The Greater Art

I

EARLY May in Paris! The pushcarts in the rue des Petits Champs made a sober blaze of color against the wet asphalt street, where the sky was reflected in uneven blue patches. There were daffodils, carts of them; and roses, tea roses, in wicker baskets, from Nice; and pansies, whole masses of them.

Ellen Whitelaw bought some daffodils; then, with these in her hands, entered the little dairy to get a bottle of cream and a pat of butter; then went on a little farther to buy the rolls. When she mounted the second flight of stairs of Madame Tontine’s house, she found Tilton waiting for her on the top step.

‘I’m sorry to be late,’ she said, ‘but the morning was so beautiful, and the color was so wonderful, I stayed longer than I should have. Will you take these for me?’

They entered. He arranged the daffodils in a bronze bowl for her while she made the coffee and set a small studio table.

‘I’m going to warm the rolls for you,’ he said, ‘because I never saw a Virginian yet who did not pine for hot bread.’

‘ I don’t,’ she answered.

She was standing with her head tilted back a little and her eyes half closed, to catch some likeness of color at the heart of the daffodils, and a note of the same color beyond in the soft fabric covering the picture on the easel.

‘You don’t!’ he said indulgently.

‘No, I don’t; I really don’t. And what is worse, I don’t pine for Virginia. I am just so thankful, so devoutly thankful for this,’ she glanced around the room, ‘I am so thankful to know that outside there, all around, everywhere, is Paris! To understand what it means to me you must have lived just the life I have lived.’

‘You always wanted to paint but could n’t leave home. Well, I know a little about that,’ he said.

‘You see, I was the eldest,’ she explained. ‘After Geoffrey left home, I could n’t leave. Then James left, then Letitia needed me. Letitia always needed steadying. If I had n’t been there she might have married Colby. I’ve told you about Colby. Then by and by Colby went away. The thing was broken off. Then, I don’t really know just how it happened, by a kindly “sweet miracle” I came here. At first I used to worry about having left mother. Three of us going away, you know, and only Letitia there. But I don’t worry any more now. I am here where I so greatly longed to be.’

‘I see,’ he said. ‘I understand perfectly. Oh, do I not!’ he raised his hand with a little characteristic and dismissing gesture. ‘I know exactly. It was art and self-expression that you longed for. For self-expression, the expression of what we each see as beauty, that and nothing else is art. This joy and the exhilaration you feel all the time, now you are here, comes from the effort to express yourself. That is the whole joy, the creative joy. How does the picture come on? May I see it?’ Without hesitation or affectation she removed the cloth from the picture on the easel. He looked long and critically at it. On a large canvas was painted the figure of a young French marketwoman, a woman of the pushcart market, a seller of daffodils. She held a little child on one arm. The other hand and arm were stretched out, selecting for a purchaser a certain bunch of daffodils from a pushcart heaped full of them. To her skirts another child, only a little older, clung; and a boy of nine or ten tied the daffodils that had fallen apart.

‘It is to be called “The Mother,’” she said, looking at it a little longingly.

‘It seems to me,’ he replied at last, with a quiet reverence, ‘it may easily be the picture of the spring exhibition. You have gone on wonderfully, wonderfully. Let me see, how long have you been here?’

‘Oh, let us not talk of it,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid to think about it for fear something might happen, might happen to make it seem that I ought to go home. And you see,’ — she turned an appealing look from the picture to him, then back to the picture, —‘you see for yourself that I cannot!’

‘Of course I do,’ he said eagerly. ‘Of course you cannot. In another year! — Bouvet praises rarely, but you know what he has said about your work.’

He turned his head on one side, a little serious, a little light. ‘And you know he never said such things about mine— nothing like that anyway.’

He remembered, too, though he did not speak of it, what Bouvet had said about the girl herself; Bouvet who taught and growled and growled and taught, and spoke rarely; Bouvet who had muttered under his breath as he saw her, one day, lovely and absorbed before her easel: ‘Quel type! Mon Dieu, quel type de femme!’ What a type she was, too! Tilton considered her as she moved about the studio.

‘It is good to have you say I must not go home. I know that I must not, but now and then I am so afraid of something happening to make it seem that I ought to go. At such times, it steadies me to hear you say that I must not go. I know, I know I must not.’

There was a knock at the partly open door, and fat little Madame Tontine came in. She carried a box of strawberries.

‘My sister sent me some from Nice, mademoiselle. These are for you.’

Tilton flung his hand on his heart and cast his eyes to heaven in the extravagant appreciation that Madame Tontine loved.

