White Magic: A Novel

When Roger Wade’s Aunt Bella died she left him forty thousand dollars in five-per-cent railway bonds and six hundred and ninety acres of wilderness extending from the outskirts of Deer Spring village to the eastern shore of Lake Wauchong, in northern New Jersey. She had contrived to quarrel and break with all her other relations. This was no easy undertaking, and in its success was a signal tribute to her force of character; for, each and everyone of those relatives knew of her possessions and longed and hoped for them and stood ready to endure, even to welcome, any outrage she might see fit to perpetrate. Roger she had not seen in fourteen years--not since he, a youth of eighteen, a painter born, long and lean, with a shock of black-brown hair and dreamy, gray-brown eyes, left his native Deer Spring to study in Paris. He and she had not communicated, either directly or indirectly--a fortunate circumstance for him, as several of Arabella Wade’s bitterest quarrels had begun and had progressed to the irreparable breach altogether by mail. Besides not knowing him she had but one other reason for choosing him as her heir: a year before her death and a week before her last will she happened to read on the cable page of a New York newspaper an enthusiastic note about his pictures and his success in Paris. So the bonds and the land went to him instead of to a missionary society.

Much American newspaper puffery of Americans abroad is sheer invention, designed to give us at home the pleasing notion that we are capturing the earth. But this notice of Roger Wade’s career had truth in it. He was doing extraordinarily well for so young a man. His sense of color and form was lifted toward genius by imagination and originality. His ability had no handicap of cheap and petty--and glaring--eccentricity, such as so often enters into the composition of an original and boldly imaginative temperament to mar its achievement and to retard the recognition of its merit. Thus he speedily made a notable place for himself. He could count on disposing of enough pictures to bring him in fifteen to twenty thousand francs a year; and that sum was about as much as he, simple of tastes, single-hearted in devotion to his work and indifferent to pose and pretense, could find time and opportunity to spend. He knew that in a few years far more money than he needed would be forced upon him--a prospect which he had the good sense to view with distrust when he thought of it at all. About the only thing that had stood in his way was his personal appearance. As one of his friends--Berthier, whose panels will be admired so long as the pale, mysterious glories of their elusive colors persist--said in a confidential moment: “Roger, you look so much like a man of genius that it’s hard to believe you are the real thing.”

Big is the word most nearly expressing that unusual appearance of his. He was tall and broad and powerful. His features were large, bold, handsome. The dark coloring of skin and hair and eyes added to the impression of bigness. It was in part a matter of real size, but only in part. Not the most casual glance could have reported a judgment of mere bulk. He seemed big because his countenance, his whole body, seemed an effort of Nature adequately to express a big nature. Herbert Spencer uttered about the most superb compliment one human being ever paid another when he said of George Eliot that she suggested “a large intelligence moving freely.” There was in Roger Wade this quality of the great bird high in the blue ether above the grime and littleness of conventional life. His looks had caused him more than a little trouble--of which he was not in the least aware. For a large part of his charm lay in his childlike unconsciousness of himself--a trait less rare in painters and sculptors than in any other class of men of genius, probably because their work compels them to concentrate constantly upon persons and things external and in no way related to their own ego. Had Roger been physically vain, beyond doubt his good looks would have ruined him. The envy of men and the infatuation of women would have made escape impossible. As it was, he did his work, ignored his enemies, and neither enslaved nor was enslaved by such women as drifted into his life--and out again. It is fortunate for men--especially for men who are striving for careers--that women are bred to feebleness of purpose and much prefer being loved to loving, being admired to admiring.

His long stay abroad and his success there had touched his Americanism only to idealize it. The dream of his life continued to be building a career at home. He was too able to be given to the fatuities of optimism. He had no delusions on the subject of the difficulties that would confront and assail him. He had observed that those Americans who had the money to buy pictures usually lacked the breadth to appreciate their own country, considered it “crude and commercial,” whatever that might mean, and preferred foreign painters and foreign subjects. But, like many another American artist of ability, he longed to have a personal share in bringing about the change toward national pride and confidence that must come sooner or later. So, when his aunt left him a competence, he felt free to engage in the hazardous American adventure. Two months after he inherited his little fortune he landed in New York with his Paris career a closed incident; a few days later he was installed in the old farmhouse on the edge of his wilderness estate and within a mile of the post office and railway station at Deer Spring. On a hill near the Lake Wauchong end of his estate--a hill that seemed a knoll in comparison with the steeps encompassing it on all sides--he got the village carpenter hastily to build for him a house of one large and lofty room, admitting light freely by way of big windows in the walls and an enormous skylight in the roof. Such small impression as his return made was wholly confined to his native Deer Spring. There the gossip went that, having failed to make art pay, he had come back home to “laze round” and live off his aunt’s money. As he had the doing sort of man’s aversion to discussing his plans, such of the villagers as succeeded in drawing him into lengthier parley than polite exchange of greetings heard nothing that contradicted the gossip.

