The Incomplete Amorist

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"On the contrary," said Vernon, "Miss Voscoe is everybody--almost!"

"I'm the nobody who can't get a word in edgeways anyhow," she said.
"What I've been trying to say ever since I was born--pretty near--is
that what this class wants is a competent Professor, some bully
top-of-the-tree artist, to come and pull our work all to pieces and
wipe his boots on the bits. Mr. Vernon, don't you know any one who's
pining to give us free crits?"

"Temple is," said Vernon. "There's no mistaking that longing glance of
his."

"As a competent professor I make you my bow of gratitude," said
Temple, "but I should never have the courage to criticise the work of
nine fair ladies."

"You needn't criticise them all at once," said a large girl from
Minneapolis, "nor yet all in the gaudy eye of heaven. We'll screen off
a corner for our Professor--sort of confessional business. You sit
there and we'll go to you one by one with our sins in our hand."

"_That_ would scare him some I surmise," said Miss Voscoe.

"Not at all," said Temple, a little nettled, he hardly knew why.

"I didn't know you were so brave," said the Minneapolis girl.

"Perhaps he didn't want you to know," said Miss Voscoe; "perhaps
that's his life's dark secret."

"People often pretend to a courage that they haven't," said Vernon. "A
consistent pose of cowardice, that would be novel and--I see the idea
developing--more than useful."

"Is that _your_ pose?" asked Temple, still rather tartly, "because if
it is, I beg to offer you, in the name of these ladies, the chair of
Professor-behind-the-screen."

"I'm not afraid of the nine Muses," Vernon laughed back, "as long as
they are nine. It's the light that lies in woman's eyes that I've
always had such a nervous dread of."

"It does make you blink, bless it," said the Irish student, "but not
from nine pairs at once, as you say. It's the light from one pair that
turns your head."

"Mr. Vernon isn't weak in the head," said the shy boy suddenly.

"No," said Vernon, "it's the heart that's weak with me. I have to be
very careful of it."

"Well, but will you?" said a downright girl.

"Will I what? I'm sorry, but I've lost my cue, I think. Where were
we--at losing hearts, wasn't it?"

"No," said the downright girl, "I didn't mean that. I mean will you
come and criticise our drawings?"

"Fiddle," said Miss Voscoe luminously. "Mr. Vernon's too big for
that."

"Oh, well," said Vernon, "if you don't think I should be competent!"

"You don't mean to say you would?"

"Who wouldn't jump at the chance of playing Apollo to the fairest set
of muses in the Quartier?" said Temple; "but after all, I had the
refusal of the situation--I won't renounce--"

"Bobby, you unman me," interrupted Vernon, putting down his cup, "you
shall _not_ renounce the altruistic pleasure which you promise to
yourself in yielding this professorship to me. I accept it."

"I'm hanged if you do!" said Temple. "You proposed me yourself, and
I'm elected--aren't I, Miss Voscoe?"

"That's so," said she; "but Mr. Vernon's president too."

"I've long been struggling with the conviction that Temple and I were
as brothers. Now I yield--Temple, to my arms!"

They embraced, elegantly, enthusiastically, almost as Frenchmen use;
and the room applauded the faithful burlesque.

"What's come to me that I should play the goat like this?" Vernon
asked himself, as he raised his head from Temple's broad shoulder.
Then he met Betty's laughing eyes, and no longer regretted his
assumption of that difficult role.

"It's settled then. Tuesdays and Fridays, four to six," he said. "At
last I am to be--"

"The light of the harem," said Miss Voscoe.

"Can there be two lights?" asked Temple anxiously. "If not, consider
the fraternal embrace withdrawn."

"No, you're _the_ light, of course," said Betty. "Mr. Vernon's the
Ancient Light. He's older than you are, isn't he?"

The roar of appreciation of her little joke surprised Betty, and, a
little, pleased her--till Miss Voscoe whispered under cover of it:

"_Ancient_ light? Then he _was_ the three-polite-word man?"

Betty explained her little jest.

"All the same," said the other, "it wasn't any old blank walls you
were thinking about. I believe he is the one."

"It's a great thing to be able to believe anything," said Betty; and
the talk broke up into duets. She found that Temple was speaking to
her.

"I came here to-day because I wanted to meet you, Miss Desmond," he
was saying. "I hope you don't think it's cheek of me to say it, but
there's something about you that reminds me of the country at home."

"That's a very pretty speech," said Betty. He reminded her of the Cafe
d'Harcourt, but she did not say so.

"You remind me of a garden," he went on, "but I don't like to see a
garden without a hedge round it."

