CHAPTER II

IN THE TRACK OF THE BRAIN-STORM

"At last you have arrived. Through an interminable progression of hours I have waited, the days and nights mixing themselves into one abominable salad of expectation, disappointment, rage against those whom I pictured as interfering to detain you; and, as dressing and sauce to the whole infernal compound, a yearning for the assuaging repose of your presence which gnawed, like the undying worm, at my entrails."

This address, although delivered in the young man's accustomed unemotional manner, with studied, carefully modulated utterance, was hardly calculated to allay the embarrassment or disquietude aroused by the uncompromising stare of the concierge, and very evident, though more deferential, curiosity of Giovanni, the bright-eyed, velvet-spoken Italian man-servant who admitted her.

Nor were other sources of discomfort lacking. Madame St. Leger, like all persons of temperament, in whom mind and body, the soul and senses, are constantly and actively interpenetrative, instinctively responded to the spiritual influences which reside in places and even in material objects. Now, coming directly into it from the glitter and movement, the thousand and one very articulate activities of the sun-bathed city, the vivid foliage of whose many trees tossed in the crisp freshness of the summer wind, René Dax's studio struck her as the strangest and, perhaps, most repellant human habitation she had ever yet set foot in. Struck her, too, as belonging to a section of that exclusively man's world, in which woman's part is at once fugitive and not a little suspect.

The black hangings and furniture stared at, the bare immaculately white walls bluffed, her. Only a mournful travesty of the splendid daylight, reigning out of doors, filtered down through the gathered black-stuff blinds drawn across the great, sloping skylights, and contended languidly against the harsh clarity of a couple of electric lights--with flat smoked-glass shades to them--hanging, spider-like, at the end of long black cords from the beam supporting the central span of the arched ceiling. Notwithstanding the height of the room and its largeness of area, the atmosphere was stagnant, listless, and dead. This constituted Madame St. Leger's initial impression. This, and a singular persuasion--returning upon her stealthily, persistently, though she strove honestly to cast it out--that the studio, although apparently so bare and empty, was, in point of fact, crowded by forms and conceptions the reverse of wholesome or ennobling, which pushed upon and jostled her, while, by their number and grossness, they further exhausted the already lifeless air.

The sense of suffocation, thus produced, so oppressed her that her heart beat nervously and her pulse fluttered. Though unwilling to discard the modest shelter it afforded and gain closer acquaintance with the details of her surroundings, Gabrielle untwisted the flowing gray veil which she wore over her hat and around her throat, and threw it back from her face. Then, for a while, all else was forgotten in the thought of, the sight of, René Dax. And, although that thought and seeing was in itself painful, it tended to restore both her outward serenity and her inward assurance and strength.

"Ah! my poor friend," she said, soothingly, "had I understood how suffering you were, how greatly in need of sympathy, I would have put aside obstacles and come to you sooner; though--though you will still remember, it is no small concession that I should come at all."

"Only by concessions is life rendered supportable," he answered. "I too have made concessions. If you defy conventional decorum for my sake, I, on the other hand, have sacrificed to it for your sake very royally. I have destroyed the labor of months, have obliterated priceless records to safeguard your delicacy, to insure you immunity--should you at last visit me--from all offense."

And _la belle Gabrielle_, listening, was moved and touched. But she asked no explanation--shrank from it, indeed, divining the sacrifice in question bore vital relation to that unseen yet jostling, unwholesome and ignoble crowd. She therefore rallied the mothering, ministering spirit within her, resolving to let speech, action and feeling be inspired and controlled by this, and this alone.

For one thing was indisputable--namely, that René Dax, caricaturist and poet, was, as the cleanly young American yesterday told her, just as sick a man as any man need be. His puny person had wasted. He looked all head--all brain, rather, since his tired little face seemed to also have dwindled and to occupy the most restricted space permissible in proportion to the whole. The full, black linen painting-blouse, which he wore in place of a coat, produced, along with his lowness of stature, a queerly youthful and even childish effect. To stand on ceremony with this small, sad human being, still more to go in fear of it, to regard it as possibly dangerous, its poor little neighborhood as in any degree compromising, was to Gabrielle St. Leger altogether absurd and unworthy. Let the overpunctilious or overworldly say what they pleased, she congratulated herself. She was glad to have disregarded opposition, glad to have come. Where custom and humanity conflict--so she told herself--let it be custom which goes to the wall.

