Aliens. William McFee
they lack our habits of order and dignified reticence. Their colonies in American cities and country-side are not models for town-planners and municipal idealists. And Bill has, in addition, much of the average Englishwoman's suspicion of foreign domestic economy. The past glories of Greece and Spain and Rome are nothing to her if the cooking utensils of the present generation are greasy or their glassware unpolished. There is, when one gets well away from them, quite a Dutch primness and staid rectangularity about English ideals in the matter of front and back yards, hen-runs, flower-beds and the like. And although her own small tract of New Jersey woefully failed to come anywhere near those same ideals she had a weakness for the gentle disparagement of Latin untidiness and lack of finish.
But, firm believers as we were in the authentic picturesqueness of American life, if we only looked for it, we had been struck more than once by the fugitive glimpses of herself which our neighbour had so far vouchsafed to us. To tell the bald truth, we stood in awe of her. We discriminated between her and her environment. And we paid to her, in spite of our prejudices and limitations, a certain homage which beauty ever commands and receives, so potent is its inspiration to the hearts of men.
On revision, that word "beauty" scarcely stands its own in this connection, and for this reason. We three, deriving our entire sustenance from art in some guise or other, had widely divergent opinions upon the indispensable attributes of beauty per se. From my experience of artists, this condition of things is not unusual. We always agreed to differ, Bill rapturous among her flowers and revelling in their colour; Mac catching with a fine enthusiasm and assured technique the fugitive tints of a sunrise through a tracery of leaves and twigs; and I, quiescently receptive, pondering at intervals upon the sublime mystery of the human form, especially the grandiose renderings of it in the works of Michael Angelo. Thus it will be seen that I alone was unprejudiced in my predilections, and qualified, however inadequately, to do justice to Mrs. Carville. Mac was annoyed because she had cut down a tree. That it was her own tree made no difference. To cut down a living tree was, in Mac's view, a sacrilege. Bill had an additional grievance in the fact that Mrs. Carville not only grew no flowers herself, but permitted her chickens to wander deleteriously among ours.
A brief and passing glance from the street would have given a stranger no inkling of the state of affairs. Indeed, Mrs. Carville's domain and ours were un-American in the fact that there had at one time been a fence between us. Even now it is a good enough fence in front; but it gradually degenerated until, at the bottom of the yards, it was a mere fortuitous concourse of rotten and smashed palings through which multitudinous armies of fowls came at unseasonable hours and against which all Bill's ladylike indignation was vented in vain. As we watched behind the curtains a Dorking stepped through and began to prospect among the sumach and stramonium that Bill had encouraged along our frontiers, under an illusion that plants labelled "poisonous" in her American gardening book would decimate the fowls.
"I wish they wouldn't," said Bill sadly, and added, "It's rotten, you know. I shall speak to them about it one of these days."
For myself, though trained habit enabled me to make note of the Dorking, my whole conscious attention was riveted upon the little group round the scaldino on the back porch. Mrs. Carville was, as I have said, stooping over the brazier. Her movements were being watched not only by ourselves, but by her two children. Fortunately, they were beyond her, their legs planted far apart, their hands behind them, so that I could see without stint the magnificent pose of the woman's body. Her arms hovered over the vessel, the left resting at times upon it, the other selecting pieces of fuel from a box at her side. The line of her back from hip to shoulder seemed incredibly straight and long. The cold wind that was blowing gustily and which was the ostensible cause of her preparations, pressed her thin dress to her form and showed with sportive candour the fine modelling of bosom and limbs. Chiefly, however, I was attracted by the superb disdain in the poise of the head. It was a dark head, coiled heavily with black hair and set back in the hollow of the shoulders. Her face may be called dark too, the black eye-brows and olive skin being unrelieved by colour in the cheeks. Her whole expression was, you might say, forbidding, and I was not surprised when one of the boys received a push as he bent his head over the brazier. There was such an electric quickness in the gesture, such a dispassionate resumption of her former pose, that one involuntarily conceded to her a fierce and peremptory disposition. One felt that such a woman would listen with some impatience to complaints about predatory fowls, that she would stand no nonsense from her children either, that. …
The same thought flashed through our minds simultaneously, and in strict accordance with our differing temperaments Bill voiced it.
"I wonder if they don't get on," she said.
"I wonder," I assented.
The brazier full, Mrs. Carville rose, the handle in her hand. Pointing to the box, she spoke to her children, who hastily removed it to a shed at the bottom of the yard. She turned to enter the house, her large black eyes swept our windows in a swift comprehensive glance of suspicion and then she vanished.
I retired hastily to my desk, acutely conscious that we had been, well, that we had been impolite! Bill went away without speaking, and for a couple of hours I was absorbed in my work. Growing weary of the thing, I took up my pipe and went upstairs to the studio.
"Just in time for tea," said Bill. "Have a cookie?"
The studio was in some disorder, and the atmosphere was heavy with the odour of printer's ink. The etching press had been dragged out from the wall, trays of water, bottles of benzine, rags of muslin, rolls of paper, palettes of ink, copper plates and all the matériel of etching were lying in considerable confusion about the room, and Mac himself, draped in a blue cotton overall, stood in negligent attitude against an easel, drinking a cup of tea. I had caught the phrase, "They're a funny lot," and I divined that Bill's hasty offer of cookies was a mere ruse to put me off the track of a possibly interesting conversation.
"Finished?" asked Mac, passing me a cup of tea.
"Not yet," I replied. "Another thousand words will do it, though."
Mac, in accordance with a vow made in all sincerity, and approved by us, set apart one day a week for etching, just as I was supposed to consecrate some part of my time to literature. At first we were to work together, select themes, write them up and illustrate them conjointly. This, we argued, could not fail to condense into fame and even wealth. Our friend Hooker had done this, and he had climbed to a one-man show in Fifth Avenue. But by some fatality, whenever Mac took a day off for high art, on that day did I invariably feel sordidly industrious. I might idle for a week, smoking too much and getting in Bill's way as she busied herself with housework, but as soon as the etching-press scraped across the studio-floor, or Mac came down with camera and satchel and dressed for a tramp, I became the victim of a mania for work, and stuck childishly to my desk. Personally I did not believe in Hooker's story at all. Hooker's mythical librettist never materialized. I was always on the look-out for a secondhand book containing Hooker's letterpress. It suited the others to believe in him, but even a writer of advertising booklets and "appreciations" has a certain literary instinct that cannot be deceived. And so I felt, as I have said, sordidly industrious and inclined to look disparagingly upon a man who was frittering away his time with absurd scratchings upon copper and whose hands were just then in a most questionable condition.
"I thought you were going to help me," he sneered over his cup.
"The fit was on me," I explained, and my eye roved round the studio. I caught sight of a piece of paper on a chair. Mac made a movement to pick it up, but he was hampered by the cup and saucer, and I secured it.
"Ah—h!" I remarked, and they two regarded each other sheepishly. "Very good indeed, old man!"
And it was very good. With the slap-dash economy of effort which he had learned of Van Roon, when that ill-fated genius was in Chelsea, Mac had caught the salient curves and angles of Mrs. Carville as she stooped over her scaldino, had caught to a surprising degree the sombre expression of her face and the tigerish energy of her crouched body. I studied it with great pleasure for a moment, and then it recurred to me that he had not been with us at the window. I say recurred, though I had known it all along, and my ejaculation, for that matter,