Yonder, in a pool of sunlight, stood his new neighbour, wholly unclad, doing exercises of some sort before a long gilt7 mirror. Hedger did not happen to think how unpardonable it was of him to watch her. Nudity was not improper8 to any one who had worked so much from the figure, and he continued to look, simply because he had never seen a woman’s body so beautiful as this one, — positively9 glorious in action. As she swung her arms and changed from one pivot10 of motion to another, muscular energy seemed to flow through her from her toes to her finger-tips. The soft flush of exercise and the gold of afternoon sun played over her flesh together, enveloped11 her in a luminous12 mist which, as she turned and twisted, made now an arm, now a shoulder, now a thigh13, dissolve in pure light and instantly recover its outline with the next gesture. Hedger’s fingers curved as if he were holding a crayon; mentally he was doing the whole figure in a single running line, and the charcoal14 seemed to explode in his hand at the point where the energy of each gesture was discharged into the whirling disc of light, from a foot or shoulder, from the up-thrust chin or the lifted breasts.
He could not have told whether he watched her for six minutes or sixteen. When her gymnastics were over, she paused to catch up a lock of hair that had come down, and examined with solicitude15 a little reddish mole16 that grew under her left arm-pit. Then, with her hand on her hip17, she walked unconcernedly across the room and disappeared through the door into her bedchamber.
Disappeared — Don Hedger was crouching18 on his knees, staring at the golden shower which poured in through the west windows, at the lake of gold sleeping on the faded Turkish carpet. The spot was enchanted19; a vision out of Alexandria, out of the remote pagan past, had bathed itself there in Helianthine fire.
When he crawled out of his closet, he stood blinking at the grey sheet stuffed with laundry, not knowing what had happened to him. He felt a little sick as he contemplated20 the bundle. Everything here was different; he hated the disorder of the place, the grey prison light, his old shoes and himself and all his slovenly21 habits. The black calico curtains that ran on wires over his big window were white with dust. There were three greasy22 frying pans in the sink, and the sink itself — He felt desperate. He couldn’t stand this another minute. He took up an armful of winter clothes and ran down four flights into the basement.
“Mrs. Foley,” he began, “I want my room cleaned this afternoon, thoroughly23 cleaned. Can you get a woman for me right away?”
“Is it company you’re having?” the fat, dirty janitress enquired24. Mrs. Foley was the widow of a useful Tammany man, and she owned real estate in Flatbush. She was huge and soft as a feather bed. Her face and arms were permanently25 coated with dust, grained like wood where the sweat had trickled26.
“Yes, company. That’s it.”
“Well, this is a queer time of the day to be asking for a cleaning woman. It’s likely I can get you old Lizzie, if she’s not drunk. I’ll send Willy round to see.”
Willy, the son of fourteen, roused from the stupor27 and stain of his fifth box of cigarettes by the gleam of a quarter, went out. In five minutes he returned with old Lizzie, — she smelling strong of spirits and wearing several jackets which she had put on one over the other, and a number of skirts, long and short, which made her resemble an animated28 dish-clout. She had, of course, to borrow her equipment from Mrs. Foley, and toiled29 up the long flights, dragging mop and pail and broom. She told Hedger to be of good cheer, for he had got the right woman for the job, and showed him a great leather strap30 she wore about her wrist to prevent dislocation of tendons. She swished about the place, scattering31 dust and splashing soapsuds, while he watched her in nervous despair. He stood over Lizzie and made her scour32 the sink, directing her roughly, then paid her and got rid of her. Shutting the door on his failure, he hurried off with his dog to lose himself among the stevedores33 and dock labourers on West Street.