"You think I ought to have a chaperon," said Betty bravely, "but
chaperons aren't needed in this quarter."

"I wish I were your brother," said Temple.

"I'm so glad you're not," said Betty. She wanted no chaperonage, even
fraternal. But the words made him shrink, and then sent a soft warmth
through him. On the whole he was not sorry that he was not her
brother.

At parting Vernon, at the foot of the staircase, said:

"And when may I see you again?"

"On Tuesday, when the class meets."

"But I didn't mean when shall I see the class. When shall I see Miss
Desmond?"

"Oh, whenever you like," Betty answered gaily; "whenever Lady St.
Craye can spare you."

He let her say it.

CHAPTER XVI.

"LOVE AND TUPPER."

"Whenever Vernon liked" proved to be the very next day. He was waiting
outside the door of the atelier when Betty, in charcoal-smeared
pinafore, left the afternoon class.

"Won't you dine with me somewhere to-night?" said he.

"I am going to Garnier's," she said. Not even for him, friend of hers
and affianced of another as he might be, would she yet break the rule
of a life Paula had instituted.

"Fallen as I am," he answered gaily, "I am not yet so low as to be
incapable of dining at Garnier's."

So when Betty passed through the outer room of the restaurant and
along the narrow little passage where eyes and nose attest strongly
the neighborhood of the kitchen, she was attended by a figure that
aroused the spontaneous envy of all her acquaintances. In the inner
room where they dined it was remarked that such a figure would be more
at home at Durand's or the Cafe de Paris than at Garnier's. That night
the first breath of criticism assailed Betty. To afficher oneself with
a fellow-student--a "type," Polish or otherwise--that was all very
well, but with an obvious Boulevardier, a creature from the other
side, this dashed itself against the conventions of the Artistic
Quartier. And conventions--even of such quarters--are iron-strong.

"Fiddle-de-dee," said Miss Voscoe to her companions' shocked comments,
"they were raised in the same village, or something. He used to give
her peanuts when he was in short jackets, and she used to halve her
candies with him. Friend of childhood's hour, that's all. And besides
he's one of the presidents of our Sketch Club."

But all Garnier's marked that whereas the habitues contented
themselves with an omelette aux champignons, saute potatoes and a
Petit Suisse, or the like modest menu, Betty's new friend ordered for
himself, and for her, "a real regular dinner," beginning with hors
d'oeuvre and ending with "mendiants." "Mendiants" are raisins and
nuts, the nearest to dessert that at this season you could get at
Garniers. Also he passed over with smiling disrelish the little
carafons of weak wine for which one pays five sous if the wine be red,
and six if it be white. He went out and interviewed Madame at her
little desk among the flowers and nuts and special sweet dishes, and
it was a bottle of real wine with a real cork to be drawn that adorned
the table between him and Betty. To her the whole thing was of the
nature of a festival. She enjoyed the little sensation created by her
companion; and the knowledge which she thought she had of his
relations to Lady St. Craye absolved her of any fear that in dining
with him tete-a-tete she was doing anything "not quite nice." To her
the thought of his engagement was as good or as bad as a chaperon. For
Betty's innocence was deeply laid, and had survived the shock of all
the waves that had beaten against it since her coming to Paris. It was
more than innocence, it was a very honest, straightforward childish
naivete.

"It's almost the same as if he was married," she said: "there can't be
any harm in having dinner with a man who's married--or almost
married."

So she enjoyed herself. Vernon exerted himself to amuse her. But he
was surprised to find that he was not so happy as he had expected to
be. It was good that Betty had permitted him to dine with her alone,
but it was flat. After dinner he took her to the Odeon, and she said
good-night to him with a lighter heart than she had known since Paula
left her.

In these rooms now sometimes it was hard to keep one's eyes shut. And
to keep her eyes shut was now Betty's aim in life, even more than the
art for which she pretended to herself that she lived. For now that
Paula had gone the deception of her father would have seemed less
justifiable, had she ever allowed herself to face the thought of it
for more than a moment; but she used to fly the thought and go round
to one of the girls' rooms to talk about Art with a big A, and forget
how little she liked or admired Betty Desmond.

She was now one of a circle of English, American and German students.
The Sketch Club had brought her eight new friends, and they went about
in parties by twos and threes, or even sevens and eights, and Betty
went with them, enjoying the fun of it all, which she liked, and
missing all that she would not have liked if she had seen it. But
Vernon was the only man with whom she dined tete-a-tete or went to the
theatre alone.

