Celia even felt that she could hold her own with the looking glass by a continuous act of wilclass="underline" unremitting, resolute, robust. Long ago, Nurse had upheld virtues of that kind, and now the time was come to practice them. One never knew what one could do until one tried. If one tried hard enough, one could be any age one chose. In the library at home, she had come upon St. Thomas Aquinas’s promise to that effect, even though in Latin, and in Gothic type that grew faint and gray as one watched, and never had much shape to the letters at the best of times.
Alas, there were crab-sized holes in Celia’s petticoat, and, up and down the staircase, rats on the rampage for food, however moldy and mottled. Cousin Rolf could not have known. Their delicate paws were like swift kisses on ones face and arms. It was just as in the attics at home.
Celia took to attending each year the service at the Chapelle Expiatoire, and to painting pictures entitled “Son of St. Louis, Ascend to Heaven!” At these times, she could feel the divine benediction cloaking her shoulders, like a soft stole.
The other pupils at the art school were either complete babies, feeding from bottles containing corn flour; or, in certain cases, motionless skeletons, also fed with corn flour, though not from bottles, because they could not suck.
It did not take long by any standard for the point to be reached where Celia’s ever smaller allowance was intersected by the ever larger cost of everything. Sometimes the watchful could see her white hair and white face at the edge of the rotting curtain as she looked out at the march past for social justice. Through hunting glasses and telescopes they could see plainly that her eyes were at once animated and frightened by the coarse thumping of the drums, the amateur screaming of the brass, the bellowing of the inebriated.
She began cutting away the gangrene from her limbs, or what she assumed to be gangrene. She was too scared to use the sharpest knife she had, as no doubt she should have done. She preferred the small, elegant fruit knives, precisely because they were rather blunt; and because they were silver, though not hallmarked with a lion, as had been so many of the knives at home. A trained surgeon would have acted upon other values, though it is hard to see that they would have made much difference in the end.
The times had become so harsh, and the people so indifferent, that the art school, after all those years, was in real danger of shutting.
Celia reflected that one’s art is strictly one’s own, and that never should it mean more to her than it meant now, or shudderingly seldom.
Faces she took to belong to Raphael, Luca Giordano, and Frederick Leighton now looked upon her, exaltedly and exhortingly, from within the beautiful looking glass. When she was not at art school, or trying to buy simple things with almost no money (a dressing jacket, a pair of gloves, a flask of flowery liqueur), Celia spent most of her time gazing, as she would hardly have been able to deny. Only in that way could she be true to herself. But never until now had she seen faces or forms to which she could attach names. Too often of late she had seen shapes for which no name was possible. On occasion, they had emerged, and had had to be driven back with implements she had found on sale second-hand at very low prices near Les Halles and presumably intended for the meat trade in one of its aspects. Sometimes she was horrified by the spectacle she was compelled to make of herself, and her father might have had an asthmatic attack, had he seen it.
Celia knew perfectly well that if she was to stand any chance of making a permanent mark, as the faces expected of her, then she should practice much more, as ballerinas have to do, and ladies and gentlemen who master enormous pianofortes. She should be plucky, confident, and indefatigable, like Rosa Bonheur. She should probably look like Rosa Bonheur also, though she had enough difficulty already in hanging on to looks of any land. Still, there it was. The demands of art are notoriously boundless; nor are they subject to appeal.
“Oh, let me join you!” cried Celia, stretching out her arms to the real Celia within the beautiful mirror’s mysterious depths. The real Celia stretched voluptuously in a patterned dress on the chaise longue she had bought with such innocent ardor, and on which the beseeching Celia lay among the decayed wreckage, virtually upon the sloping floor, gazed upon by a hundred expectant eyes. The colored figures at the top of the frame had entirely faded long ago.
Celia thought that the real Celia slightly moved one pale hand and even opened her eyes a little wider. She could not remember whether the patterned dress was a silk dress for parties or a cotton dress for shopping. The pattern was known as Capet.
In any case, there would be no actual harm done if she continued to supplicate, to beseech.
Once, about this time, Celia actually heard from Mr. Burphy. It was the very first letter she had ever received from him, and Celia was quite glad that she had opened it, even though the address on the envelope had merely been typewritten. Mr. Burphy said that he had often thought of their romantic trip to Paris together, that he fancied there might be no harm in his recalling it now, that her father unfortunately needed more trained nurses all the time, that there was almost no money left from which to pay for anything, and that he, Mr. Burphy, was about to retire after generations of service with the firm, and was writing to everyone he knew and could remember, for that reason. The rest of the staff had subscribed to buy him a small electric clock, which had taken him completely by surprise, and particularly when Mr. Daniel himself had found a few moments to participate in the presentation!
Celia thought for a long, long time about the elms, and urns, and tiny bubbling springs in her fathers park; and about the tenant farmers comely, contented cows, and occasional frisky bulls. She thought about the forty-seven catalogued likenesses of her ancestors and collaterals; many of them in large familiar groups; one of them turned to the wall. She thought about the schoolroom with a dozen desks and only one occupant. She thought of the withered feathered fans in the conservatory, the property of ladies who, for her, had been dead always. She listened in memory to the Mad Hunt at twilight, and saw it take form. She smelt the rotting grapes, with the German name; and the ullaged wine, with no name at all. She felt the wet camel-hair bristles on the back of her slender hand, as she painted the world and herself into a certain transcendence.
Celia had all along been required to pay the rent in advance, especially as she was a foreigner; and she became anxious if she did not meet all demands in cash, and with punctuality to say the least of it. Often her purse, however slim, was considerably more than punctual, and most of all with the rent.
These rigors may have combined to reverse the effect intended, as so often in life; because somehow the payment due from Celia, after that last payment she was able to make and had made more prematurely than ever, came to be overlooked altogether. It is not such an uncommon event in Paris as is generally supposed.
Quite unfairly, there was a small scandal when Celia was certified to have been dead for something like four or five months before any part of her was actually found by a visitor from the outside world.
After various alarums had been raised, some of them by observers on the other side of the street, the elderly married couple who lived far below Celia, and looked after the place as best they could, sent their burly young nephew, Armand, to beat upon the door, and, if necessary, to beat it down. Armand admitted that he had not cared for the job from the first.