THE AMOURETTA LANDSCAPE
If you search from Greenwich Village to Lawrence Park, and then from Turtle Bay to Chelsea, you will not find in all New York a painter less spoiled by fame than Maurice Price. It was in his nature to know from the very first that the luckier you are, the kinder you can be. I do not regard it as a limitation that in what he does and in what he wears he scarcely satisfies the romantic ideal about artists and their ways. There is nothing wild in his attire, and he does not live more dangerously than other citizens must. Still, there is something about his type of good looks that sets him apart and gives him away. Those who see him for the first time, in profile, whether at the Follies or at a funeral of an Academician, sometimes think that if they knew the man, they would esteem him more than they would love him. That is because they have not yet met him in front view, and discovered the eager friendliness in his gray eyes, thesensitive, listening expression of his whole face; the look that says, “Tell me your joke in life, and I’ll tell mine.” His merry young wife had once declared that there were only two things that saved his head from an intolerable Greek goddishness. Maurice’s curiosity was roused, but the girl had kept him guessing until the end of the week, when she explained that one of the things was his right ear, the other, his left; both of them stuck out more than the classic law allowed; just as well, too; since, for her part, she had preferred to marry a man, not an archangel or a Greek coin. The man smiled, and kept on painting.
A time came when Maurice Price, suddenly finding himself in a new environment, remembered that in ten years he had not once painted a landscape from nature. As he stood in the wide doorway of his friend’s country studio, and gazed with delight at the springtime beauty of the New Hampshire hills flung down at his feet, the fact that during a whole decade his painting had been done within doors and under glass struck him as an absurdity, even a reproach. Ah, well, those who go about calling ten years a whole decade must expect reproach, he reasoned. They bring it on themselves.
Besides, the situation was explicable enough. Ever since he and his wife had said good-bye to their cottage near Fontainebleau, exchanging the joys of study in France for the responsibilities of family life in their own land, his work had been chiefly portraits, with an occasional welcome mural decoration to break the monotony of rosy lips, shimmering pearls, crisp satins; of academic robes, frock coats, tennis trousers, and whatever else a modern portrait-painter must cope valiantly with, on canvas. Not that Maurice was weary of his good fortune in having portraits to do. He often said, with that frank yet pensive smile of his, that every sitter on earth has some personal quality which, if seen aright, can alleviate if not actually elevate our art. Hence, after every excursion into the field of mural decoration, he returned with new zest to his girls with pearls, his dowagers, his bankers; while after every surfeit of our common humanity as shown up in a north light, he seized with ardor the chance to depict on the walls of some library or court-house those various fables of antiquity which seem to shed the most pleasing light on the fables of our modern civilization. But never a landscape!
Naturally, his decorations and even his portraits often had landscape backgrounds. Fancy our Agriculture without her wheatfields, or our Mining Industry without her tumbled hills, or a Bridal at Glen Cove without blue skies, lovely leafage, a beauty-haunted marble vase, a teasing vista where Pan might lurk unseen! But very properly, such backgrounds as these were merely arrangements, or, as one might say, apt quotations from nature; they did not pretend to report passionate personal interviews with her. Maurice Price loved to paint such backgrounds. Whether in a tranquil or a stormy mood, he always kept the hope of distilling beauty for the ages. And he knew that the backgrounds had their part in that enterprise of his.
In his golden twenties, he had been a singularly diligent lover and student of landscape. Many an elder painter might have envied him his portfolios stuffed with first-hand information and first-hand illusion concerning rocks and seas, skies and fields, trees and hills, and all the rainbow hues and lights and darks that visited them in their repose, their shifting moods, their crises. Maurice in the late thirties often stood in awe of that far-off Maurice of the early twenties, whoseemed to know so much even then of the painter’s magic book of all outdoors. To-day, he wondered whether he could beat his younger self in the game that is played on canvas with brushes, under the sky, with everything more or less astir, and nothing at all ever quite the same as it was a moment before, least of all in its colors and values.