To him the winter passed in a maze of doubt and self-contempt. He
could not take what the gods held out: could not draw from his
constant companionship of Betty the pleasure which his artistic
principles, his trained instincts taught him to expect. He had now all
the tete-a-tetes he cared to ask for, and he hated that it should be
so. He almost wanted her to be in a position where such things should
be impossible to her. He wanted her to be guarded, watched, sheltered.
And he had never wanted that for any woman in his life before.

"I shall be wishing her in a convent next," he said, "with high walls
with spikes on the top. Then I should walk round and round the outside
of the walls and wish her out. But I should not be able to get at her.
And nothing else would either."

Lady St. Craye was more charming than ever. Vernon knew it and
sometimes he deliberately tried to let her charm him. But though he
perceived her charm he could not feel it. Always before he had felt
what he chose to feel. Or perhaps--he hated the thought and would not
look at it--perhaps all his love affairs had been just pictures,
perhaps he had never felt anything but an artistic pleasure in their
grouping and lighting. Perhaps now he was really feeling natural human
emotion, didn't they call it? But that was just it. He wasn't. What he
felt was resentment, dissatisfaction, a growing inability to control
events or to prearrange his sensations. He felt that he himself was
controlled. He felt like a wild creature caught in a trap. The trap
was not gilded, and he was very uncomfortable in it. Even the affairs
of others almost ceased to amuse him. He could hardly call up a
cynical smile at Lady St. Craye's evident misapprehension of those
conscientious efforts of his to be charmed by her. He was only moved
to a very faint amusement when one day Bobbie Temple, smoking in the
studio, broke a long silence abruptly to say:

"Look here. Someone was saying the other day that a man can be in love
with two women at a time. Do you think it's true?"

"Two? Yes. Or twenty."

"Then it's not love," said Temple wisely.

"They call it love," said Vernon. "_I_ don't know what they mean by
it. What do _you_ mean?"

"By love?"

"Yes."

"I don't exactly know," said Temple slowly. "I suppose it's wanting to
be with a person, and thinking about nothing else. And thinking
they're the most beautiful and all that. And going over everything
that they've ever said to you, and wanting--"

"Wanting?"

"Well, I suppose if it's really love you want to marry them."

"You can't marry _them_, you know," said Vernon; "at least not
simultaneously. That's just it. Well?"

"Well that's all. If that's not love, what is?"

"I'm hanged if _I_ know," said Vernon.

"I thought you knew all about those sort of things."

"So did I," said Vernon to himself. Aloud he said:

"If you want a philosophic definition: it's passion transfigured by
tenderness--at least I've often said so."

"But can you feel that for two people at once?"

"Or," said Vernon, getting interested in his words, "it's tenderness
intoxicated by passion, and not knowing that it's drunk--"

"But can you feel that for two--"

"Oh, bother," said Vernon, "every sort of fool-fancy calls itself
love. There's the pleasure of pursuit--there's vanity, there's the
satisfaction of your own amour-propre, there's desire, there's
intellectual attraction, there's the love of beauty, there's the
artist's joy in doing what you know you can do well, and getting a
pretty woman for sole audience. You might feel one or two or twenty of
these things for one woman, and one or two or twenty different ones
for another. But if you mean do you love two women in the same way, I
say no. Thank Heaven it's new every time."

"It mayn't be the same way," said Temple, "but it's the same thing to
you--if you feel you can't bear to give either of them up."

"Well, then, you can marry one and keep on with the other. Or be
'friends' with both and marry neither. Or cut the whole show and go to
the Colonies."

"Then you have to choose between being unhappy or being a blackguard."

"My good chap, that's the situation in which our emotions are always
landing us--our confounded emotions and the conventions of Society."

"And how are you to know whether the thing's love--or--all those other
things?"

"You don't know: you can't know till it's too late for your knowing to
matter. Marriage is like spinach. You can't tell that you hate it till
you've tried it. Only--"

"Well?"

"I think I've heard it said," Vernon voiced his own sudden conviction,
very carelessly, "that love wants to give and passion wants to take.
Love wants to possess the beloved object--and to make her happy.
Desire wants possession too--but the happiness is to be for oneself;
and if there's not enough happiness for both so much the worse. If I'm
talking like a Sunday School book you've brought it on yourself."

"I like it," said Temple.

"Well, since the Dissenting surplice has fallen on me, I'll give you a
test. I believe that the more you love a woman the less your thoughts
will dwell on the physical side of the business. You want to take care
of her."

"Yes," said Temple.

