# Peter Whiffle/Chapter 2

It must have been nearly noon when I awakened and drew back the heavy curtains to let the sunlight into my room, as I have since seen so many French actresses do on the stage. I rang the bell, and when Joseph appeared, I asked for hot water, chocolate and rolls. Presently, he returned with a little can of tepid water and my breakfast on a tray. While I sponged myself, I listened to the cacophony of the street, the boys calling vegetables, the heavy rumbling of the buses on the rough pavement, the shrieking and tooting of the automobile sirens. Then I sipped my chocolate and munched my croissant, feeling very happy. My past had dropped from me like a crustacean's discarded shell. I was in Paris and it still seemed possible to live in Paris as I had been told that one lived there. It was exactly like the books.
After my breakfast, I dressed slowly, and wandered out, past the peristyle of the Odéon, where I afterwards spent so many contented hours searching for old plays, on through the now open gate of the Luxembourg Gardens, gaily sprinkled with children and their nounous, students and sweet girls, charming old ladies with lace caps on their heads and lace scarfs round their shoulders, and painters, ​working away at their canvases on easels. In the pool in front of the Senate, boys were launching their toy sloops and schooners and, a little further away on the gravel walk, other boys were engaged in the more active sport of diabolo. The gardens were ablaze with flowers but a classic order was maintained for which the stately rows of clipped limes furnished the leading note. The place seemed to have been created for pleasure. Even the dingy statues of the queens smiled at me. I sat on a bench, dreaming, until an old crone approached and asked me for a sou. I thought her a beggar until she returned the change from a fifty centimes piece which I had given her, explaining that one sou was the price of my seat. There were free seats too, I discovered after I had paid.
The Luxembourg Gardens have always retained their hold over my imagination. I never visit Paris without spending several hours there, sometimes in the bright morning light, sometimes in the late afternoon, when the military band plays dolent tunes, usually by Massenet, sometimes a spectator at one of the guignols and, very often in the autumn, when the leaves are falling, I sit silently on a bench before the Medici fountain, entirely unconscious of the passing of time. The Luxembourg Gardens always envelop me in a sentimental mood. Their atmosphere is softly poetic, old-fashioned, melancholy. I am near to tears now, merely thinking of them, and I am sure the tears came to ​my eyes even on that bright May morning fourteen years ago.
Did I, attracted by the strange name, lunch at the Deux-Magots? It is possible. I know that later I strolled down the Rue de Seine and along the quais, examining eighteenth century books, buying old numbers of l'Assiette au Beurre, and talking with the quaint vendors, most of them old men. Then I wandered up the Rue de Richelieu, studying the examples of fine bindings in the windows of the shops on either hand. About three o'clock, I mounted the impériale of a bus, not even asking where it was going. I didn't care. I descended before the gate of the Parc Monceau and passed a few happy moments in the presence of the marble lady in a dress of the nineties, who reads Guy de Maupassant in the shadow of his bust, and a few more by the Naumachie, the oval pool, flanked by a semi-circular Corinthian colonnade in a state of picturesque ruin.
At a quarter before four, I left the parc and, hailing a fiacre, bade the driver take me to Martha Baker's studio in the Avenue Victor Hugo, where I had an appointment. Martha was painting my portrait. She had begun work on the picture in Chicago the year before but when I went to New York, she went to Paris. So it was still unfinished and I had promised to come to her for more sittings. Now, in Chicago, Martha noted that I grew restless on the model-stand and she had found ​it expedient to ask people in to talk to me, so that my face would not become dead and sullen. There, I usually knew the people she would ask, but it occurred to me, as I was driving to her door, that in Paris I knew no one, so that, if she followed her habit, I would see new faces.
The cocher stopped his horse before an old stone house and I entered. Challenged by the concierge, I asked for Mademoiselle Bahker, and was directed to go through the courtyard into a back passageway, up the stairs, where I would find Mademoiselle Bahker, troisième à gauche. I followed these instructions and knocked at the door. Martha, herself, opened it.
Oh, Carl, it's you! I'm so glad to see you!
