VII
OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

The tremendous tragedy in Europe, now nearing the end of the second act, had been slowly shaking the drowsy Western World out of its snug slumber of complacency. Young America was already sitting up in bed, awake, alert, listening. Older America, more difficult to convince, rolled solemn and interrogative eyes toward Washington, where the wooden gods still sat nodding in a row, smiling vacuously at destiny out of carved and painted features. Eyes had they but they saw not, ears but they heard not; neither spake they through their mouths.

Yet, they that made them were no longer like unto them, for many an anxious idolater no longer trusted in them. For their old God’s voice was sounding in their ears.

The voice of a great ex-president, too, had been thundering from the wilderness; lesser prophets, endowed, however, with intellect and vision, had been warning the young West that the second advent of Attila was at hand; an officer of the army, inspired of God, had preached preparedness from the market places and had established for its few disciples an habitation; and a great Admiral had died of a broken heart because his lips had been officially sealed – the wisest lips that ever told of those who go down to the sea in ships.

Plainer and plainer in American ears sounded the 88 mounting surf of that blood-red sea thundering against the frontiers of Democracy; clearer and clearer came the discordant clamour of the barbaric hordes; louder and more menacing the half-crazed blasphemies of their chief, who had given the very name of the Scourge of God to one among the degenerate litter he had sired.

Garret Barres had been educated like any American of modern New York type. Harvard, then five years abroad, and a return to his native city revealed him as an ambitious, receptive, intelligent young man, deeply interested in himself and his own affairs, theoretically patriotic, a good citizen by intention, an affectionate son and brother, and already a pretty good painter of the saner species.

A modest income of his own enabled him to bide his time and decline pot-boilers. A comparatively young father and an even more youthful mother, both of sporting proclivities, together with a sister of the same tastes, were his preferred companions when he had time to go home to the family rooftree in northern New York. His lines, indeed, were cast in pleasant places. Beside still waters in green pastures, he could always restore his city-tarnished soul when he desired to retire for a while from the battleground of endeavour.

The city, after all, offered him a world-wide battlefield; for Garret Barres was by choice a painter of thoroughbred women, of cosmopolitan men – a younger warrior of the brush imbued with the old traditions of those great English captains of portraiture, who recorded for us the more brilliant human truths of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

From their stately canvases aglow, the eyes of the lovely dead look out at us; the eyes of ambition, of 89 pride, of fatuous complacency; the haunted eyes of sorrow; the clear eyes of faith. Out of the past they gaze – those who once lived – deathlessly recorded by Van Dyck, Lely, Kneller; by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hoppner, Lawrence, Raeburn; or consigned to a dignified destiny by Stuart, Sully, Inman, and Vanderlyn.

When Barres returned to New York after many years, he found that the aspect of the city had not altered very greatly. The usual dirt, disorder, and municipal confusion still reigned; subways were being dug, but since the memory of man runneth, the streets of the metropolis have been dug up, and its market places and byways have been an abomination.

The only visible excitement, however, was in the war columns of the newspapers, and, sometimes, around bulletin boards where wrangling groups were no uncommon sight, citizens and aliens often coming into verbal collision – sometimes physical – promptly suppressed by bored policemen.

There was a “preparedness” parade; thousands of worthy citizens marched in it, nervously aware, now, that the Great Republic’s only mobile military division was on the Mexican border, where also certain Guard regiments were likely to be directed to reinforce the regulars – pet regiments from the city, among whose corps of officers and enlisted men everybody had some friend or relative.

But these regiments had not yet entrained. There were few soldiers to be seen on the streets. Khaki began to be noticeable in New York only when the Plattsburg camps opened. After that there was an interim of the usual dull, unaccented civilian monotony, mitigated at rare intervals by this dun-coloured ebb and flow from Plattsburg.

Like the first vague premonitions of a nightmare the first ominous symptoms of depression were slowly possessing hearts already uneasy under two years’ burden of rumours unprintable, horrors incredible to those aloof and pursuing the peaceful tenor of their ways.

A growing restlessness, unbelief, the incapacity to understand – selfishness, rapacity, self-righteousness, complacency, cowardice, even stupidity itself were being jolted and shocked into something resembling a glimmer of comprehension as the hunnish U-boats, made ravenous by the taste of blood, steered into western shipping lanes like a vast shoal of sharks.

And always thicker and thicker came the damning tales of rape and murder, of cowardly savagery, brutal vileness, degenerate bestiality – clearer, nearer, distinctly audible, the sigh of a ravaged and expiring civilisation trampled to obliteration by the slavering, ferocious swine of the north.