"And then often," Vernon went on, surprised to find that he wanted to
help the other in his soul-searchings, "if a chap's not had much to do
with women--the women of our class, I mean--he gets a bit dazed with
them. They're all so nice, confound them. If a man felt he was falling
in love with two women at once, and he had the tiresome temperament
that takes these things seriously, it wouldn't be a bad thing for him
to go away into the country, and moon about for a few weeks, and see
which was the one that bothered his brain most. Then he'd know where
he was, and not be led like a lamb to the slaughter by the wrong one.
They can't both get him, you know, unless his intentions are strictly
dishonourable."

"I wasn't putting the case that either of them wished to get him,"
said Temple carefully.

Vernon nodded.

"Of course not. The thing simplifies itself wonderfully if neither of
them wants to get him. Even if they both do, matters are less
complicated. It's when only one of them wants him that it's the very
devil for a man not to be sure what _he_ wants. That's very clumsily
put--what I mean is--"

"I see what you mean," said Temple impatiently.

"--It's the devil for him because then he lets himself drift and the
one who wants him collars him and then of course she always turns out
to be the one he didn't want. My observations are as full of wants as
an advertisement column. But the thing to do in all relations of life
is to make up your mind what it is that you _do_ want, and then to
jolly well see that you get it. What I want is a pipe."

He filled and lighted one.

"You talk," said Temple slowly, "as though a man could get anyone--I
mean anything, he wanted."

"So he can, my dear chap, if he only wants her badly enough."

"Badly enough?"

"Badly enough to make the supreme sacrifice to get her."

"?" Temple enquired.

"Marriage," Vernon answered; "there's only one excuse for marriage."

"Excuse?"

"Excuse. And that excuse is that one couldn't help it. The only excuse
one will have to offer, some day, to the recording angel, for all
one's other faults and follies. A man who _can_ help getting married,
and doesn't, deserves all he gets."

"I don't agree with you in the least," said Temple,--"about marriage, I
mean. A man _ought_ to want to get married--"

"To anybody? Without its being anybody in particular?"

"Yes," said Temple stoutly. "If he gets to thirty without wanting to
marry any one in particular, he ought to look about till he finds some
one he does want. It's the right and proper thing to marry and have
kiddies."

"Oh, if you're going to be Patriarchal," said Vernon. "What a symbolic
dialogue! We begin with love and we end with marriage! There's the
tragedy of romance, in a nut-shell. Yes, life's a beastly rotten show,
and the light won't last more than another two hours."

[Illustration: "Unfinished, but a disquieting likeness"]

"Your hints are always as delicate as gossamer," said Temple. "Don't
throw anything at me. I'm going."

He went, leaving his secret in Vernon's hands.

"Poor old Temple! That's the worst of walking carefully all your days:
you do come such an awful cropper when you do come one. Two women. The
Jasmine lady must have been practising on his poor little heart.
Heigh-ho, I wish she could do as much for me! And the other one?
_Her_--I suppose."

The use of the pronoun, the disuse of the grammar pulled him up short.

"By Jove," he said, "that's what people say when--But I'm not in
love--with anybody. I want to work."

But he didn't work. He seldom did now. And when he did the work was
not good. His easel held most often the portrait of Betty that had
been begun at Long Barton--unfinished, but a disquieting likeness. He
walked up and down his room not thinking, but dreaming. His dreams
took him to the warren, in the pure morning light; he saw Betty; he
told himself what he had said, what she had said.

"And it was I who advised her to come to Paris. If only I'd known
then--"

He stopped and asked himself what he knew now that he had not known
then, refused himself the answer, and went to call on Lady St. Craye.

Christmas came and went; the black winds of January swept the
Boulevards, and snow lay white on the walls of court and garden.
Betty's life was full now.

The empty cage that had opened its door to love at Long Barton had now
other occupants. Ambition was beginning to grow its wing feathers. She
could draw--at least some day she would be able to draw. Already she
had won a prize with a charcoal study of a bare back. But she did not
dare to name this to her father, and when he wrote to ask what was the
subject of her prize drawing she replied with misleading truth that it
was a study from nature. His imagination pictured a rustic cottage, a
water-wheel, a castle and mountains in the distance and cows and a
peasant in the foreground.

But though her life was now crowded with new interests that
first-comer was not ousted. Only he had changed his plumage and she
called him Friendship. She blushed sometimes and stamped her foot when
she remembered those meetings in the summer mornings, her tremors, her
heart-beats. And oh, the "drivel" she had written in her diary!

"Girls ought never to be allowed to lead that 'sheltered home life,'"
she said to Miss Voscoe, "with nothing real in it. It makes your mind
all swept and garnished and then you hurry to fill it up with
rubbish."