‘Madame Tontine! Have I not told you, have we not all told you — all of us — that you are an angel, and now

— behold you bring strawberries! ’

‘La! Lai’

The little fat French woman laughed, raised one hand, and turned her head away with a pretty affectation. ‘I have always said to Alphonse,’ — she spoke rapidly and with coquetry,

— ‘“Alphonse, my angel, when you see that I am dying — run quick, quick and get me strawberries! Let me die eating strawberries — t hen I shall already be in heaven, with no perilous journey! ’

She ended with her voice high, and a little laugh.

Some one called from below stairs,—

‘Madame Tontine! Madame Tontine ! ’

Her face took on suddenly a look of distress. She fumbled in the bosom of her dress and brought out an envelope.

‘Something for you, mademoiselle! See! The strawberries are good! Be sure to eat them! See how red! How beautiful! ’

Tilton always remembered the look of Ellen Whitelaw’s hand as it was stretched out now to take the telegram. He put down the berries; his face was very sober. He watched her fingers as she opened the envelope.

‘What is it ?’ he said, glancing at her face.

A moment later she met his eyes; only, some light had gone out of her own!

‘It is a cablegram from James. Letitia has run away and married Colby after all.’

He did not answer, but watched her keenly.

She folded the paper and slipped it in its envelope. When she spoke her voice had to him a far-off sound.

‘It never would have happened if I had been there. It never would have happened. Letitia needed me. She needed somebody steadier, wiser. Mother would n’t do, beautiful as mother is.’

His eyes did not leave her face, but his thought went defensively to the picture on the easel.

‘You see, you see,’—she was picturing it all rapidly in her mind — ‘this leaves mother alone. James is away too, now. I must go home.’

He flung his head back as though to be rid of some impatience. He spoke with a kind of forced quietness. His face, with its noticeably fine line of brow and cheek, showed indignant color, suddenly, like a girl’s.

‘See here,’ he said, ‘you are wrong; dead wrong. You must not go and leave your work. You must listen to me. At a time like this your judgment cannot be clear — you’ve got to think it out with me. There are two kinds of art, two kinds of duty, the lesser and the greater. Sometimes we are so bewildered by the events of life, that we cannot tell one from the other. But nevertheless one is the greater, and one the less. You must not forget that. It is for us always, always, to cling to the greater. Your greater duty is right here; the greater duty and the greater art are right here. I have been all through the thing myself. I have a mother, an old mother. I dote on her; I tell you I dote on her. Yet I came away. She is there at home, alone. Do you think it does not take courage to stay here and think of her?’

He was not even sure she had heard him. His feeling was one of real indignation, indignation colored too by his own preference. He felt that art could not afford to lose her; but added to that sufficient fact was his own loss. Who in heaven’s name were Letitia and Colby! Who indeed! That Letitia was pretty he knew’. Ellen had told him she was ‘exquisite, beautiful ’; that she was utterly selfish he had thought out for himself. And Colby! one of the many and variegated types of masculine human selfishness. The old pitiful trifling claims that drag at a woman s skirts, and make of her an inferior creature! Why, the lives of men could be so cut up too, if men would allow them (he thought again of his mother), allow them to be!

When he brought his indignant look back to her, he was struck anew by the loveliness of her face. He remembered long afterwards the peculiar evening stillness there was about her; he had seen it before only in a clear western sky after the sun is gone, and the look in her eyes that told him he had not moved her.

II

At the familiar little Virginia station no one met her. She had not let any one know that she was coming. She walked along the country road, noting the fallow fields. It was late afternoon. The old white house, when she came in sight of it, looked still and thoughtful in the late light that was almost dusk. Against a clear yellow in the western sky, the smoke from the low kitchen chimneys rose blue and straight, and cut across a remote young moon in the heavens. She took the short path across the fields, which brought her to the side entrance of Braeton. There was wistaria over the entrance, just coming into bloom. She opened the door. The knob of it felt familiar to her hand. She entered the hall. The house was very still. A few steps brought her to the library door. The rooms seemed smaller than she remembered them to be. There was the quiet self-possessed air of refinement that she knew so well, but added to it the slight look of shabbiness which, though it was perfectly familiar to her, she had not remembered during her absence.

The library door stood partly open. She paused on the threshold. In a low arm-chair by the window in the fading light sat her mother. There was quiet in the whole figure. The face was turned somewhat; she was looking out on the driveway. She was dressed in the accustomed black dress, with the soft white collar and cuffs. Her hands rested on an open letter in her lap. Ellen recognized it as one of her own letters, written on the dun-colored paper that she used to buy from Madame Tontine’s brother-in-law, in a little boutique on rue des Petits Champs. At sight of it, suddenly, without warning, a surge of almost intolerable homesickness came over her. In the flash of an instant all that she had left was before her, even to Madame Tontine’s little gay ways, seriousness, and coquetry. Then suddenly too, it was as though a veil were drawn away.

