FullReads

It was a good party.

They sat on the floor and drank cognac and shouted. The host, with no great urging, showed a few score of his paintings. In them, the houses staggered and the hills looked like garbage heaps, so Whit knew they were the genuine advanced things, and he was proud and happy.

From that night on, Whit was in a joyous turmoil of artistic adventure. He was the real thing—except, perhaps, during the hours at Monsieur Schoelkopf’s, when he tried to paint.

Like most active young Americans, he discovered the extreme difficulty of going slow. During a fifty-minute class in Yale he had been able to draw twenty caricatures, all amusing, all vivid. That was the trouble with him! It was infinitely harder to spend fifty minutes on a square inch of painting.

Whit was reasonably honest. He snarled at himself that his pictures had about as much depth and significance as a croquis for a dressmakers’ magazine.

And Monsieur Schoelkopf told him all about it. He stood tickling the back of Whit’s neck with his beard, and observed “Huh!” And when Monsieur Schoelkopf said “Huh!” Whit wanted to go off and dig sewers.

So Whit fled from that morgue to the Caf Fanfaron, and to Isadora, whom he had met his first night in Paris.

Isadora was not a painter. She wrote. She carried a brief case, of course. Once it snapped open, and in it Whit saw a bottle of vermouth, some blank paper, lovely pencils all red and blue and green and purple, a handkerchief and a pair of silk stockings. Yet he was not shocked when, later in the evening, Isadora announced that she was carrying in that brief case the manuscript of her novel.

Isadora came from Omaha, Nebraska, and she liked to be kissed.

They picnicked in the Forest of Fontainebleau, Isadora and he. Whit was certain that all his life he had longed for just this; to lunch on bread and cheese and cherries and Burgundy, then to lie under the fretwork of oak boughs, stripped by October, holding the hand of a girl who knew everything and who would certainly, in a year or two, drive Edith Wharton and Willa Cather off the map; to have with her a relationship as innocent as children, and, withal, romantic as the steeple-hatted princesses who had once hallooed to the hunt in this same royal forest.

“I think your water-color sketch of Notre Dame is wonderful!” said Isadora.

“I’m glad you like it,” said Whitney.

“So original in concept!”

“Well, I tried to give it a new concept. ”

“That’s the thing! The new! We must get away from the old-fashioned Cubists and Expressionists. It’s so old-fashioned now to be crazy! We must have restraint. ”

“That’s so. Austerity. That’s the stuff…. Gee, doggone it, I wish there was some more of that wine left,” said Whit.

“You’re a darling!”

She leaned on her elbow to kiss him, she sprang up and fled through the woodland aisle. And he gamboled after her in a rapture which endured even through a bus ride back to the Fontainebleau station with a mess of tourists who admired all the wrong things.

The Fanfaron school of wisdom had a magnificent show window but not much on the shelves. It was a high-class evening’s entertainment to listen to Miles O’Sullivan, the celebrated Irish critic from South Brooklyn, on the beauties of Proust. But when, for the fifth time, Whit had heard O’Sullivan gasp in a drowning voice, “I remember dear old Marcel saying to me, ‘Miles, mon petit, you alone understand that exteriority can be expressed only by inferiority,’” then Whit was stirred to taxi defiantly over to the Anglo–American Pharmacy and do the most American thing a man can do—buy a package of chewing gum.