Crucial Instances

They stopped in London to see the National Gallery.

It was thus that, in their inexperience, they had narrowly put it; but in reality every stone of the streets, every trick of the atmosphere, had its message of surprise for their virgin sensibilities.  The pictures were simply the summing up, the final interpretation, of the cumulative pressure of an unimagined world; and it seemed to Claudia that long before they reached the doors of the gallery she had some intuitive revelation of what awaited them within.

They moved about from room to room without exchanging a word.  The vast noiseless spaces seemed full of sound, like the roar of a distant multitude heard only by the inner ear.  Had their speech been articulate their language would have been incomprehensible; and even that far-off murmur of meaning pressed intolerably on Claudia’s nerves.  Keniston took the onset without outward sign of disturbance.  Now and then he paused before a canvas, or prolonged from one of the benches his silent communion with some miracle of line or color; but he neither looked at his wife nor spoke to her.  He seemed to have forgotten her presence.

Claudia was conscious of keeping a furtive watch on him; but the sum total of her impressions was negative.  She remembered thinking when she first met him that his face was rather expressionless; and he had the habit of self-engrossed silences.

All that evening, at the hotel, they talked about London, and he surprised her by an acuteness of observation that she had sometimes inwardly accused him of lacking.  He seemed to have seen everything, to have examined, felt, compared, with nerves as finely adjusted as her own; but he said nothing of the pictures.  The next day they returned to the National Gallery, and he began to study the paintings in detail, pointing out differences of technique, analyzing and criticising, but still without summing up his conclusions.  He seemed to have a sort of provincial dread of showing himself too much impressed.  Claudia’s own sensations were too complex, too overwhelming, to be readily classified.  Lacking the craftsman’s instinct to steady her, she felt herself carried off her feet by the rush of incoherent impressions.  One point she consciously avoided, and that was the comparison of her husband’s work with what they were daily seeing.  Art, she inwardly argued, was too various, too complex, dependent on too many inter-relations of feeling and environment, to allow of its being judged by any provisional standard.  Even the subtleties of technique must be modified by the artist’s changing purpose, as this in turn is acted on by influences of which he is himself unconscious.  How, then, was an unprepared imagination to distinguish between such varied reflections of the elusive vision?  She took refuge in a passionate exaggeration of her own ignorance and insufficiency.

After a week in London they went to Paris.  The exhibition of Keniston’s pictures had been opened a few days earlier; and as they drove through the streets on the way to the station an “impressionist” poster here and there invited them to the display of the American artist’s work.  Mrs. Davant, who had been in Paris for the opening, had already written rapturously of the impression produced, enclosing commendatory notices from one or two papers.  She reported that there had been a great crowd on the first day, and that the critics had been “immensely struck.”

The Kenistons arrived in the evening, and the next morning Claudia, as a matter of course, asked her husband at what time he meant to go and see the pictures.

He looked up absently from his guide-book.

“What pictures?”

“Why—­yours,” she said, surprised.

“Oh, they’ll keep,” he answered; adding with a slightly embarrassed laugh, “We’ll give the other chaps a show first.”  Presently he laid down his book and proposed that they should go to the Louvre.

They spent the morning there, lunched at a restaurant near by, and returned to the gallery in the afternoon.  Keniston had passed from inarticulateness to an eager volubility.  It was clear that he was beginning to co-ordinate his impressions, to find his way about in a corner of the great imaginative universe.  He seemed extraordinarily ready to impart his discoveries; and Claudia felt that her ignorance served him as a convenient buffer against the terrific impact of new sensations.

On the way home she asked when he meant to see Mrs. Davant.

His answer surprised her.  “Does she know we’re here?”

“Not unless you’ve sent her word,” said Claudia, with a touch of harmless irony.

“That’s all right, then,” he returned simply.  “I want to wait and look about a day or two longer.  She’d want us to go sight-seeing with her; and I’d rather get my impressions alone.”

The next two days were hampered by the necessity of eluding Mrs. Davant.  Claudia, under different circumstances, would have scrupled to share in this somewhat shabby conspiracy; but she found herself in a state of suspended judgment, wherein her husband’s treatment of Mrs. Davant became for the moment merely a clue to larger meanings.

They had been four days in Paris when Claudia, returning one afternoon from a parenthetical excursion to the Rue de la Paix, was confronted on her threshold by the reproachful figure of their benefactress.  It was not to her, however, that Mrs. Davant’s reproaches were addressed.  Keniston, it appeared, had borne the brunt of them; for he stood leaning against the mantelpiece of their modest salon in that attitude of convicted negligence when, if ever, a man is glad to take refuge behind his wife.

Claudia had however no immediate intention of affording him such shelter.  She wanted to observe and wait.

“He’s too impossible!” cried Mrs. Davant, sweeping her at once into the central current of her grievance.

Claudia looked from one to the other.

“For not going to see you?”

“For not going to see his pictures!” cried the other nobly.

Claudia colored and Keniston shifted his position uneasily.

“I can’t make her understand,” he said, turning to his wife.

“I don’t care about myself!” Mrs. Davant interjected.

“I do, then; it’s the only thing I do care about,” he hurriedly protested.  “I meant to go at once—­to write—­Claudia wanted to go, but I wouldn’t let her.”  He looked helplessly about the pleasant red-curtained room, which was rapidly burning itself into Claudia’s consciousness as a visible extension of Mrs. Davant’s claims.

“I can’t explain,” he broke off.

Mrs. Davant in turn addressed herself to Claudia.

“People think it’s so odd,” she complained.  “So many of the artists here are anxious to meet him; they’ve all been so charming about the pictures; and several of our American friends have come over from London expressly for the exhibition.  I told every one that he would be here for the opening—­there was a private view, you know—­and they were so disappointed—­they wanted to give him an ovation; and I didn’t know what to say.  What am I to say?” she abruptly ended.

“There’s nothing to say,” said Keniston slowly.

“But the exhibition closes the day after to-morrow.”

“Well, I sha’n’t close—­I shall be here,” he declared with an effort at playfulness.  “If they want to see me—­all these people you’re kind enough to mention—­won’t there be other chances?”

“But I wanted them to see you among your pictures—­to hear you talk about them, explain them in that wonderful way.  I wanted you to interpret each other, as Professor Wildmarsh says!”

“Oh, hang Professor Wildmarsh!” said Keniston, softening the commination with a smile.  “If my pictures are good for anything they oughtn’t to need explaining.”

Mrs. Davant stared.  “But I thought that was what made them so interesting!” she exclaimed.

Keniston looked down.  “Perhaps it was,” he murmured.

There was an awkward silence, which Claudia broke by saying, with a glance at her husband:  “But if the exhibition is to remain open to-morrow, could we not meet you there?  And perhaps you could send word to some of our friends.”

Mrs. Davant brightened like a child whose broken toy is glued together.  “Oh, do make him!” she implored.  “I’ll ask them to come in the afternoon—­we’ll make it into a little tea—­a five o’clock.  I’ll send word at once to everybody!” She gathered up her beruffled boa and sunshade, settling her plumage like a reassured bird.  “It will be too lovely!” she ended in a self-consoling murmur.

But in the doorway a new doubt assailed her.  “You won’t fail me?” she said, turning plaintively to Keniston.  “You’ll make him come, Mrs. Keniston?”

“I’ll bring him!” Claudia promised.