Martha had not changed. She and even her studio were much as they had been in Chicago. She is dead now, dead possibly of a broken heart; certainly she was never happy. Her Insouciance, the portrait of Elizabeth Buehrmann, in a green cloth dress trimmed with fur, and a miniature or two hang in the Art Institute in Chicago, but during her lifetime she never received the kind of appreciation she really craved. She had an uncanny talent for portraiture, a talent which in some respects I have never seen equalled by any of her coevals. Artists, as a matter of fact, generally either envied or admired her. Her peculiar form of genius lay in the facility with which she caught her sitters' weaknesses. Possibly this is the reason she did not sell more ​pictures, for her models were frequently dissatisfied. It was exasperating, doubtless, to find oneself caught in paint on canvas against an unenviable immortality. Her sitters were exposed, so to speak; petty vices shone forth; Martha almost idealized the faults of her subjects. It would be impossible for the model to strut or pose before one of her pictures. It told the truth. Sargent caught the trick once. I have been informed that a physician diagnosed the malady of an American lady, his patient, after studying Sargent's portrait of her.
Martha should have painted our presidents, our mayors, our politicians, our authors, our college presidents, and our critics. Posterity might have learned more from such portraits than from volumes of psychoanalytic biography. But most of her sitters were silly Chicago ladies, not particularly weak because they were not particularly strong. On the few occasions on which in her capacity as an artist she had faced character, her brushes unerringly depicted something beneath the surface. She tore away men's masks and, with a kind of mystic understanding, painted their insides. How it was done, I don't know. Probably she herself didn't know. Many an artist is ignorant of the secret of his own method. If I had ascribed this quality to Martha during her lifetime, which I never did, she might not have taken it as praise. It may not, indeed, have been her ambition, al​though truth was undoubtedly her ambition. Speculation aside, this was no art for Chicago. I doubt, indeed, if it would have been popular anywhere, for men the world over are alike in this, that they not only prefer to be painted in masks, they even want the artist to flatter the mask a bit.
The studio, I observed at once, was a little arty, a little more arty than a painter's studio usually is. It was arranged, of that there could be no doubt. There were, to be sure, canvases stacked against the wall in addition to those which were hanging, but they had been stacked with a crafty hand, one indubious of its effect. For the rest, the tables and couches were strewn with brocades and laces, and lilacs and mimosa bloomed in brown and blue and green earthenware bowls on the tables. Later, I knew that marigolds and zinnias would replace these and, later still, violets and gardenias. On an easel stood my unfinished portrait and a palette and a box of paints lay on a stool nearby.
Martha herself wore a soft, clinging, dark-green woolen dress, almost completely covered by a brown denim painter's blouse. Her hair was her great glory, long, reddish gold Mélisande hair which, when uncoiled, hung far below her knees, but today it was knotted loosely on top of her head. Her face, keen and searching, wore an expression that might be described as wistful; discontent lurked somewhere between her eyes and her mouth. Her complexion was sallow and she wore eye-glasses.
​There was some one else present, a girl, sitting in a shadowy corner, who rose as I entered. A strong odour of Cœur de Jeannette hovered about her. She was an American. She was immediately introduced as Miss Clara Barnes of Chicago, but I would have known she was an American had she not been so introduced. She wore a shirt-waist and skirt. She had very black hair, parted in the middle, a face that it would have been impossible to remember ten minutes and which now, although I have seen her many times since, I have completely forgotten, and very thick ankles. I gathered presently that she was in Paris to study singing as were so many girls like her. Very soon, I sized her up as the kind of girl who thinks that antimacassars are ottomans, that tripe is a variety of fish, that Così Fan Tutte is an Italian ice cream, that the pope's nose is a nasal appendage which has been blessed by the head of the established church, that The Beast in the Jungle is an animal story, and that when one says Arthur Machen one means Harry Mencken.
Well, we'd best begin, said Martha. It's late.
Isn't it too late? I was rather surprised when you asked me to come in the afternoon.
Martha smiled but there was a touch of petulance in her reply: I knew you wouldn't get up very early the morning after your first night in Paris, and I knew if I didn't get you here today there would be small chance of getting you here at all. If you come again, of course it will be in the morning.