After that devastating influenza of March, his seldom-needed doctor had ordered a few weeks’ complete rest. “Complete piffle,” Price had growled. Nevertheless, when his friend James Anthony, a painter given to unexpected withdrawals and fresh beginnings in art, had offered him an opportunity for an entire change of scene, he had accepted. Anthony, always as keen as any Vibert or Abendroth in his pursuit of the secrets of the old masters, had suddenly decided to go abroad to study certain gums and resins that might eventually preserve our American painting from destruction. Anthony was like that. He was successful enough and wealthy enough to be as whimsically conscientious as he pleased about pigments and surfaces. He could afford to keep a bee in his hat, and call it altruism. And now, the bee having stung him afresh, thatwonderful hill studio of his was at Maurice’s disposal.
“You will be doing me a favor,” wrote Jimmy Anthony, “if you’ll take it, even for this one summer. There are two sculptors hounding me to rent it to them, a man and a woman. The man I can beat off, but the woman will work her will and get the place and wreck it for me, if you don’t come to the rescue. I can stand a painter’s rubbish, but sculptors! No, no, not for Jimmy. And please use up whatever you find in the line of materials. There’s nothing there of any further interest to me. You might like all that garance rose doré, and that pomegranate cadmium I used to swear by. And those mahogany panels that I had especially made. Do use them. Good on both sides, and bully for landscapes.”
When Price, after a look of delight at the spring magic framed by the doorway, had turned to examine his new quarters, he was not surprised that Anthony had shunned sculptors as tenants. He could not imagine the litter of clay and plaster, wet rags and greasy plastiline, defiling that spacious immaculate hall and its dependencies, all contrived by his friend out of a hay-barn and stable used by the roadhousegentry of a hundred years ago. Boxstalls made excellent dressing-rooms for models. Harness-closets gave ample space for easels and canvases, frames and colors. The north light was vast, but could be curtained at any point. The great door of the former hayloft was a proscenium arch through which one could look east, south, and west, upon various enchanted worlds. Again and again, that southern picture called aloud to Price to be painted. He found himself saying, “I will!” with the exultation of a man about to be married for the first time.
His own materials had not yet arrived; his wife, a doctor-abiding person, had seen to that; she too had picked up that annoying slogan, a complete rest! Perhaps Anthony’s closets would give first aid. Yes, there were plenty of brushes and colors, all in good condition; easels great and small; and such a panoply of varnishes and mediums as Price himself had never dreamed of needing. No wonder Anthony’s painting ran rather hectic, at times; he had too much stuff to paint with, yes, too much by far. His canvases were overdressed, by Jove! Pluming himself a bit on his own very simple palette, which he naturally regarded as an evidence of a higherculture than Anthony’s (just as the Doric lay in literature is finer than the Corinthian ode, he told himself), Maurice picked out from a bewildering variety the ten colors of his heart’s desire, including the garance rose. He looked indulgently, but not self-indulgently, on the pomegranate cadmium, as on a pretty lady he had no wish to flirt with.
Still searching, he laughed outright to find on an upper shelf the selfsame palette that Anthony had so often bragged about, at the Club, and (to judge from its pristine appearance) had so seldom used, in the studio. It was a rather large palette, acquired at no small cost by Anthony, during his period of trying out dear Shorty Lasar’s theory, namely: that when seen on the dull brownish wood of the ordinary palette, any color, no matter how muddy, looks bright and pure, luring the painter to his ruin; whereas, when shown on a brilliant, untarnished surface, say that of pearl or of ivory, the same color is revealed at once in all its foulness. “Nothing like mother-of-pearl,” Jimmy would say, “for exposing the true soul of a gob of paint!” And Anthony’s Club-famous palette, which Maurice now held in his hand, had been inlaid with pearlfrom stem to stern, a splendor which had added somewhat to its weight. Price balanced it between thumb and fingers, a little patronizingly, perhaps, as may well happen when a man takes up another’s palette, especially a palette more famed in theory than in practice. Not that he wanted to quarrel with the tools he was lucky enough to find; anything in reason would do.