"That's so," said her friend.

"If ever _I_ have a daughter," said Betty, "she shall set to work at
_something_ definite the very instant she leaves school--if it's only
Hebrew or algebra. Not just Parish duties that she didn't begin, and
doesn't want to go on with. But something that's her _own_ work."

"You're beginning to see straight. I surmised you would by and by. But
don't you go to the other end of the see-saw, Miss Daisy-Face!"

"What do you mean?" asked Betty. It was the morning interval when
students eat patisserie out of folded papers. The two were on the
window ledge of the Atelier, looking down on the convent garden where
already the buds were breaking to green leaf.

"Why, there's room for the devil even if your flat ain't swept and
garnished. He folds up mighty small, and gets into less space than a
poppy-seed."

"What do you mean?" asked Betty again.

"I mean that Vernon chap," said Miss Voscoe down-rightly. "I told you
to change partners every now and then. But with you it's that Vernon
this week and last week and the week after next."

"I've known him longer than I have the others, and I like him," said
Betty.

"Oh, he's all right; fine and dandy!" replied Miss Voscoe. "He's a big
man, too, in his own line. Not the kind you expect to see knocking
about at a students' cremerie. Does he give you lessons?"

"He did at home," said Betty.

"Take care he doesn't teach you what's the easiest thing in creation
to learn about a man."

"What's that?" Betty did not like to have to ask the question.

"Why, how not to be able to do without him, of course," said Miss
Voscoe.

"You're quite mistaken," said Betty eagerly: "one of the reasons I
don't mind going about with him so much is that he's engaged to be
married."

"Acquainted with the lady?"

"Yes," said Betty, sheltering behind the convention that an
introduction at a tea-party constitutes acquaintanceship. She was glad
Miss Voscoe had not asked her if she _knew_ Lady St. Craye.

"Oh, well"--Miss Voscoe jumped up and shook the flakes of pastry off
her pinafore--"if she doesn't mind, I guess I've got no call to. But
why don't you give that saint in the go-to-hell collar a turn?"

"Meaning?"

"Mr. Temple. He admires you no end. He'd be always in your pocket if
you'd let him. He's worth fifty of the other man _as_ a man, if he
isn't as an artist. I keep my eyes skinned--and the Sketch Club gives
me a chance to tot them both up. I guess I can size up a man some. The
other man isn't _fast_. That's how it strikes me."

"Fast?" echoed Betty, bewildered.

"Fast dye: fast colour. I suspicion he'd go wrong a bit in the wash.
Temple's fast colour, warranted not to run."

"I know," said Betty, "but I don't care for the colour, and I'm rather
tired of the pattern."

"I wish you'd tell me which of the two was the three-polite-word man."

"I know you do. But surely you see _now_?"

"You're too cute. Just as likely it's the Temple one, and that's why
you're so sick of the pattern by now."

"Didn't I tell you you were clever?" laughed Betty.

But, all the same, next evening when Vernon called to take her to
dinner, she said:

"Couldn't we go somewhere else? I'm tired of Garnier's."

Vernon was tired of Garnier's, too.

"Do you know Thirion's?" he said. "Thirion's in the Boulevard St.
Germain, Thirion's where Du Maurier used to go, and Thackeray, and all
sorts of celebrated people; and where the host treats you like a
friend, and the waiter like a brother?"

"I should love to be treated like a waiter's brother. Do let's go,"
said Betty.

"He's a dream of a waiter," Vernon went on as they turned down the
lighted slope of the Rue de Rennes, "has a voice like a trumpet, and
takes a pride in calling twenty orders down the speaking-tube in one
breath, ending up with a shout. He never makes a mistake either. Shall
we walk, or take the tram, or a carriage?"

The Fate who was amusing herself by playing with Betty's destiny had
sent Temple to call on Lady St. Craye that afternoon, and Lady St.
Craye had seemed bored, so bored that she had hardly appeared to
listen to Temple's talk, which, duly directed by her quite early into
the channel she desired for it, flowed in a constant stream over the
name, the history, the work, the personality of Vernon. When at last
the stream ebbed Lady St. Craye made a pretty feint of stifling a
yawn.

"Oh, how horrid I am!" she cried with instant penitence, "and how very
rude you will think me! I think I have the blues to-day, or, to be
more French and more poetic, the black butterflies. It _is_ so sweet
of you to have let me talk to you. I know I've been as stupid as an
owl. Won't you stay and dine with me? I'll promise to cheer up if you
will."

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