Chambers Robert William
Between Friends
Even Quair, after recovering from his wonder that his own condescending advances had been ignored, bestowed his fatuously inflammable attentions elsewhere.
He had been inclined to complain one day in the studio, when he and Guilder visited Drene professionally; and Guilder looked at his dapper confrere in surprise and slight disgust; and Drene, at first bored, grew irritable.
“What are you talking about?” he said sharply.
“I’m talking about Cecile White,” continued Quair, looking rather oddly at the sculptor out of his slightly prominent eyes. “I didn’t suppose you could be interested in any woman—not that I mind your interfering with any little affair between Cecile and me—”
“There wasn’t any.”
“I beg your pardon, Drene—”
“There wasn’t any!” repeated Drene, with curt contempt. “Don’t talk about her, anyway.”
“You mean I’m not to talk about a common artist’s model—”
“Not that way.”
“Oh. Is she yours?”
“She isn’t anybody’s, I fancy. Therefore, let her alone, or I’ll throw you out of doors.”
Quair said to Guilder after they had departed:
“Fancy old Drene playing about with that girl on a strictly pious basis! He’s doubtless dub enough to waste his time. But what’s in it for her?”
“Perhaps a little unaccustomed masculine decency.”
“Everybody is decent enough to her as far as I know.”
“Including yourself?”
“Certainly, including myself,” retorted Quair, adding naively: “Besides, I knew any attempt at philandering would be time wasted.”
“Yet you tried it,” mused Guilder, entering his big touring car and depositing a bundle of blue-prints and linen tracing paper at his own ponderous feet. Quair followed him and spoke briefly to the chauffeur, then:
“Tried nothing,” he said. “A little chaff, that’s all. When it comes to a man like Jack Graylock going so far as to ask her to marry him, good night, nurse! Nothing doing, even for me.”
“Even for you,” repeated Guilder in his moderate and always modulated voice. “Well, if she’s escaped you and Graylock, she’s beyond any danger from Drene, I fancy.”
Quair smiled appreciatively, as though a delicate compliment had been offered him. Several times on the way to call on Graylock he insisted on stopping the car at as many celebrated cafes. Guilder patiently awaited him in the car and each time Quair emerged from the cafe bar a little more flushed and a trifle jauntier than when he had entered.
He was a man so perfectly attired and so scrupulously fastidious about his person that Guilder often speculated as to just why Quair always seemed to him a trifle soiled.
Now, looking him over as he climbed into the car, unusually red in the face, breathing out the aroma of spirits through his little, pinched nostrils, a faint sensation of disgust came over the senior member of the firm as though the junior member were physically unclean.
“That’s about ten drinks since luncheon,” he remarked, as the car rolled on down Fifth Avenue.
Quair, who usually grew disagreeably familiar when mellow, poked his gloved thumb:
“You’re a merry old cock, aren’t you?” he inquired genially, “—like a pig’s wrist! If I hadn’t the drinking of the entire firm to do, who’d ever talk about Guilder and Quair, architects?”
It was common rumor that Quair did his brilliant work only when “soused.” And he never appeared to be perfectly sober, even when he was.
Graylock received them in his office—a big, reckless-eyed, handsome man, with Broad Street written all over him and “danger” etched in every deepened line of his face.
“Well, how about that business of mine?” he inquired. “It’s all right to keep me waiting, of course, while you and Quair here match for highballs at the Ritz.”
“I had to see Drene—that’s why we are late,” explained Guilder. “We’re ready to go ahead and let your contracts for you—”
“Drene?” interrupted Graylock, looking straight at Guilder with a curious and staring intensity. “Why drag Drene into an excuse?”
“Because we went to his studio,” said Guilder. “Now about letting the contracts—”
“Were you at Drene’s studio?”
“Yes. He’s doing the groups for the new opera for us.”
Quair, watching Graylock, was seized with a malicious impulse:
“Neat little skirt he has up there—that White girl,” he remarked, seating himself on Graylock’s polished table.
A dull flush stained Graylock’s cheekbones, and his keen eyes turned on Quair. The latter lighted a cigarette, expelled the smoke in two thin streams from his abnormally narrow nostrils.
“Some skirt,” he repeated. “And it looks as though old Drene had her number—”
Guilder’s level voice interrupted:
“The contracts are ready to be—”
But Graylock, not heeding, and perhaps not hearing, and looking all the time at Quair, said slowly:
“Drene isn’t that kind.... Is he?”