Therewith she drew herself up proudly, and, carrying her charming head high, looked bravely around the strange and somewhat sinister place. Noted the wide divans on either side the fireplace and the diminutive scarlet cane chair set on the hearth-rug; the five-fold red lacquer screen; the trophy of arms--swords, rapiers, simitars, daggers, and other such uncomfortably cutting, ripping, and stabbing tools--upon the chimney-breast above the mantelpiece. Noted, not without a shudder of disgust, the glass tank and its slimy swimming and crawling population; the tables loaded with books, materials and implements of the draftsman's craft; the model's platform; the array of portfolios, canvases, drawing-boards--surely the place had been very scrupulously swept and garnished against her coming! It was minutely, even rigidly, clean and neat. This pleased her as a pretty tribute of respect. Finally, her eyes sought the nearly life-size red-chalk drawing set on an easel in the center of the studio immediately beneath the electric light.

René Dax stood beside her. She tall, noticeably elegant in her short-waisted, long-coated, pale-gray, braided walking-dress. He reserved and weary in bearing, but very watchful and very intent.

"You observe my drawing?" he inquired softly. "I have been waiting for that--waiting for you to grasp the fact that there is nothing new, nothing extraordinary in your being here with me--you, and Mademoiselle Bette. For months now you are my companions all day and all night--yes, then very sensibly also. Look, I lie there upon the divan. I fold the red screen back--it is loot from the Imperial Palace at Peking, that screen. Grotesquely sanguinary scenes figure upon it. But I forget them and the entertainment they afford me.--I fold the screen back, I turn upon my side among the cushions and I look at you. I look until, on those nights when my will is active and yours in abeyance, or perhaps a little weak, you step off the paper and cross the room, there--between the platform and the long table--always carrying Mademoiselle Bette on your arm; and, coming close, you bend down over me. You never speak, neither do you touch me. But I cease to suffer. The tension of my nerves is relaxed. The hideous pain at the base of my skull, where the brain and spinal-cord form their junction, no longer tortures me. I am inexpressibly soothed. I become calm. I sleep."

Gabrielle St. Leger had grown very serious. For this small, sad human being to whom she proposed to minister and to mother had disconcertingly original and even consternating ways with it. Should she resent the said ways, soundly snubbing him? Or, making allowance for his ill-health and acknowledged eccentricity, parley with and humor him? To steer a wise course was difficult.

"I willingly believe your intention in making this drawing was not disloyal," she said, quietly. "Yet I cannot but be displeased. Before making it you should have asked my approval and obtained my consent."

"Which you would have refused?--No, I knew better than that. But dismiss the idea of disloyalty. Rise above paltry considerations of expediency and etiquette. You can do so if you choose. Accept the position in its gravity, in its permanent consequences both to me and to yourself. In making this drawing I thought not merely of the ease and relief I might obtain through it. I thought of you also. For I perceived the perversion which threatened you. I decided to intervene, to rescue you. I decided to co-operate with destiny, to interest myself in the evolution of your highest good. So now it amounts to no less than this--that your future and mine are inextricably conjoined, intermingled, incapable of separation henceforth."

"Gently, gently, my poor friend," Gabrielle said.

"Are you not then sorry for me?" he asked quickly, with very disarming and child-like pathos. "Is it a fraud, a heartless experiment, coming to-day to see me thus? Have you no real desire to console or bring me hope?"

"From my heart I pity and commiserate you," Gabrielle said.

"Then where is your logic, where is your reason? For I--I--René Dax--I, and my recovery, my welfare, constitute your highest good. I am your destiny. Your being here to-day regardless of etiquette, your stepping off the paper there upon the easel, crossing the room and bending over me at night, carrying the little maiden child, the flower of innocence, in your arms, these are at least a tacit admission of the truth of that."

A point of fear came into Madame St. Leger's eyes. Outward serenity, inward assurance, were not easy of maintenance. The more so, that again she was very sensible of the unseen crowd of ignoble forms and conceptions peopling the room, tainting and exhausting the air of it, pressing upon and--as she felt--deriding her.