A strange chapter began for Don Hedger. Day after day, at that hour in the afternoon, the hour before his neighbour dressed for dinner, he crouched34 down in his closet to watch her go through her mysterious exercises. It did not occur to him that his conduct was detestable; there was nothing shy or retreating about this unclad girl, — a bold body, studying itself quite coolly and evidently well pleased with itself, doing all this for a purpose. Hedger scarcely regarded his action as conduct at all; it was something that had happened to him. More than once he went out and tried to stay 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 aperture35 was stronger than his will, — and he had always considered his will the strongest thing about him. When she threw herself upon the divan36 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 tug37 at his sleeve, knowing that something was wrong with his master. If he attempted a mournful whine38, 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 possessed39 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 perpetuate40 this excitement. His brain held but one image now — vibrated, burned with it. It was a heathenish feeling; without friendliness41, 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 amorous42 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 antipathy43 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 standing44 on the steps of one of the houses on upper Fifth Avenue, he frowned at her and went by with his shoulders hunched45 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 aesthetic46 sense, perverted47. He saw them enslaved by desire of merchandise and manufactured articles, effective only in making life complicated and insincere and in embroidering48 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 naught49 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 geographical50 associations; unless with Crete, or Alexandria, or Veronese’s Venice. She was the immortal51 conception, the perennial52 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 doorway53. The moon stood full over the Square, a thing of regal glory; but Hedger did not see the moon; he was looking, murderously, for men. Presently two, wearing straw hats and white trousers and carrying canes54, came down the steps from his house. He rose and dogged them across the Square. They were laughing and seemed very much elated about something. As one stopped to light a cigarette, Hedger caught from the other:
“Don’t you think she has a beautiful talent?”
His companion threw away his match. “She has a beautiful figure.” They both ran to catch the stage.
Hedger went back to his studio. The light was shining from her transom. For the first time he violated her privacy at night, and peered through that fatal aperture. She was sitting, fully55 dressed, in the window, smoking a cigarette and looking out over the housetops. He watched her until she rose, looked about her with a disdainful, crafty56 smile, and turned out the light.
The next morning, when Miss Bower went out, Hedger followed her. Her white skirt gleamed ahead of him as she sauntered about the Square. She sat down behind the Garibaldi statue and opened a music book she carried. She turned the leaves carelessly, and several times glanced in his direction. He was on the point of going over to her, when she rose quickly and looked up at the sky. A flock of pigeons had risen from somewhere in the crowded Italian quarter to the south, and were wheeling rapidly up through the morning air, soaring and dropping, scattering and coming together, now grey, now white as silver, as they caught or intercepted57 the sunlight. She put up her hand to shade her eyes and followed them with a kind of defiant58 delight in her face.
Hedger came and stood beside her. “You’ve surely seen them before?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied, still looking up. “I see them every day from my windows. They always come home about five o’clock. Where do they live?”
“I don’t know. Probably some Italian raises them for the market. They were here long before I came, and I’ve been here four years.”
“In that same gloomy room? Why didn’t you take mine when it was vacant?”
“It isn’t gloomy. That’s the best light for painting.”
“Oh, is it? I don’t know anything about painting. I’d like to see your pictures sometime. You have such a lot in there. Don’t they get dusty, piled up against the wall like that?”
“Not very. I’d be glad to show them to you. Is your name really Eden Bower? I’ve seen your letters on the table.”
“Well, it’s the name I’m going to sing under. My father’s name is Bowers59, but my friend Mr. Jones, a Chicago newspaper man who writes about music, told me to drop the ‘s.’ He’s crazy about my voice.”
Miss Bower didn’t usually tell the whole story, — about anything. Her first name, when she lived in Huntington, Illinois, was Edna, but Mr. Jones had persuaded her to change it to one which he felt would be worthy60 of her future. She was quick to take suggestions, though she told him she “didn’t see what was the matter with ‘Edna.’”
She explained to Hedger that she was going to Paris to study. She was waiting in New York for Chicago friends who were to take her over, but who had been detained. “Did you study in Paris?” she asked.
“No, I’ve never been in Paris. But I was in the south of France all last summer, studying with C—— . He’s the biggest man among the moderns, — at least I think so.”
Miss Bower sat down and made room for him on the bench. “Do tell me about it. I expected to be there by this time, and I can’t wait to find out what it’s like.”