Toward the end of an April afternoon, not long after the studio was finished, Roger reached it in the midst of a tremendous storm of rain and wind. Just before he gained the shelter of the north wall a swooping gust blew into his face a heavy cloud of wood smoke; so when he strode in he was not altogether unprepared for the sight that met his eyes as he dashed the water and smoke out of them. A fire had been built with generous hands in the fireplace in the south wall. Upon the long, low bench parallel with the outer edge of the broad hearth lay the intruder who had doubtless sought the one refuge within a radius of a mile when the storm came on suddenly about half an hour before. Roger had assumed he would find a man; but he was not much surprised to see that it was a woman for whom his roof was doing this good turn.

As he divested himself of dripping hat and water-proof he said genially: “I’m glad you made yourself at home!”

No answer came and the figure did not move. He flung his wraps on one of the heavy plain chairs which, with the bench, were all the furniture he had--or wanted. He advanced to a corner of the hearth to take a look at his guest. She was a girl--a young girl, sound asleep. Her head was comfortably pillowed on one slim, round arm and her folded jacket. Her sweet, healthily delicate face was toward the fire, and flushed from its warmth. She had abundant yellow hair, long lashes somewhat darker, a charming, determined mouth, a very fair skin. With such a skin a woman far less well-favored otherwise than she could have felt secure against any verdict of homeliness. His trained eyes told him that she was above the medium height and that her figure was good, arms and legs and body well-formed and in proper proportion to one another. She had--in texture of skin, in look of the hair, of the hands--those small but unmistakable indications that she had been brought up secure from labor and from those frettings and worryings about the fundamental necessities of life that react so early and so powerfully upon the bodies of the masses of mankind. Even her dress gave this indication of elevation above the common lot, though the felt hat pinned carelessly on her head, the plain shirtwaist, the blue serge short skirt, the leather leggings and shoes had all been through hard wear. There are ways and ways of growing old; the way of expensive garments is as different from the way of cheap garments as the way of expensively nourished bodies is from that of bodies poorly supplied with poor food.

He stood for several minutes, enjoying the engaging spectacle--enjoying it both as artist and as man. Then he went to the huge closet in the west wall where he kept, under strong lock, everything of value he had to have at the studio. He changed his boots for shoes. He took out and opened a collapsible table. Having noiselessly set upon it pots and dishes, including an alcohol stove and two cups and saucers, he proceeded to make chocolate. When it was nearly ready he opened a package of biscuits and filled a plate with them. All this with the expertness of the old, experienced bachelor housekeeper. He moved the table over to the hearth, to the corner nearer her feet, and seated himself. Luck was with him. Hardly had he got settled when her eyes--gray eyes--opened. She saw the table, the steaming pot of chocolate. She raised herself on her elbow--saw him. He met her amazed stare with a smile wholly free from impertinence.

“The chocolate is ready,” said he. “I have no tea. You see, I didn’t know you were coming.” His voice carried the humorous suggestion of old and intimate friendship, of a conversation continued after a brief interruption.

She brushed her hand over her eyes, stared at him again, this time a little wildly. His expression--the kind eyes, the mouth with no suggestion of cruelty or guile, the smile of friendliness without familiarity--reassured her straightway. A merry smile drifted over her features--charming, pretty features, though not beautiful. “You know I detest tea,” said she. “Besides, I’m hungry.”

“I’ve made enough for two large cups apiece,” he assured her. “But I had only condensed milk. It’s hard to get the other kind in the country.”

She took the cup into which he poured first, tasted it. “Splendid!” she ejaculated.

“I’ve been famous for my chocolate for years,” said he complacently.

“If you weren’t so vain!”

“Everybody’s vain. I have the courage to speak out.”

“_I’m_ not vain,” replied she. “If I were I should be embarrassed at your catching me like this.” And she glanced down at her wrinkled and mussy attire.

“Possibly you are so vain that you don’t care,” rejoined he. “You said you were hungry, yet you haven’t tried the biscuit.”