"You speak foolishly and extravagantly," she said, steadying her voice with effort. "I pardon that because I know that you are suffering and not altogether master of yourself. But I do not enjoy this conversation. I beg you to talk more becomingly, or I shall be unable to remain. I shall feel compelled to leave you."

For an instant René Dax looked up at her with a positively diabolic expression of resentment. Then his face was distorted by a sudden spasm.

"It is only too true that I suffer," he cried bitterly. "My head aches--there at the base of my brain. It is like the grinding of iron knuckles. I become distracted. Very probably I speak extravagantly. My sensations are extravagant, and my talk matches them. But do not leave me. I will not offend you. I will be altogether good, altogether mild and amiable. Only remain. Place yourself here in this chair. Your presence comforts and pacifies me--but only if you are in sympathy with me. Let your sympathy flow out then. Do not restrain it. Let it surround and support me, buoying me up, so that I float upon the surface of it as upon some divine river of peace. Ah, Madame, pity me. I am so tired of pain."

Reluctantly, out of her charity and against her better, her mundane judgment, Gabrielle St. Leger yielded. She sat down in the large, black brocade-covered chair indicated. Her back was toward the drawing upon the easel. She was glad not to see it, glad that the electric light no longer glared in her eyes. She clasped her hands lightly in her lap, trying to subdue all inward agitation, to maintain a perfectly sane and normal outlook, thereby infusing something of her own health and sweetness as a disinfectant into this morbid atmosphere.

The young man sat down, too, upon the edge of the divan just opposite to her. He set his elbows upon his knees, his big head projected forward, his eyes closed, his chin resting in the hollow of his hard, clever little hands. For a time there was silence, save for the dripping of the fountain in the glass tank, and the ticking of a clock. Presently, very softly, he began to speak.

"My art is killing me--killing me--and only you and Mademoiselle Bette can save me," he said. "And I am worth saving; for, not only am I the most accomplished draftsman of the century, but my knowledge of the human animal is unsurpassed. Moreover, that I should die is so inconceivably purposeless. Death is such a stupidity, such an outrage on intelligence and common-sense."

Gabrielle remained passive. To reason with him would, she felt, be useless as yet. She would wait her opportunity.

"Yes, my art is killing me," he went on. "It asks too much. More than once I have tried to sever myself from it; but it is the stronger. It refuses amputation. Long ago, when, as a child--unhappy, devoured by fancies, by curiosity about myself, about other children, about everything which I saw--I found that I possessed this talent, I was both shy and enchanted. It gave me power. Everything that I looked at belonged to me. I could reproduce it in beauty or the reverse. I could cover with ridicule those who annoyed me. By means of my talent I could torment. I played with it as naughty little boys play together, ingenious in provocation, in malice, in dirty monkey tricks. Then as I grew older I enjoyed my talent languorously. I spent long days of dreams, long nights of love with it. That was a period when my heart was still soft. I believed. The trivial vices of the little boy were left behind. The full-blooded vices of manhood were untried as yet. Later ambition took me. I would study. I would know. I would train my eye and my hand to perfect mastery in observation and in execution. My own mechanical skill, my power of memorizing, of visualizing, intoxicated me. I reviewed the work of famous draftsmen. I recognized that I was on the highroad to surpass it, both in effrontery of conception and perfection of technique. I refused my art nothing, shrank from nothing. I had loved my art as a companion in childish mischief; then as a youth loves his first mistress. Now I loved it as a man loves his career, loves that which raises him above his contemporaries. I stood above others, alone. I was filled with an immense scorn of them. I unveiled their deceit, their hypocrisy, their ignorance, their vileness, the degradation of their minds and habits. I whipped them till the blood came. No one could escape. I jeered. I laughed. I made them laugh too. Between the cuts of the lash, even while the blood flowed, they laughed. How could they help doing so? My wit was irresistible. They cursed me, yet shouted to me to lay on to them again."