Paris, the pushcart market, Tilton, fat sympathetic little Madame Tontine, with her hand on her heart and her eyes to heaven they were swept away, like a piece of changing scenery, and she saw distinctly what was before her. She saw that the familiar figure by the window was changed by some subtle change. The slender almost girlish shoulders drooped a little more than they used to do. The whole figure was a little thinner. The black dress was too large, a little too large everywhere. The face, partly turned away, had a little added delicacy, the hair was noticeably more gray.

The girl on the threshold knew suddenly and poignantly that the woman at the window had been lonely for her. For herself the time had been short there in Paris; but here, you see, where nothing happened, where the birds built their nests, and the familiar summer came slowly and shone as of old on the fields, and the trees across the shaded driveway bent their branches toward each other continually, and lost their color in the dusk and had it given back to them in the dawn, day after day, patient, submissive; here, where no voices were heard — a year, two years! Two years at that age, under those circumstances! Two years of loneliness had passed their hands over this woman and had wrought this thing. The familiar figure in t he familiar chair in the accustomed place! Geoffrey and James and Letitia, and she herself, they had all gone; and this woman, the mother of all of them, was left there in the dusk with a little bit of dun-colored paper in her lap.

Her mother had never complained of loneliness, but something aloof and alone in the little figure told its own story. This was not only Ellen Whitelaw’s mother, it was a mother, any mother grown old and left alone; a mother whose children were gone from her; a mother sitting in the dusk of her life, looking out on a road which does not bring them back to her. There was a time when the children were little and clung to her skirts, and when she directed their comings and goings.

We are wont to think of a mother as young, with children, little children dependent on her; this younger type, the daffodil-seller of the pushcart market, was the type Ellen Whitelaw had chosen to paint; not this later crown of motherhood, this loneliness, this renunciation at the last.

Suddenly the whole wonderful picture, as the girl saw it, swam in quick tears. With a swift step she traversed the little space. The little dark figure rose uncertainly in the dim light.

‘ Ellen! Ellen l ’

‘O mother, mother! Are you alone? Here I am! I’ve come back!’

All that evening she followed her mother with eyes that noted anew with a kind of passionate pity the unconscious loneliness of the little figure. Why, the cheerfulness, the delighted cheerfulness at Ellen’s return, — was ever anything at heart so lonely as that! On every side the quiet house seemed thinking, meditating.

That night as she lay in her own bed the stillness and loneliness seemed to her intolerable. The homesickness swept over her again, almost unendurable. Tilton’s words came back to her, and with them the old comradeship. How wonderful it had all been! She knew now so much better than she had known over there in Paris. Dearly as she had loved Paris then, how infinitely dearer it was now that it was lost to her. She might have remained there, and in time she and Tilton would have married, no doubt. She had refused him once, and he had taken it quietly and had been willing for the time to give her up to her art. But together, they could have served art together, in time. In time doubtless he would have come to mean everything to her. She remembered keenly now the loveliness of their association. The flower of it, the very flower of it, was his understanding of her art, his ambition for her. She recalled his words. ‘The great duty is here; the greater duty to the world is here. I have been through it all, myself.’ And that about his mother, — ‘I tell you I dote on her. Do you think it does not take courage to stay here and think of her ? ’

Tilton seemed, suddenly, to have outstripped her in strength and spirituality. Whereas sometimes he had seemed to her light, now she saw in his devotion to art a strength superior to her own. She turned over miserably on her pillow. Why, why had she come away! Why had she not stayed, stayed and finished the picture?

She remembered her promise to Tilton. How he held her, even at this distance, to her art! She would fulfill the promise somehow. But how paint a picture off here, with the inspiration, the atmosphere gone; with no Tilton to encourage her, no Bouvet to inspire her, no Madame Tontine, no rue des Petits Champs, no blaze of daffodils, no pushcart market.

A little breath came in at the window, stirring lightly the scrim curtains and sweeping across her face. It was the breath of fresh-turned fields; a breath sweet but strange; for there were no tilled fields at Braeton and for good reason: there was no one there to till them since Geoffrey was gone and James was in the mill at Richmond. Yet this was unmistakably the breath of earth freshly turned over by the plough. With the scent of it sweet in her consciousness, and a great homesickness for the light of daffodils in rue des Petits Champs, she fell asleep.

