“Back, are you?” Gordon sat in his single chair, munching a thick sandwich, clutching a book. The unshaded light glared savagely upon his undershirt.
“You have callers,” Mr. Talliaferro offered his belated warning, but the other looking up had already seen beyond his shoulder Mrs. Maurier’s interested face. He rose and cursed Mr. Talliaferro, who had begun immediately his unhappy explanation.
“Mrs. Maurier insisted on dropping in—”
Mrs. Maurier vanquished him anew. “Mister Gordon!” She sailed into the room, bearing her expression of happy astonishment like a round platter stood on edge. “How do you do? Can you ever, ever forgive us for intruding like this?” she went on in her gushing italics. “We just met Mr. Talliaferro on the street with your milk, and we decided to brave the lion in his den. How do you do?” She forced her effusive hand upon him, staring about in happy curiosity. “So this is where genius labors. How charming: so — so original. And that”—she indicated a corner screened off by a draggled length of green rep—“is your bedroom, isn’t it? How delightful! Ah, Mr. Gordon, how I envy you this freedom. And a view — you have a view also, haven’t you?” She held his hand and stared entranced at a high useless window framing two tired looking stars of the fourth magnitude.
“I would have if I were eight feet tall,” he corrected. She looked at him quickly, happily. Mr. Talliaferro laughed nervously.
“That would be delightful,” she agreed readily. “I was so anxious to have my niece see a real studio, Mr. Gordon, where a real artist works. Darling”—she glanced over her shoulder fatly, still holding his hand—“darling, let me present you to a real sculptor, one from whom we expect great things. . Darling,” she repeated in a louder tone.
The niece, untroubled by the stairs, had drifted in after them and she now stood before the single marble. “Come and speak to Mr. Gordon, darling.” Beneath her aunt’s saccharine modulation was a faint trace of something not so sweet after all. The niece turned her head and nodded slightly without looking at him. Gordon released his hand.
“Mr. Talliaferro tells me you have a commission.” Mrs. Maurier’s voice was again a happy astonished honey. “May we see it? I know artists don’t like to exhibit an incomplete work, but just among friends, you see. . You both know how sensitive to beauty I am, though I have been denied the creative impulse myself.”
“Yes,” agreed Gordon, watching the niece.
“I have long intended visiting your studio, as I promised, you remember. So I shall take this opportunity of looking about — Do you mind?”
“Help yourself. Talliaferro can show you things. Pardon me.” He lurched characteristically between them and Mrs. Maurier chanted:
“Yes, indeed. Mr. Talliaferro, like myself, is sensitive to the beautiful in Art. Ah, Mr. Talliaferro, why were you and I given a love for the beautiful, yet denied the ability to create it from stone and wood and clay. . ”
Her body in its brief simple dress was motionless when he came over to her. After a time he said:
“Like it?”
Her jaw in profile was heavy: there was something masculine about it. But in full face it was not heavy, only quiet. Her mouth was full and colorless, unpainted, and her eyes were opaque as smoke. She met his gaze, remarking the icy blueness of his eyes (like a surgeon’s, she thought) and looked at the marble again.
“I don’t know,” she answered slowly. Then: “It’s like me.”
“How like you?” he asked gravely.
She didn’t answer. Then she said, “Can I touch it?”
“If you like,” he replied, examining the line of her jaw, her firm brief nose. She made no move and he added, “Aren’t you going to touch it?”
“I’ve changed my mind,” she told him calmly. Gordon glanced over his shoulder to where Mrs. Maurier pored volubly over something. Mr. Talliaferro yea’d her with restrained passion.
“Why is it like you?” he repeated.
She said irrelevantly, “Why hasn’t she anything here?” Her brown hand flashed slimly across the high unemphasis of the marble’s breast, and withdrew.
“You haven’t much there yourself.” She met his steady gaze steadily. “Why should it have anything there?” he asked.
“You’re right,” she agreed with the judicial complaisance of an equal. “I see now. Of course she shouldn’t. I didn’t quite — quite get it for a moment.”
Gordon examined with growing interest her flat breast and belly, her boy’s body which the poise of it and the thinness of her arms belied. Sexless, yet somehow vaguely troubling. Perhaps just young, like a calf or a colt. “How old are you?” he asked abruptly.
“Eighteen, if it’s any of your business,” she replied without rancor, staring at the marble. Suddenly she looked up at him again. “I wish I could have it,” she said with sudden sincerity and longing, quite like a four-year-old.
“Thanks,” he said. “That was quite sincere, too, wasn’t it? Of course you can’t have it, though. You see that, don’t you?”
She was silent. He knew she could see no reason why she shouldn’t have it.
“I guess so,” she agreed at last. “I just thought I’d see, though.”
“Not to overlook any bets?”
“Oh, well, by tomorrow I probably won’t want it, anyway. . And if I still do, I can get something just as good.”
“You mean,” he amended, “that if you still want it tomorrow, you can get it. Don’t you?”
Her hand, as if it were a separate organism, reached out slowly, stroking the marble. “Why are you so black?” she asked.
“Black?”
“Not your hair and beard. I like your red hair and beard. But you. You are black. I mean—” Her voice fell and he suggested Soul? “I don’t know what that is,” she stated quietly.
“Neither do I. You might ask your aunt, though. She seems familiar with souls.”
She glanced over her shoulder, showing him her other un-equal profile. “Ask her yourself. Here she comes.”
Mrs. Maurier surged her scented upholstered bulk between them. “Wonderful, wonderful,” she was exclaiming in sincere astonishment. “And this—” Her voice died away and she gazed at the marble dazed. Mr. Talliaferro echoed her immaculately, taking to himself the showman’s credit.
“Do you see what he has caught?” he bugled melodiously. “Do you see? The spirit of youth, of something fine and hard and clean in the world; something we all desire until our mouths are stopped with dust,” Desire with Mr. Talliaferro had long since become an unfulfilled habit requiring no longer any particular object at all.
“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Maurier. “How beautiful. What — what does it signify, Mr. Gordon?”
“Nothing, Aunt Pat,” the niece snapped. “It doesn’t have to.”
“But, really—”
“What do you want it to signify? Suppose it signified a — a dog, or an ice cream soda, what difference would it make? Isn’t it all right like it is?”
“Yes, indeed, Mrs. Maurier,” Mr. Talliaferro agreed with soothing haste, “it is not necessary that it have objective significance. We must accept it for what it is: pure form untrammeled by any relation to a familiar or utilitarian object.”
“Oh, yes: untrammeled,” Here was a word Mrs. Maurier knew. “The untrammeled spirit, freedom like the eagle’s.”
“Shut up, Aunty,” the niece told her. “Don’t be a fool.”
“But it has what Talliaferro calls objective significance,” Gordon interrupted brutally. “This is my feminine ideaclass="underline" a virgin with no legs to leave me, no arms to hold me, no head to talk to me.”