovered in their midst was startling. It was a rather large figure, and so completely naked! So profoundly naked! And it was well done! The marble whiteness of body and limbs had a wonderful fleshlike appearance, so subtle were the lines, the little elevations and depressions, so skillfully and lovingly chiseled. They stood and looked at that statue of an exposed female form; and they saw on the rough marble at its foot, painted with black paint in small but precise capital letters:

MISS MARIA CHIDDEN.

A gasp of amazement and horror came from eighteen throats. They looked at Maria Chidden and back again at the statue, and they were dangerously near explosion from the supreme awfulness of the thing. It was an excellent instance of the lack of reason in the feminine mind. To any reasonable eye, even one totally unskilled in the perception of form, it must have been patently manifest that the proportions of the lady in marble were certainly not the proportions of Miss Maria Chidden; the thing could have been considered a representation of that attenuated dame only by an heroic application of the theory of idealization. But they did not think of that; they saw this reproduction of a female person without any clothes on, and they saw the label. Their faces turned all colors from ghostly pale to purple, and they stood speechless.

The horrified silence was broken by Miss Maria herself.

“Wretch!” she screamed, and made a dive for Mr. Comicci.

The Italian, springing aside, barely missed her clutching fingers, and caused two of the Misses Bipp to sit down abruptly on the floor. He escaped by leaping over their prostrate forms. Then confusion and babel. As the Misses Bipp went down, the others screamed, and the more timid made for the door. The third Miss Bipp sank into a chair and began to moan. Miss Maria continued to clutch frantically, and shout “Wretch!” at the top of her voice, but the Italian kept out of reach behind the others, shouting back meanwhile:

“No, no, no, I did not do eet! No, no, no, signora!”

Mrs. Rankin and Mrs. Manger assisted the fallen Bipps to arise, and led them to the door; the others had by this time crowded into the hall. They hustled them out.

Miss Maria stood in the middle of the floor, trembling and choking with rage.

“No, no, no!” shouted the Italian, dancing up and down in front of her. “I did not do eet! See! Eet could not be—eet is small, plump; and you, you are—what you say?—you are skinny, beeg—”

“Wretch!” screamed Maria.

The Italian jumped back. Then he stopped suddenly and let out a fearful Italian oath. He glanced toward the corner where Mr. Chidden had last been seen. It was empty. The whole room was empty. Of Mr. Chidden there was neither sight nor sound, and from the hall came the chorus of the ladies’ voices as they trooped downstairs.

“That—I did not do eet!” cried Mr. Comicci, trying to seize Maria’s hand. “No, no, no! So pure and beautiful!”

She threw at him an awful look of concentrated scorn. She flew to the door.

“Miserable dago!” she said in a choking voice. The door slammed after her.

It was, on the whole, I think, a stroke of genius, for it must be remembered that Mr. Chidden appreciated the necessity for witnesses; also, that he secured the very best possible. It is true that it gave him a lot of extra work; he spent most of Saturday cleaning up the room, from which Mr. Comicci was ejected Friday morning. But his heart was light and his soul buoyant, and he sang as he worked. And it may as well be recorded that when he went to the movies on Eighth Avenue on Saturday evening, he wore a new pair of pants.

T
HE POET WAS LOCKED IN HIS
room and Mrs. Mannerlys, his hostess, had the key. Probably she had read somewhere of the method adopted by Lady Gregory to get work out of Yeats; but still Mrs. Mannerlys was capable of having thought it up for herself. Her cousin, the poet, was a lazy fellow who would not drive himself to work, so in the interests of literature she had taken him out to her country place and shut him up for four hours every day, first removing all books and placing fresh pens and paper on a table at the window.

… Where his muscles swelled.

And will and force and courage: ever dwelled.

Therein his strength; until he saw and heard her;

Then his heart trembled, and all his strength was weakness.

“Impossible,” thought the poet disgustedly. “It sounds like Vers Libre. I’ll have to take the line out. But it’s exactly what I want to say: ‘Then his heart trembled, and all his strength was weakness.’ It’ll have to be chopped up, but ‘weakness’ must have a strong pause. It’s enough to drive you mad.”

He threw his pen on the table and walked to the window, where he stood looking down into the garden and on the long, sloping lawn with great shade trees and here and there a clump of shrubbery or low laca bushes. Further away he could see the tennis court and the lake and three or four figures of people moving about, one of them in the act of launching a boat. He watched them a little while without being conscious of what he saw, then his gaze slowly traveled back toward the house. And then, in the garden almost directly beneath his window, his eye caught the light from a spot of blue in a hammock swung beneath two trees. It was a woman’s dress.

The eyes of the poet quickened, and he softly opened the window and leaned across the sill, but the woman’s face remained hidden behind the end of the hammock. The poet left the window and went to the door and turned the knob.

“Oh, it’s locked,” he said stupidly, as though he had not known it before. He raised his hand to knock on the panel, then let it fall after a moment’s hesitation and returned to the window. Stopping only for a glance at the spot of blue in the hammock, he clambered onto the sill and swung himself out, catching the farther edge of the shutter. There he hung for a moment, twenty feet above the ground, then with a quick, agile movement he threw his body sharply to one side and wrapped his legs and arms around a drainpipe five feet away, while the shutter banged against the side of the house with a loud noise and a cry of surprise and alarm came from below. The poet slid easily down the drain pipe to the ground and began dusting off his clothes.

“Good heavens!” came a voice from the hammock. “It’s a wonder you didn’t kill yourself!”

The poet looked up quickly with an expression of the keenest disappointment. What he saw was a young woman of twenty-three or four with rather ordinary brown hair, a clear, high brow, fine dark eyes and a full pleasant face divided in the middle by a delicately thin nose. Not a displeasing sight, surely; but the poet’s tone was certainly one of displeasure as he took a step forward and observed:

“Oh, it’s you. Where did you get that dress?”

“Why, I—well, I’m not surprised. I’ve often said you’re crazy.”

“What right have you got to wear that dress?”

“
Well
! It’s ‘a poor thing, but mine own.’ It came from Herbert, on Fifth Avenue, if you must know. And now, my dear Paul, perhaps you’ll explain why you’ve taken to climbing through windows to slide down drainpipes and ask your lady friends where they buy their clothes.”

The poet grunted, seated himself on the grass beside the hammock and hugged his knees.

“It deceived me,” he said dismally.

“I thought it was someone else. Dress exactly the same. And I wanted to speak to her, and Helen had me locked in the room, so I came that way. It was all for nothing, and now I can’t get back. Got a cigarette?”