III

The next day, in crossing the fields, she found the answer to the question of the night before. Reynold Ambry was at home. The Ambry place adjoined Braeton. Reynold Ambry was ploughing. She waited for him at the end of a furrow. He lifted the plough, turned it aside, and threw the reins over the horses’ backs.

‘You came then, despite my cable.’

‘ I received only a cable from James,’ she said. ‘Did you cable me also?’

He arranged a place for her on the grass nearby, under a tree.

‘Won’t you sit down? Yes, I cabled you asking you not to come. I’ve been all through it, this thing of leaving one’s art for the nearer duty. I’ve been all through that torment myself. I wanted you to be spared the homesickness and the loneliness. I knew I could run in and look after your mother. I knew I could see her often. I knew she would manage somehow, and I wanted you spared, that is all; that is all there is to it. So I took it upon myself to send the cable.’

She turned her clear eyes on him.

‘So you have been through it too.’

He nodded.

‘Why, you see, it is this way.’ He turned his head away from her, considering, with his eyes on the horizon; then he brought his glance back to hers, clear and direct. ‘You see, I’ve always meant to be a writer. I worked and studied in New York, and then I went abroad. I wanted to write plays, in time, good plays. There’s such an awful need of them, you know; and I felt I had something to say. But — well, of course I needed study, and I needed life, and great cities, and comradeship, and the press of other lives, and art, art, all that one gets over there. You know what I mean.’

He gave his attention apparently to scratching the earth with a little stick.

‘It’s a thing you can’t talk about to any one who has n’t been there,— who does n’t know.’ He threw the twig away and looked off to the horizon again. ‘But you’ve been. You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, yes.’ The words were quick and understanding.

‘Well,’he continued, ‘I had it all, for six years, for the six years after I left college; and I was getting somewhere; good art is slow work, but I was getting somewhere; and then Cousin Betty died and left Cousin Molly alone. You see Cousin Molly has raised me; she’s been a mother to me; and’ — he hesitated — ‘I’m all she has.’

‘So you came home.’

He nodded.

There was silence between them.

‘That was why I took the liberty,’ he said, at last. ‘I wanted you to be spared the torment. I wanted you to be spared those awful nights after you first get back, and you think you can’t stand it, really can’t stand it; when you wake in the morning and wish it were Paris, with the wet asphalt and the pushcart markets; and with the Arc de Triomphe, and the boulevards, and the Pont Neuf, and the Madeleine, and the Luxembourg, and Cluny all there, somewhere, though you don’t see them; all there, like friends, in the morning. And you long for the sound and the smell of it all; and what you hear is nothing but a couple of meadowlarks going about their business, and what you smell is nothing but the breath of fresh fields, and you know that all around you is nothing but Virginia, miles of Virginia. I wanted you to stay over there and follow your art.’ He finished abruptly.

She was silent a moment. Then, there was the suggestion of a smile and she looked far off, it might have been toward Paris.

‘And you thought you could plough the land for both of us.’

‘I thought,’ he said, with great simplicity, ‘I thought I would do anything to spare you suffering.’

The deep lines and the great earnestness in his face impressed her. She had known him always, but she had never known before that his face was like this — so strong. He was a man who had faced things.

‘What was the picture you were painting? Your mother told me of it,’ he said, a little as though he were changing the subject.

‘A picture to be called “The Mother.” ’

She described it to him briefly. He, in his turn listened with his gaze far away, as though he too saw Paris. At last he turned to her.

‘And you cannot finish the picture here?’

She shook her head.

‘No. It needs Paris and the pushcarts and the wet asphalt and the narrow streets, and the boulevards, and the light of the daffodils; daffodils not as they grow here in small clumps and scraggly borders, but as they are found there, heaped up, in bunches, thousands of them, as one sees them on the pushcarts or beside the Madeleine; concentrated there, as life itself is concentrated; not only beauty here and there, but enough of it, enough of it!’

‘I understand,’ he said quietly.

It was a few moments later that she left him, on her way over the fields to the village, to mail the lett er to Tilton, saying she had arrived home safely.

Ambry watched her across the fields, his hand on the plough. He followed her with a pity he would gladly have spared her, mingled with an appreciation of her, something such as Bouvet had had. What a type of woman she was, to be sure.

IV

The summer drifted by. Ambry was at Braeton often. Then for a while Ellen did not see him, could see no one.

She was painting, painting. It was the picture for the autumn exhibition, the painting that was to fulfill her parting promise to Tilton.

At last it was finished; and Ambry was allowed to come over and look at it.

“It is a portrait of my mother,’ she said simply.

Mrs. Whitelaw stood by, an anxious little figure.

