Under the Skylights | Page 9

you call it--a marquise," Abner observed on a certain occasion to one of the miniature painters. "This creature with a fluffy white wig and a low-necked dress is a marquise, is she? Do you like that sort of thing?"
"Why, yes,--rather," said the artist.
"Well,I don't," declared Abner, returning the trifle to the girl's hands.
"I'll paint my next sitter as a milkmaid--if she'll let me."
"As a milkmaid? No; paint the milkmaid herself. Deal with the verities. Like them before you paint them. Paint them because you like them."
"I don't know whether I should like milkmaids or not. I've never seen one."
"They don't exist," chimed in Adrian Bond, who was dawdling in the background. "The milkmaids are all men. And as for the dairy-farms themselves----!" He sank back among his cushions. "I visited one in the suburbs last month--the same time when I was going round among the markets. I have been of half a mind, lately," he said, more directly to Abner, "to do a large, serious thing based on local actualities; The City's Maw--something like that. My things so far, I know (none better) are slight, flimsy, exotic, factitious. The first-hand study of actuality, thought I----But no, no, no! It was a place fit only for a reporter in search of a--of a--I don't know what. I shall never drink coffee again; while as for milk punch----"
"And what is the artist," asked Abner, "but the reporter sublimated? Why must the artist go afield to dabble in far-fetched artificialities that have nothing to do with his own proper time and place? Our people go abroad for study, instead of staying at home and guarding their native quality. They return affected, lackadaisical, self-conscious--they bring the hothouse with them. Why, I have seen such a simple matter as the pouring of a cup of tea turned into----"
"You can't mean Medora Giles," said the miniaturist quickly, pausing amidst the laces of her bodice. "Don't make any mistake about Medora. When she goes in for all that sort of thing, she's merely 'creating atmosphere,' as we say,--she's simply after the 'envelopment,' in fact."
"She is just getting into tone," Bond re-enforced, "with the candle-shades and the peppermints."
"Medora," declared the painter, "is as sensible and capable a girl as I know. Why, the very dress she wore that afternoon----You noticed it?"
"I--I----" began Abner.
"No, you didn't--of course you didn't. Well, she made every stitch of it with her own hands."
"And those tea-cakes, that afternoon," supplemented Bond. "She made every stitch of them with her own hands. She told me so herself, when I stayed afterward, to help wash things up."
"I may have done her an injustice," Abner acknowledged. "Perhaps I might like to know her, after all."
"You might be proud to," said Bond.
"And the favour would be the other way round," declared the painter stoutly.
Abner passed over any such possibility as this. "How long was she abroad?" he asked Bond.
"Let's see. She studied music in Leipsic two years; she plays the violin like an angel--up to a certain point. Then she was in Paris for another year. She paints a little--not enough to hurt."
"Leipsic? Two years?" pondered Abner. It seemed more staid, less vicious, after all, than if the whole time had been spent in Paris. The violin; painting. Both required technique; each art demanded long, close application. "Well, I dare say she is excusable." But here, he thought, was just where the other arts were at a disadvantage compared with literature: you might stay at home wherever you were, if a writer, and get your own technique.
"And you have done it," said Bond. "I admire some of your things so much. Your instinct for realities, your sturdy central grasp--"
"What man has done, man may do," rejoined Abner. "Yet what is technique, after all? There remains, as ever, the problem, the great Social Problem, to be solved."
"You think so?" queried Bond.
"Think that there is a social problem?"
"Think that it can be solved. I have my own idea there. It is a secret. I am willing to tell it to one person, but not to more,--I couldn't answer for the consequences. If Miss Wilbur will just stop her ears----"
The miniaturist laughed and laid her palms against her cheeks.
"You are sure you can't hear?" asked Bond, with his eye on her spreading fingers. "Well, then"--to Abner--"there is the great Human Problem, but it is not to be solved, nor was it designed that it should be. The world is only a big coral for us to cut our teeth upon, a proving-ground, a hotbed from which we shall presently be transplanted according to our several deserts. No power can solve the puzzle save the power that cut it up into pieces to start with. Try as we may, the blanket will always be just a little too small for the bedstead.