Fires among shipping, fires amid great stores of cotton and grain destined for France or England, explosions of munitions of war ordered by nations of the Entente, the clumsy propaganda or impudent sneers of German and pro-German newspapers; reports of German meddling in Mexico, in South America, in Japan; more sinister news concerning the insolent activities of certain embassies – all these were beginning to have their logical effect among a fat and prosperous people which simply could not bear to be aroused from pleasant dreams of brotherhood to face the raw and hellish truth.

“For fifty years,” remarked Barres to his neighbour, Esmé Trenor, also a painter of somewhat eccentric portraits, “our national characteristic has been 91 a capacity for absorbing bunk and a fixed determination to kid ourselves. There really is a war, Trenor, old top, and we’re going to get into it before very long.”

Trenor, a tall, tired, exquisitely groomed young man, who once had painted a superficially attractive portrait of a popular débutante, and had been overwhelmed with fashionable orders ever since, was the adored of women. He dropped one attenuated knee over the other and lighted an attenuated cigarette.

“Fancy anybody bothering enough about anything to fight over it!” he said languidly.

“We’re going to war, Trenor,” repeated Barres, jamming his brushes into a bowl of black soap. “That’s my positive conviction.”

“Yours is so disturbingly positive a nature,” remonstrated the other. “Why ever raise a row? Nothing positive is of any real importance – not even opinions.”

Barres, vigorously cleaning his brushes in turpentine and black soap, glanced around at Trenor, and in his quick smile there glimmered a hint of good-natured malice. For Esmé Trenor was notoriously anything except positive in his painting, always enveloping a lack of technical knowledge with a veil of camouflage. Behind this pretty veil hid many defects, perhaps even deformities – protected by vague, indefinite shadows and the effrontery of an adroit exploiter of the restless sex.

But Esmé Trenor was both clever and alert. He had not even missed that slight and momentary glimmer of good-humoured malice in the pleasant glance of Barres. But, like his more intelligent prototype, Whistler, it was impossible to know whether or not discovery ever made any particular difference to him. He tucked a lilac-bordered handkerchief a little deeper 92 into his cuff, glanced at his jewelled wrist-watch, shook the long ash from his cigarette.

“To be positive in anything,” he drawled, “is an effort; effort entails exertion; exertion is merely a degree of violence; violence engenders toxins; toxins dull the intellect. Quod erat, dear friend. You see?”

“Oh, yes, I see,” nodded Barres, always frankly amused at Trenor and his ways.

“Well, then, if you see – ” Trenor waved a long, bony, over-manicured hand, expelled a ring or two of smoke, meditatively; then, in his characteristically languid voice: “To be positive closes the door to further observation and pulls down the window shades. Nothing remains except to go to bed. Is there anything more uninteresting than to go to bed? Is there anything more depressing than to know all about something?”

“You do converse like an ass sometimes,” remarked Barres.

“Yes – sometimes. Not now, Barres. I don’t desire to know all about anybody or anything. Fancy my knowing all about art, for example!”

“Yes, fancy!” repeated Barres, laughing.

“Or about anything specific – a woman, for example!” He shrugged wearily.

“If you meet a woman and like her, don’t you want to know all there is to know about her?” inquired Barres.

“I should say not!” returned the other with languid contempt. “I don’t wish to know anything at all about her.”

“Well, we differ about that, old top.”

“Religiously. A woman can be only an incidental amusement in one’s career. You don’t go to a musical 93 comedy twice, do you? And any woman will reveal herself sufficiently in one evening.”

“Nice, kindly domestic instincts you have, Trenor.”

“I’m merely fastidious,” returned the other, dropping his cigarette out of the open window. He rose, yawned, took his hat, stick and gloves.

“Bye,” he said languidly. “I’m painting Elsena Helmund this morning.”

Barres said, with good-humoured envy:

“I’ve neither commission nor sitter. If I had, you bet I’d not stand there yawning at my luck.”

“It is you who have the luck, not I,” drawled Trenor. “I give a portion of my spiritual and material self with every brush stroke, while you remain at liberty to flourish and grow fat in idleness. I perish as I create; my life exhausts itself to feed my art. What you call my good luck is my martyrdom. You see, dear friend, how fortunate you are?”

“I see,” grinned Barres. “But will your spiritual nature stand such a cruel drain? Aren’t you afraid your morality may totter?”

“Morality,” mused Esmé, going; “that is one of those early Gothic terms now obsolete, I believe – ”

He sauntered out with his hat and gloves and stick, still murmuring:

“Morality? Gothic – very Gothic – ”

Barres, still amused, sorted his wet brushes, dried them carefully one by one on a handful of cotton waste, and laid them in a neat row across the soapstone top of his palette-table.

“Hang it!” he muttered cheerfully. “I could paint like a streak this morning if I had the chance – ”