“Our kind, you mean?” inquired Quair, with a malice so buried under flippancy that the deliberate effrontery passed for it with Graylock. Which amused Quair for a moment, but the satisfaction was not sufficient. He desired that Graylock should feel the gaff.
“Drene,” he said, “is one of those fussers who jellify when hurled on their necks—the kind that ask that kind of girl to marry them after she’s turned down everything else they suggest.”
Graylock’s square jaw tightened and his steady eyes seemed to grow even paler; but Quair, as though perfectly unconscious of this man’s record with the wife of his closest friend, and of the rumors which connected him so seriously with Cecile White, swung his leg unconcernedly, where it dangled over the table’s edge, and smiled frankly and knowingly upon Graylock:
“There’s always somebody to marry that sort of girl; all mush isn’t on the breakfast table. When you and I are ready to quit, Graylock, Providence has created a species of man who settles our bills.”
He threw back his head, inhaled the smoke of his cigarette, sent two thin streams through his nose.
“Maybe Drene may marry her himself. But—I don’t believe he’ll have to.... Now, about those contracts—” he affected a yawn, “—go on and tell him, Guilder,” he added, his words distorted by another yawn.
He stepped down to the floor from his perch on the table, stretched his arms, looking affably all the while at Graylock, who had never moved a muscle.
“I believe you had a run-in with that Cecile girl once, didn’t you, Graylock? Like the rest of us, eh? Oh, well—my hat off to old Drene if he wins out. I hold no malice. After all, Graylock, what’s a woman between friends?”
And he nodded gaily at Graylock and sauntered leisurely to the window.
And kept his back turned, fearful of exploding with laughter in the very face of the man who had been staring at him out of pale, unchanging eyes so steadily and so long.
Guilder’s patient, bored, but moderate voice was raised once more:
“In regard to the letting of these contracts—”
But Graylock, staring at Quair’s back, neither heeded nor heard him, for his brain was still ringing with the mockery of Quair’s words—“What is a woman between friends?” And now, for the first time, he was beginning to understand what the answer might be.
III
She had not posed for Drene during the last two weeks, and he had begun to miss her, after his own fashion—that is, he thought of her when not preoccupied and sometimes desired her companionship when unoccupied.
And one evening he went to his desk, rummaged among note-books, and scribbled sheets of paper, until he found her address, which he could never remember, wrote it down on another slip of paper, pocketed it, and went out to his dinner.
But as he dined, other matters reoccupied his mind, matters professional, schemes little and great, broad and in detail, which gradually, though not excluding her entirely, quenched his desire to see her at that particular time.
Sometimes it was sheer disinclination to make an effort to communicate with her, sometimes, and usually, the self-centering concentration which included himself and his career, as well as his work, seemed to obliterate even any memory of her existence.
Now and then, when alone in his shabby bedroom, reading a dull book, or duly preparing to retire, far in the dim recesses of heart and brain a faint pain became apparent—if it could still be called pain, this vague ghost of anger stirring in the ashes of dead years—and at such moments he thought of Graylock, and of another; and the partly paralyzed emotion, which memory of these two evoked, stirred him finally to think of Cecile.
It was at such times that he always determined to seek her the next day and continue with her what had been begun—an intimacy which depended upon his own will; a destiny for her which instinct whispered was within his own control. But the next day found him at work; models of various types, ages, and degrees of stupidity came, posed, were paid, and departed; his studies for the groups in collaboration with Guilder and Quair were approaching the intensely interesting period—that stage of completion where composition has been determined upon and the excitement of developing the construction and the technical charm of modeling begins.
And evening always found him physically tired and mentally satisfied—or perturbed—to the exclusion of such minor interests as life is made of—dress, amusement, food, women. Between a man and a beloved profession in full shock of embrace there is no real room for these or thought of these.
He ate irregularly and worked with the lack of wisdom characteristic of creative ability, and he grew thinner and grayer at the temples, and grayer of flesh, too, so that within a month, between the torrid New York summer and his own unwisdom, he became again the gaunt, silent, darkly absorbed recluse, never even stirring abroad for air until some half-deadened pang of hunger, or the heavy warning of a headache, set him in reluctant motion.
He heard of Cecile now and then; Cosby had used her for a figure on a fountain destined to embellish the estate of a wealthy young man somewhere or other; Greer employed her for the central figure of Innocence in his lovely and springlike decoration for some Western public edifice. Quair had met her several times at Manhattan Beach with various and assorted wealthy young men.
