第10章 An Artist's Freak.(2)

He asked himself,"Can it be that here is a character in which the elements of a true and good woman do not exist?Has she no heart,no mind,no conscience worthy of the name?At her age she cannot have lost these qualities.Have they never been awakened?Do they exist to that degree that they can be aroused into controlling activity?I suppose there can be pretty idiots.As people are born blind or scrofulous,so I suppose others can be born devoid of heart or conscience,inheriting from a degenerate ancestry sundry mean and vile propensities in their places.Human nature is a scale that runs both up and down,and it is astonishing how far the extremes can be apart.""How high is it possible for the same individual to rise in this scale?I imagine we are all prone to judge of people as if they were finished pictures,and to think that the defects our first scrutiny discovers will remain for all time.It is in real life much as in fiction.From first to last a villain is a villain,as if he had been created one.The heroine is a moss rose-bud by equal and unchanging necessity.Is this girl a fool,and will she remain one by any innate compulsion?By Jove!I would like to see her again in the searching light of day.I would like to follow her career sufficiently long,to discover whether nature has been guilty of the grotesque crime of associating inseparably with that fine form and those exquisite features,a hideous little mind that must go on intensifying its dwarfed deformity,until death snuffs it out.If this be true,the beautiful little monster that is bothering me so suggests a knotty problem to wiser heads than mine."Somewhat later his musings led him to indulge in a broad laugh.

"Possibly,"he said aloud,"she is a modern and fashionable Undine,and has never yet received a woman's soul.The good Lord deliver me from trying to awaken it,as did the knight of old in the story,by swelling the long list of her victims.I can scarcely imagine a more pitiable and abject creature than a man (once sane and sensible)in thraldom to such a tantalizing semblance of a woman.

She would no more appreciate his devotion than the jackdaw the pearl necklace it pecked at.

"I fear my Undine theory won't answer.Stanton says she has no heart,and her face and manner confirm his words.But now I think of it,the original Undine lived a long time ago--in the age of primeval simplicity,when even cool-blooded water nymphs had hearts.One is induced to think,in our age,that this organ will eventually disappear with the other characteristics of ancient and undeveloped man,and that the brain,or what stands for it,will become all in all.In the first instance the woman's soul came in through the heart;but I suppose that in the case of a modern Undine it could enter most readily through the head.I wonder if there is something like an unawakened mind,sleeping under that broad low brow that mocks one with its fair intellectual outline.I wonder if it would be possible to set her thinking,and so eventually render her capable of receiving a woman's soul.As it is now she seems to possess only certain disagreeable feminine propensities.One might engage in such an experiment as a philosopher rather than a lover;or,what is more to my purpose,as an artist.

"By Jove!I would half like to make the attempt;it would give zest to one's summer vacation.Well,what is to hinder?Now I think of it she remarked that she was to spend the season at the Lake House,not far from the Hudson,a place well suited to my purposes.

There are the wild highlands on one side,and a soft pastoral country on the other.I could there find abundant opportunity for varied studies in scenery,and at the same time beguile my idle hours at the hotel with this face of marvellous capabilities and possibilities.

The features already exist,and would be beautiful if the girl were dead,and they could be no longer distorted by the small vices of the spirit back of them.They might become transcendently beautiful,could she in very truth receive the soul of a true and thoughtful woman--a soul such as makes my mother beautiful in her plain old age.

"I'm inclined to follow this odd fancy.That girl is a 'rara avis'such as has never flown across my path before.I shall have a quarrel with nature all my life if I must believe she can fashion a face capable of meaning so much and yet actually meaning so little,and that little disgusting."After a few moments of deep thought,he again started to his feet and commenced pacing his studio.

"Suppose,"he soliloquized,"I attempt a novel bit of artistic work as my summer recreation.Suppose I take the face of this stranger instead of a piece of canvas and try to illumine it with thought,with womanly character and intelligence.If I fail,as I probably shall,no harm will be done.If her silliness and vanity are ingrained and essential parts of her nature,she shall learn that there is at least one man who can see her as she is,and whose heart is not wax on which to stamp her pretty and senseless image.

If I only partially succeed,if I discern she has a mind,but so feeble that it can only half reclaim her from her weakness and folly,still something will be accomplished.Her features are so beautiful,that should they come to express even the glimmerings of that which is admirable,the face will be in part redeemed.

But if by some happy miracle,as in the instance of the original Undine,a mind can be awakened that will gradually prepare a place for the soul of a true woman,I shall accomplish the best work of my life,even estimated from an artistic point of view.Possibly,for my reward,she will permit me to paint her portrait as a souvenir of our summer's acquaintance."It did not take Van Berg long to complete his arrangements for leaving town.He wrote a line to his friend Stanton,saying that he proposed spending a few weeks in the vicinity of the Highlands on the Hudson,and that he could not say when he would be at his rooms or at home again.The afternoon of the following day found him a passenger on a fleet steamboat,and fully bent upon carrying out his odd artistic freak.