Hedger began to relate how he had seen some of this Frenchman’s work in an exhibition, and deciding at once that this was the man for him, he had taken a boat for Marseilles the next week, going over steerage. He proceeded at once to the little town on the coast where his painter lived, and presented himself. The man never took pupils, but because Hedger had come so far, he let him stay. Hedger lived at the master’s house and every day they went out together to paint, sometimes on the blazing rocks down by the sea. They wrapped themselves in light woollen blankets and didn’t feel the heat. Being there and working with C—— was being in Paradise, Hedger concluded; he learned more in three months than in all his life before.
Eden Bower laughed. “You’re a funny fellow. Didn’t you do anything but work? Are the women very beautiful? Did you have awfully61 good things to eat and drink?”
Hedger said some of the women were fine looking, especially one girl who went about selling fish and lobsters62. About the food there was nothing remarkable63, — except the ripe figs64, he liked those. They drank sour wine, and used goat-butter, which was strong and full of hair, as it was churned in a goat skin.
“But don’t they have parties or banquets? Aren’t there any fine hotels down there?”
“Yes, but they are all closed in summer, and the country people are poor. It’s a beautiful country, though.”
“How, beautiful?” she persisted.
“If you want to go in, I’ll show you some sketches65, and you’ll see.”
Miss Bower rose. “All right. I won’t go to my fencing lesson this morning. Do you fence? Here comes your dog. You can’t move but he’s after you. He always makes a face at me when I meet him in the hall, and shows his nasty little teeth as if he wanted to bite me.”
In the studio Hedger got out his sketches, but to Miss Bower, whose favourite pictures were Christ Before Pilate and a redhaired Magdalen of Henner, these landscapes were not at all beautiful, and they gave her no idea of any country whatsoever66. She was careful not to commit herself, however. Her vocal67 teacher had already convinced her that she had a great deal to learn about many things.
“Why don’t we go out to lunch somewhere?” Hedger asked, and began to dust his fingers with a handkerchief — which he got out of sight as swiftly as possible.
“All right, the Brevoort,” she said carelessly. “I think that’s a good place, and they have good wine. I don’t care for cocktails68.”
Hedger felt his chin uneasily. “I’m afraid I haven’t shaved this morning. If you could wait for me in the Square? It won’t take me ten minutes.”
Left alone, he found a clean collar and handkerchief, brushed his coat and blacked his shoes, and last of all dug up ten dollars from the bottom of an old copper69 kettle he had brought from Spain. His winter hat was of such a complexion70 that the Brevoort hall boy winked71 at the porter as he took it and placed it on the rack in a row of fresh straw ones.
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1
bower
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| n.凉亭，树荫下凉快之处；闺房；v.荫蔽 | |
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hangers
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| n.衣架( hanger的名词复数 )；挂耳 | |
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moths
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| n.蛾( moth的名词复数 ) | |
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disorder
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| n.紊乱，混乱；骚动，骚乱；疾病，失调 | |
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shunned
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| v.避开，回避，避免( shun的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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squinted
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| 斜视( squint的过去式和过去分词 )； 眯着眼睛； 瞟； 从小孔或缝隙里看 | |
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gilt
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| adj.镀金的；n.金边证券 | |
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improper
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| adj.不适当的，不合适的，不正确的，不合礼仪的 | |
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positively
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| adv.明确地，断然，坚决地；实在，确实 | |
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pivot
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| v.在枢轴上转动；装枢轴，枢轴；adj.枢轴的 | |
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enveloped
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| v.包围，笼罩，包住( envelop的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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luminous
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| adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的 | |
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thigh
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| n.大腿；股骨 | |
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charcoal
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| n.炭，木炭，生物炭 | |
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solicitude
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| n.焦虑 | |
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mole
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| n.胎块；痣；克分子 | |
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hip
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| n.臀部，髋；屋脊 | |
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crouching
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的现在分词 ) | |
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enchanted
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| adj. 被施魔法的，陶醉的，入迷的 动词enchant的过去式和过去分词 | |
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20
contemplated
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| adj. 预期的 动词contemplate的过去分词形式 | |
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slovenly
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| adj.懒散的，不整齐的，邋遢的 | |
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greasy
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| adj. 多脂的，油脂的 | |
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thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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enquired
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| 打听( enquire的过去式和过去分词 )； 询问； 问问题； 查问 | |
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permanently
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| adv.永恒地，永久地，固定不变地 | |