​I climbed to the model-chair, seated myself, grasped the green book that was part of the composition, and automatically assumed that woebegone expression that is worn by all amateurs who pose for their portraits.
That won't do at all, said Martha. I asked Clara to come here to amuse you.
Clara tried. She told me that she was studying Manon and that she had been to the Opéra-Comique fifteen times to hear the opera.
Garden is all wrong in it, all wrong, she continued. In the first place she can't sing. Of course she's pretty, but she's not my idea of Manon at all. I will really sing the part and act it too.
A month or two later, while we munched sandwiches and drank beer between the acts of Tristan und Isolde in the foyer of the Prinzregenten Theater in Munich, Olive Fremstad introduced me to an American girl, who informed me that a new Isolde had been born that day.
I shall be the great Isolde, she remarked casually, and her name, I gathered, when I asked Madame Fremstad to repeat it, was Minnie Saltzmann-Stevens.
But on the day that Clara spoke of her future triumphs in Manon, I had yet to become accustomed to this confidence with which beginners in the vocal art seem so richly endowed, a confidence which is frequently disturbed by circumstances for, as George Moore has somewhere said, our dreams and our ​circumstances are often in conflict. Later, I discovered that every unsuccessful singer believes, and asserts, that Geraldine Farrar is instrumental in preventing her from singing at the Metropolitan Opéra House. On this day, I say, I was unaware of this peculiarity in vocalists but I was interested in the name she had let slip, a name I had never before heard.
Who is Garden? I asked.
You don't know Mary Garden! exclaimed Martha.
There! shrieked Clara. There! I told you so. No one outside of Paris has ever even heard of the woman.
Well, they've heard of her here, said Martha, quietly, pinching a little worm of cobalt blue from a tube. She's the favourite singer of the Opéra-Comique. She is an American and she sings Louise and Manon and Traviata and Mélisande and Aphrodite, especially Aphrodite.
She's singing Aphrodite tonight, said Miss Barnes.
And what is she like? I queried.
Well, Clara began dubiously, she is said to be like Sybil Sanderson but, of course, Sanderson had a voice and, she hurried on, you know even Sanderson never had any success in New York.
I recalled, only too readily, how Manon with Jean de Reszke, Pol Plançon, and Sybil Sanderson in the cast had failed in the nineties at the Metro​politan Opéra House, and I admitted as much to Clara.
But would this be true today? I pondered.
Certainly, advanced Clara. America doesn't want French singers. They never know how to sing.
But you are studying in Paris.
The girl began to look discomfited.
With an Italian teacher, she asseverated.
It delighted me to be able to add, I think Sanderson studied with Sbriglia and Madame Marchesi.
Your face is getting very hard, cried Martha in despair.
I think he is very rude, exclaimed the outraged and contumacious Miss Barnes, with a kind of leering acidity. He doesn't seem to know the difference between tradition and impertinent improvisation. He doesn't see that singing at the Opéra or the Opéra-Comique with a lot of rotten French singers would ruin anybody who didn't have training enough to stand out against this influence, singing utterly unmusical parts like Mélisande, too, parlando reles calculated to ruin any voice. Maeterlinck won't even go to hear the opera, it's so rotten. I wonder how much Mr. Van Vechten knows about music anyway?
Very little, I remarked mildly.
O! wailed Martha, you're not entertaining Carl at all and I can't paint when you squabble. Carl's very nice. Why can't you be agreeable, Clara? What is the matter?
Miss Barnes disdained to reply. She drew her​self into a sort of sulk, crossing her thick ankles massively. The scent of Cœur de Jeannette seemed to grow heavier. Within bounds, I was amused by her display of emotion but I was also bored. My face must have showed it. Martha worked on for a moment or two and then flung down her brushes.
It's no good, no good at all, she announced. You have no expression today. I can't get behind your mask. Your face is completely empty.
And, I may add, as this was the last day that Martha ever painted on this portrait, she never did get behind the mask. To that extent I triumphed, and the picture still exists to confuse people as to my real personality. It is as empty as if it had been painted by Boldini or McEvoy. Fortunately for her future reputation in this regard, Martha had already painted a portrait of me which is sufficiently revealing.