For a minute or more silence, save for the dripping fountain, the ticking clock, and a bubbling, sucking sound as one of the black-and-orange blotched newts dived from the rockwork down to the sandy, pebbly floor of the glass tank. Madame St. Leger leaned back in her chair. She pressed her handkerchief against her lips. She felt as one who witnesses some terrible drama upon the stage which holds the attention captive. She could not have gone away and left René Dax until the scene was concluded, even if she would.

"That was the period of my apotheosis, when I appeared to myself as a god,--last year, the year before last, even this winter," he said, presently, "before the pain came and while still I myself was greater than my art. But now, now, to-day, I do not laugh any more, nor can I make others laugh. My art is greater than I. It has grown unruly, arrogant. I am unequal to its demands. It asks of me what I am no longer able to give. It hounds me along. It storms at me--'Go further yet, imagine the unimaginable, pass all known limits. You are too squeamish, too fastidious, too modest, too nice. There yet remain sanctities to be defiled, shames to be depicted, agonies to be stewed in the vitriol juice of sarcasm. Go forward. You are lazy. Exert yourself. Discover fresh subjects. Invent new profanities. Turn the spit on which you have impaled humanity faster and faster. Draw better--you grow lethargic, indolent--draw better and better yet.'--But I cannot, I cannot," René Dax said, the corners of his mouth drooping like those of a tired baby. "We have changed places, my art and I. It is greater than me. It masters me instead of my mastering it. Like some huge brazen Moloch, with burning, brazen arms it presses me against its burning, brazen breast, scorching me to a cinder. It has squeezed me dry--dry--I am no longer able to collect my ideas, to memorize that which I see. My imagination is sterile. My hand refuses to obey my brain. My line, my beloved, my unexampled line, wavers, is broken, uncertain, loses itself. I scrabble unmeaning nonsense upon the paper."

He unbuttoned the wristband of his blouse and stripped up the sleeve of it.

"See," he went on, "how my muscles have deteriorated. My arm resembles some withered, sapless twig. Soon I shall not possess sufficient strength to hold a pencil or a bit of charcoal. Yes, yes, I know what you would say. Others have already said it. Travel, try change of scene, rest, consult doctors. But pah! Butchers, carrion-feeders, what can they tell me which I do not know already? For--for--"

He rose, came nearer to Gabrielle St. Leger, pointing to the inner corner of the great room in a line with the door.

"There," he said, with a singular sly gleefulness, "there--you see, Madame, behind the port folio-wagon? Yes?--It has its lair there, its retreat in which it conceals itself. It always says one thing, and it always tells the truth. It has once been a man; now it has no skin. You can observe all the muscles and sinews in action, which is extremely instructive. But naturally it is red--red all over. And it is highly varnished, otherwise, of course, it would feel the cold too much. It places its red hands on the edges of the portfolios--thus--and it vaults into the room. It is astonishingly agile. I think it may formerly have been, by profession, an acrobat, it runs so very swiftly. Its contortions are infinite. It avoids the pieces of furniture with extraordinary dexterity. Sometimes it leaps over them. The rapidity of its movements excites me. The pain--here at the base of my skull--always increases when I see it. I cannot restrain myself. I pursue it with frenzy. I hurl books, pictures, firewood, anything I can lay hands upon, at it--even my precious daggers and javelins from off the wall. But it sustains no injury. They--these objects which I throw--pass clean through it; yet they leave no aperture, no mark. My servant afterward finds them scattered upon the ground quite clean and free from moisture. And, as it runs, it screams to me, over its red shoulder, in a rasping voice like the cutting of stone with a saw, 'You are going mad, René Dax. You are going mad--mad.'"

Madame St. Leger raised both hands in mute horror, pity, protest. Her lips trembled. The tears ran down her cheeks. The young man watched her for some seconds, the strangest expression of triumph upon his solemn little face. Then, with a great sigh, he backed away and sat down on the divan once more.

"Ah! Ah!" he said, quite calmly and gently. "It is so adorable to see you weep! Better even than that you should step down off the easel, as you sometimes do at night, and, crossing the room, bend over me and give me sleep. Still the red man speaks truth, Madame, accurate, unassailable truth. It comes just to this. Very soon now the final act of this infernal comedy will be reached. I shall be mad--unless--"

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