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trickled
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| v.滴( trickle的过去式和过去分词 )；淌；使)慢慢走；缓慢移动 | |
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stupor
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| v.昏迷；不省人事 | |
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animated
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| adj.生气勃勃的，活跃的，愉快的 | |
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toiled
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| 长时间或辛苦地工作( toil的过去式和过去分词 )； 艰难缓慢地移动，跋涉 | |
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strap
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| n.皮带，带子；v.用带扣住，束牢；用绷带包扎 | |
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31
scattering
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| n.[物]散射；散乱，分散；在媒介质中的散播adj.散乱的；分散在不同范围的；广泛扩散的；（选票）数量分散的v.散射(scatter的ing形式)；散布；驱散 | |
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scour
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| v.搜索；擦，洗，腹泻，冲刷 | |
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stevedores
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| n.码头装卸工人，搬运工( stevedore的名词复数 ) | |
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crouched
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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aperture
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| n.孔，隙，窄的缺口 | |
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divan
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| n.长沙发；（波斯或其他东方诗人的）诗集 | |
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tug
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| v.用力拖(或拉)；苦干；n.拖；苦干；拖船 | |
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38
whine
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| v.哀号，号哭；n.哀鸣 | |
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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perpetuate
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| v.使永存，使永记不忘 | |
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41
friendliness
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| n.友谊，亲切，亲密 | |
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42
amorous
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| adj.多情的；有关爱情的 | |
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43
antipathy
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| n.憎恶；反感，引起反感的人或事物 | |
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44
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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45
hunched
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| （常指因寒冷、生病或愁苦）耸肩弓身的，伏首前倾的 | |
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46
aesthetic
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| adj.美学的，审美的，有美感 | |
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47
perverted
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| adj.不正当的v.滥用( pervert的过去式和过去分词 )；腐蚀；败坏；使堕落 | |
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48
embroidering
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| v.（在织物上）绣花( embroider的现在分词 )；刺绣；对…加以渲染（或修饰）；给…添枝加叶 | |
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49
naught
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| n.无，零 [=nought] | |
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50
geographical
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| adj.地理的；地区(性)的 | |
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51
immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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52
perennial
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| adj.终年的；长久的 | |
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53
doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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54
canes
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| n.（某些植物，如竹或甘蔗的）茎( cane的名词复数 )；（用于制作家具等的）竹竿；竹杖 | |
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55
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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crafty
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| adj.狡猾的，诡诈的 | |
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57
intercepted
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| 拦截( intercept的过去式和过去分词 )； 截住； 截击； 拦阻 | |
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defiant
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| adj.无礼的，挑战的 | |
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bowers
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| n.（女子的）卧室( bower的名词复数 )；船首锚；阴凉处；鞠躬的人 | |
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60
worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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awfully
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| adv.可怕地，非常地，极端地 | |
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62
lobsters
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| 龙虾( lobster的名词复数 )； 龙虾肉 | |
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63
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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figs
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| figures 数字，图形，外形 | |
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sketches
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| n.草图( sketch的名词复数 )；素描；速写；梗概 | |
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66
whatsoever
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| adv.（用于否定句中以加强语气）任何；pron.无论什么 | |
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67
vocal
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| adj.直言不讳的；嗓音的；n.[pl.]声乐节目 | |
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68
cocktails
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| n.鸡尾酒( cocktail的名词复数 )；餐前开胃菜；混合物 | |
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69
copper
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| n.铜；铜币；铜器；adj.铜(制)的；(紫)铜色的 | |
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70
complexion
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| n.肤色；情况，局面；气质，性格 | |
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71
winked
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| v.使眼色( wink的过去式和过去分词 )；递眼色（表示友好或高兴等）；（指光）闪烁；闪亮 | |
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