‘It is beautifully painted,’ she said, ‘but I rather wish it were a little less sad. If any one who knows me sees it they will say, “How Nancy has aged! ” I don’t think she realizes she’s made the hair a little too gray.’

‘ Then personally,’she told Ambry when Ellen was away, ‘I should like it better wit hout the letter in my hands. It looks a little bereft, —you know; I don’t know why; I don’t believe Ellen quite realizes that either — but, as though my children had left me.’

Ambry hardly heard. He was looking intently at t he picture. He had not guessed she painted so well. It was not only the technique, although the technique seemed to him remarkable, but the inner heart of the thing, that so called to him.

For a while the days settled into the commonplace again, after the picture was gone. Sometimes the old homesickness came to her, but it was rare now, and different. She and Ambry, after that first talk in which each had shown the other such swift sympathy, such full understanding, spoke nothing of the big experience they had been through — or were, rather, in the very midst of.

Then one day Ambry, returning from the village, brought her a cable from Tilton. He watched her as she opened it.

‘Is it honorable mention?’ he said eagerly, as eagerly, almost, as Tilton himself would have said it.

She handed it to him.

‘Yes, and more. The first prize.’

Her eyes shone with sudden tears that were gone almost as suddenly.

Neither spoke for a moment or two. She was far away from him in thought, and her eyes saw Bouvet’s herculean shoulders, as he bent with his nearsighted squint, close to the picture, to see just her manner of painting it; then saw him straighten up again and puff his cheeks and blow out a great breath like a halted steam-engine, as he did when he was pleased and moved.

To Ambry the thought of her homesickness, what he knew must be her homesickness, was something demanding reverence, something one does not talk about. But he questioned in his own mind why she should be here when she could do such things as this,— win prizes over who knows how many competitors, by merely locking herself away from every one, and painting.

V

A letter from Tilton followed in time; a warm characteristic letter. She and Ambry were down by the brook when it came.

‘I wish,’ the letter said, among other things, ‘you had called it “A Portrait of my Mother.” Just to call it “The Mother” is to call one’s attention to the motherhood only, and it is poignant, too poignant. But it is great as art. When are you coming back?’

She let Ambry read the letter.

He read it, folded it, and returned it to her.

‘It is the larger art!’ he said simply and reverently. ‘When are you going back?’

‘ I am not going back.’

He looked at the brook a long while as it flowed quiet over the brown stones. They were very used to silences, — he who was often planning plays, and she who caught sight here and there all the while of things that grouped themselves into pictures she wanted to paint. He turned at last and met her eyes with his grave ones.

’Is n’t it strange! I renounced art and came back here; and you did; and we found your mother and Cousin Molly; — and then ’ — he turned more fully to her, ‘we found each other.’

She shrank a little from him.

’I suppose I shall always want to paint pictures,’ she said vaguely.

‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘and you will paint them of course. And I shall try to write plays, and some day perhaps I shall accomplish it. But there is the greater art first — the greater art that you and I thought was the less.’

‘What?’ she said, not looking at him.

‘The planting of these fields; the making of home; the love and laughter of little children; t he peace of duty fulfilled; and the smiles of the old.’

She looked at him now wit h a kind of wonder in her eyes.

‘There is the painting of motherhood,’ — he continued. ‘There is art with all its glories and renunciations; and that is great. Then there is motherhood itself, with all the glories and renunciations of it. There is life for you and me, for you and me, my beloved. There is life itself, — the greater art.’

They sat silent for a moment. For a moment she seemed to see the light of daffodils in rue des Petits Champs, and the little dairy where she used to buy cream and rolls, and the little stairs, and the studio, and Madame Tontine and Tilton; and then it seemed that all this, wonderful and beautiful as it was, was something painted, unreal, something like a picture to be put in a frame, to hang on some wall of her life; but real and wonderful before her sat Ambry, his arms bared to the elbow, the ploughed field back of him, the blue smoke from the old thoughtful house rising against the quiet sky; above all, the strength and force in his face which made its great beauty; the beauty of a man with purpose and will, and with insight to know and choose.

He leaned forward and took her hands, his whole face lit up with some inner glory.

‘Have I spoken too soon, my beloved? Havel been hasty? I knew this thing perhaps before you knew it. Are you ready to understand? Do you know, too, have you discovered, — here in these brown fields, here at home, — that life is the greater art? Are you ready to live it with me, here? Not to paint motherhood, but to know it? Or will you go back?’

For answer she hid her face on his hands with a little shudder and with a little unconscious leaning toward him, that blessed him with its loveliness and its surrender.