And one evening Guilder came alone to his studio and found him lying on the lounge, his lank, muscular hands, still clay-stained, hanging inert to the floor above an evening paper fallen there.
“Hello, Guilder,” he said, without rising, as the big architect shambled loosely through the open doorway.
“How are you, Drene?”
“All right. It’s hot.”
“There’s not a breath of air. It looks like a thunder-storm in the west.”
He pulled up a chair and sprawled on it, wiping his grave features with a damp handkerchief.
“Drene,” he said, “a philanthropic guy of sorts wants to add a chapel to the church at Shallow Brook, Long Island. We’ve pinched the job. Can you do an altar piece?”
“What sort?”
“They want a Virgin. It’s to be called the Chapel of the Annunciation. It’s for women to repair to—under certain and natural circumstances.”
“I’ve so much on hand—”
“It’s only a single figure-barring the dove. Why don’t you do it?”
“There are plenty of other men—”
“They want you. There’ll be no difficulty about terms.”
Drene said with a shrug:
“Terms are coming to mean less and less to me, Guilder. It costs very little for me to live.” He turned his gray, tired face. “Look at this barn of a place; and go in there and look at my bedroom. I have no use for what are known as necessities.”
“Still, terms are terms—”
“Oh, yes. A truck may run over me. Even at that, I’ve enough to live life out as I am living it here—between these empty walls—and that expanse of glass overhead. That’s about all life holds for me—a sheet of glass and four empty walls—and a fistfull of wet clay.”
“Are you a trifle morbid, Drene?”
“I’m not by any means; I merely prefer to live this way. I have sufficient means to live otherwise if I wish. But this is enough of the world to suit me, Guilder—and I can go to a noisy restaurant to eat in when I’m so inclined—” He laughed a rather mirthless laugh and glanced up, catching a peculiar expression in Guilder’s eyes.
“You’re thinking,” said Drene coolly, “what a god I once set up on the altar of domesticity. I used to talk a lot once, didn’t I?—a hell of a clamor I made in eulogy of the domestic virtues. Well, only idiots retain the same opinions longer than twenty-four hours. Fixity is imbecility; the inconstant alone progress; dissatisfaction is only a synonym for intelligence; contentment translated means stagnation..... I have changed my opinion concerning the virtues of domesticity.”
Guilder said, in his even, moderate voice:
“Your logic is weird, Drene: in one breath you say you have changed your opinion; in another that you are content; in another that contentment is the fixedness of imbecility—”
Drene, reddening slightly, half rose on one elbow from his couch:
“What I meant was that I change in my convictions from day to day, without reproaching myself with inconstancy. What I believed with all my heart to be sacred yesterday I find a barrier to-day; and push it aside and go on.”
“Toward what?”
“I go on, that’s all I know—toward sanctuary.”
“You mean professionally.”
“In every way—ethically—spiritually. The gods of yesterday, too, were very real—yesterday.”
“Drene, a man may change and progress on his way toward what never changes. But standards remained fixed. They were there in the beginning; they are immutable. If they shifted, humanity could have no goal.”
“Is there a goal?”
“Where are you going, then?”
“Just on.”
“In your profession there is a goal toward which you sculptors all journey.”
“Perfection?”
Guilder nodded.
“But,” smiled Drene, “no two sculptors ever see it alike.”
“It is still Perfection. It is still the goal to the color-blind and normal alike, whatever they call it, however, they visualize it. That is its only importance; it is The Goal..... In things spiritual the same obtains—whether one’s vision embraces Nirvana, or the Algonquin Ocean of Light, or a pallid Christ half hidden in floating clouds—Drene, it is all one, all one. It is not the Goal that changes; only our intelligence concerning its existence and its immortality.”
Drene lay looking at him:
“You never knew pain—real pain, did you? The world never ended for you, did it?”
“In one manner or another we all must be reborn before we can progress.”
“That is a cant phrase.”
“No; there’s truth under the cant. Under all the sleek, smooth, canty phrases of ecclesiastic proverb, precept, axiom, and lore, there is truth worth the sifting out.”
“You are welcome to think so, Guilder.”
“You also could come to no other conclusion if you took the trouble to investigate.”
Drene smiled:
“Morals are no more than folk-ways—merely mental condition consequent upon custom. Spiritual beliefs are radically dependant upon folkways and the resultant physical and mental condition of the human brain which creates everything that has been and that is to be.”
“Physiology has proven that no idea, no thought, ever originated within the concrete and physical brain.”
“I’ve read of those experiments.”
“Then you can’t ignore a conclusion.”