As for the mahogany panels, he would gratefully use one of those, at a pinch. It had not the kind of surface he preferred, his way being to use a rather absorbent canvas, preparing the surface to suit the needs of the work in hand. But here again, Maurice was not hide-bound. Surface wasn’t the only thing; it would be a poor painter who would let a marvel-landscape like that go unpainted, merely because he hadn’t a fine new roll of canvas to slash into. He was glad to find, in that inexhaustible closet, half a dozen of those panels; baywood or cherry, perhaps, though his friend always called them mahogany. Running eager fingers over them, he found that the one he liked best for size and solidity, for shape and texture, had already been used, on one side; but that mattered not at all. He knew Anthony’s three-layered panels; both sides were good.
On bringing the panel of his choice out into the full light, he was first dazzled and then puzzled by the painting on it. Was this really Anthony’s work? Theory-ridden as he was, Anthony had certainly painted queer stuff, at times. But Maurice could not insult his friend’s hospitality by taking this weird performance in earnest. Its style out-Jimmied Jimmy. Yet it seemed brilliantly familiar; it had Anthony mannerisms.
Then memory suddenly turned her flashlight on the thing, and told him why it seemed familiar. Three years before, on the eve of sailing for the Front, he had visited Anthony, and the two had inspired the boys and girls of the artist colony to organize a “Faker Show” for the benefit of the French wounded; children, models, and even the artists themselves had vied with each other in producing caricatured art. The most wildly acclaimed piece had been this very panel, painted in a joyous hour by Anthony’s studio-boy, Pietro, from Anthony’s model, Amouretta McGowan; to save time, he had used one of his master’s discarded portrait-studies, and he had kept the characteristic Anthony composition throughout.
It was meant for a portrait, one saw,—the portrait of a woman, a hussy, if you like, withdusky flesh-tints after Gauguin, and with an impudent gown patterned and colored like that in Matisse’s once celebrated “Madras Rouge.” But the pearls with which the minx was crowned and girdled, draped and festooned,—ah, the pearls were surely a fling at Maurice Price himself, “the Price-of-Great-Pearls,” as the League students called him, just as in other days they had called Kenyon Cox, “Bunion Socks,” George de Forest Brush, “Young-Man-Afraid-of-his-Brushes,” and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, “Gaudy Saint August”; youthful pleasantries which harmed no one, least of all the artists themselves.
Once again Maurice laughed aloud as he recalled how earnestly he had explained to his students his method in painting pearls, telling them of the many slow and careful studies he had made of pearls before he had really mastered the mystery of pearls, and much else, after the manner of enthusiastic and self-giving teachers the world over. In general, the youngsters had listened and profited; otherwise, they would have been donkeys. Also, they had jeered and jested; otherwise, Maurice thought, they would have been prigs. And that nickname, “the Price-of-Great-Pearls,” had clung to him, in a heart-warmingway. He felt that if his students had given him no title at all, he would have suffered some vague loneliness of spirit when among them.
Astonishing how Pietro, in one piece of brilliant painting, had succeeded in poking fun at two Frenchmen and two Americans! Certainly, Anthony’s well-studied devil-may-care composition showed doubly riotous after that boy had wreaked his genius on it; and the pearls, as Maurice saw with a twinge of gratification, were exquisitely painted, if you considered them as giant opalescent lamps filched from some moonlit fairyland, and not as gems discreetly adorning a woman. And then the Gauguin coloring, the Matisse arabesques! As a final flourish, like the “I thank you” after a four-minute speech, Pietro had signed the work “the Price-of-Great-Pearls.” Maurice found, on looking for that signature, that some later jester had obliterated from it all but the one word, “Price.” Price, indeed!
