Youth and the Bright Medusa | Page 7

away for the whole afternoon, but at about
five o'clock he was sure to find himself among his old shoes in the dark.
The pull of that aperture was stronger than his will,--and he had always
considered his will the strongest thing about him. When she threw
herself upon the divan and lay resting, he still stared, holding his breath.
His nerves were so on edge that a sudden noise made him start and
brought out the sweat on his forehead. The dog would come and tug at
his sleeve, knowing that something was wrong with his master. If he
attempted a mournful whine, those strong hands closed about his throat.
When Hedger came slinking out of his closet, he sat down on the edge
of the couch, sat for hours without moving. He was not painting at all
now. This thing, whatever it was, drank him up as ideas had sometimes

done, and he sank into a stupor of idleness as deep and dark as the
stupor of work. He could not understand it; he was no boy, he had
worked from models for years, and a woman's body was no mystery to
him. Yet now he did nothing but sit and think about one. He slept very
little, and with the first light of morning he awoke as completely
possessed by this woman as if he had been with her all the night before.
The unconscious operations of life went on in him only to perpetuate
this excitement. His brain held but one image now--vibrated, burned
with it. It was a heathenish feeling; without friendliness, almost without
tenderness.
Women had come and gone in Hedger's life. Not having had a mother
to begin with, his relations with them, whether amorous or friendly, had
been casual. He got on well with janitresses and wash-women, with
Indians and with the peasant women of foreign countries. He had
friends among the silk-skirt factory girls who came to eat their lunch in
Washington Square, and he sometimes took a model for a day in the
country. He felt an unreasoning antipathy toward the well-dressed
women he saw coming out of big shops, or driving in the Park. If, on
his way to the Art Museum, he noticed a pretty girl standing on the
steps of one of the houses on upper Fifth Avenue, he frowned at her
and went by with his shoulders hunched up as if he were cold. He had
never known such girls, or heard them talk, or seen the inside of the
houses in which they lived; but he believed them all to be artificial and,
in an aesthetic sense, perverted. He saw them enslaved by desire of
merchandise and manufactured articles, effective only in making life
complicated and insincere and in embroidering it with ugly and
meaningless trivialities. They were enough, he thought, to make one
almost forget woman as she existed in art, in thought, and in the
universe.
He had no desire to know the woman who had, for the time at least, so
broken up his life,--no curiosity about her every-day personality. He
shunned any revelation of it, and he listened for Miss Bower's coming
and going, not to encounter, but to avoid her. He wished that the girl
who wore shirt-waists and got letters from Chicago would keep out of
his way, that she did not exist. With her he had naught to make. But in

a room full of sun, before an old mirror, on a little enchanted rug of
sleeping colours, he had seen a woman who emerged naked through a
door, and disappeared naked. He thought of that body as never having
been clad, or as having worn the stuffs and dyes of all the centuries but
his own. And for him she had no geographical associations; unless with
Crete, or Alexandria, or Veronese's Venice. She was the immortal
conception, the perennial theme.
The first break in Hedger's lethargy occurred one afternoon when two
young men came to take Eden Bower out to dine. They went into her
music room, laughed and talked for a few minutes, and then took her
away with them. They were gone a long while, but he did not go out for
food himself; he waited for them to come back. At last he heard them
coming down the hall, gayer and more talkative than when they left.
One of them sat down at the piano, and they all began to sing. This
Hedger found absolutely unendurable. He snatched up his hat and went
running down the stairs. Caesar leaped beside him, hoping that old
times were coming back. They had supper in the oysterman's basement
and then sat down in front of their own doorway. The moon stood full
over the Square, a thing of regal