I must have stretched and yawned at this point, for Martha looked cross, when a welcome interruption occurred in the form of a knock at the door. Martha walked across the room. As she opened the door, directly opposite where I was sitting, I saw the slender figure of a young man, perhaps twenty-one years old. He was carefully dressed in a light grey suit with a herring-bone pattern, and wore a neck-scarf of deep blue. He carried a stick and buckskin gloves in one hand and a straw hat in the other.
​Why, it's Peter! cried Martha. I wish you had come sooner.
This is Peter Whiffle, she said, leading him into the room and then, as he extended his hand to me, You know Clara Barnes.
He turned away, to bow but I had already caught his interesting face, his deep blue eyes that shifted rather uneasily but at the same time remained honest and frank, his clear, simple expression, his high brow, his curly, blue-black hair, carefully parted down the centre of his head. He spoke to me at once.
Martha has said a good deal, perhaps too much about you. Still, I have wanted to meet you.
You must tell me who you are, I replied.
I should have told you, only you just arrived, Martha put in. I had no idea that Peter would come in today. He is the American Flaubert or Anatole France or something. He is writing a book. What is your book about, Peter?
Whiffle smiled, drew out a cigarette-case of Toledo work, extracted a cigarette from it, and said, I haven't the slightest idea. Then, as if he thought this might be construed as rudeness, or false modesty, or a rather viscous attempt at secrecy, he added, I really haven't, not the remotest. I want to talk to you about it. . . . That's why I wanted to meet you. Martha says that you know . . . well, that you know.
​You really should be painting Mr. Van Vechten now, said Clara Barnes, with a trace of malice. He has the right expression.
I hope I haven't interrupted your work, said Peter.
No, I'm through today, Martha rejoined. We're neither of us in the mood. Besides it's absurd to try to paint in this light.
Painting, Peter went on, is not any easier than writing. Always the search for—for what? he asked suddenly, turning to me.
For truth, I suppose, I replied.
I thought you would say that but that's not what I meant, that's not at all what I meant.
This logogriph rather concluded that subject, for Peter did not explain what it was that he did mean. Neither did he wear a conscious air of obfuscation. He rambled on about many things, spoke of new people, new books, new music, and he also mentioned Mary Garden.
I have heard of Mary Garden for the first time today, I said, and I am beginning to be interested.
You haven't seen her? demanded Peter. But she is stupendous, soul, body, imagination, intellect, everything! How few there are. A lyric Mélisande, a caressing Manon, a throbbingly wicked Chrysis. She is the cult in Paris and the Opéra-Comique is the Temple where she is worshipped. I think some day this new religion will be carried to ​America. He stopped. Let me see, what am I doing tonight? O! yes, I know. I won't do that. Will you go with me to hear Aphrodite?
Of course, I will. I have just come to Paris and I want to do and hear and see everything.
Well, we'll go, he announced, but I noted that his tone was curiously indecisive. We'll go to dinner first.
You're not going to dinner yet? Martha demanded rather querulously.
Not quite yet. Then, turning to Clara, How's the Voice?
It was my first intimation that Clara had thus symbolized her talent in the third person. People were not expected to refer to her as Clara or Miss Barnes; she was the Voice.
The Voice is doing very well indeed, Clara, now quite mollified, rejoined. I'm studying Manon, and if you like Mary Garden, wait until you hear me!
Peter continued to manipulate Clara with the proper address. The conversation bubbled or languished, I forget, which; at any rate, a half hour or so later, Peter and I were seated in a taxi-cab, bound for Foyot's where he had decided we would dine; at least I thought he had decided, but soon he seemed doubtful.
Foyot's, Foyot's, he rolled the name meditatively over on his tongue. I don't know. . . .
We leaned back against the seat and drank in the soft air. I don't think that we talked very much. ​The cocher was driving over the bridge of Alexandre III with its golden horses gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight when Peter bent forward and addressed him.
Allez au Café Anglais.
Where meant nothing to me, but I was a little surprised at his hesitation. The cocher changed his route, grumbling a bit, for he was out of his course.
I don't know why I ever suggested Foyot, said Peter, or the Café Anglais either. We'll go to the Petit Riche.