Maurice’s smile faded away into mere pensiveness as he recalled both Pietro and Amouretta. The boy, in all his vivid brightness of youth, had died suddenly from the epidemic in which Maurice himself had suffered, while Amouretta—
Her real name was not Amouretta. No one’sis. She was just Anna McGowan, golden and rosy, with hair and complexion that would have been beyond belief if she had not insisted on showing every artist (and more especially his wife) just how far her hair fell below her knees and just how it grew around her temples; because, as she said, it was where the hair started and where it left off that all that nasty peroxide business gave those others away, poor things! Also, she would press her finger on her cheek and lips, so that their roses would vanish and return, as if an electric button had been touched. She loved to have the wives see that, too. There was nothing false about Amouretta. From her golden topknot to her pink toes, she was as good a girl, all in all, as ever hopped high-heeled from a painter’s studio to a picture-studio (two quite different arenas), in the effort to make both ends meet, and then cross over. “It’s the cross-over that counts,” Amouretta used to say; “there’s where the joy in life appears.” The name Amouretta was a business concession to the picture industry and to the small vaudeville shows in which she worked when posing was slack.
A singularly vivid personality, that child; her adventures, like her hair and her complexion,sometimes seemed fabulous, at first glance, but always gained new lustre after investigation. For instance, there was on her shoulder a tiny red mark, which she said was due to a bite she had received at the Kilkenny Ball, from a mad and anonymous devotee of beauty. Could any one altogether believe that? Nevertheless, young Cavendish (whom she had never known or even seen), on coming to himself the day after, had confessed himself publicly, in an agony of shame. He had taken a bite of a peach in passing; he didn’t know why, Lord help him; and from that hour he was nevermore the strayed reveller we once had known, but settled down into blameless and uninteresting eclipse. Then again, there came a morning when Amouretta, posing in a green satin bodice as an understudy for an overworked “bud,” whose portrait Maurice Price was painting, had yielded to that self-revealing mood to which all models are at times given; she confided to our painter that she was engaged to be married to a middle-aged admirer, a man of great wealth, whose name she would not tell until the engagement was publicly announced. Could not Mr. Price guess? She meant to give up both stage and model-stand, of course; why, she hadgiven up cigarettes already for that man, because he had said that the men of his family didn’t like them for ladies. “And he was so dear, when he said it.”
Amouretta’s brilliant blush came and went so often during her story, and finally stayed so long, that it played the very deuce with Maurice’s entire morning; you know how difficult it is to paint emerald satin when the wearer is blushing; the green and the red come to blows. And Maurice, who had two daughters of his own, howbeit small, was really worried, until one afternoon at the Century, Mr. William Saltonstall, long of limb, lineage, and purse,—a man of undoubted probity, and a collector, too!—had touched him on the shoulder, and poured out the whole story of his love for Amouretta. The wedding was to be at Saint Barnaby’s, in June. There could be no doubt as to Mr. Saltonstall’s self-surrender; love at first sight it was, that day in the studio when Maurice had introduced a patron of beauty to beauty herself. Naturally the painter was delighted with this idyl—its delicate fragrance, its perfect flowering; all unconsciously, he himself had sown the seed, his wife and Amouretta smiling wisely thereafterat his blindness. He had always liked William Saltonstall, and none the less because that gentleman was not one whom every one called Bill.
After the engagement, Amouretta continued to work, because, valiant little soul, she meant to earn her own trousseau. No man not a relative should be able to say he had done that for her; and I’m thinking it would be a long day before either her father or her brother, in their good-natured shiftlessness, could provide the outfit she had in mind! But there was no June wedding at Saint Barnaby’s, after all; for Amouretta caught a fatal chill one raw night at the Revelries, while posing as Innocence, insufficiently clad in white paint and a scrap of georgette, in one of those pure-white sculpture groups which occasionally reappear in refined vaudeville.
And there was nothing more that could ever happen now to Pietro and Amouretta, thought Maurice. For one as for the other, their story of bright youth was ended. For Pietro, no daring assault upon the Roman Prize; for Amouretta, no adventure of any color at all, not even that climax of white satin train and flower-girls at Saint Barnaby’s. Maurice sighed as he tookup a large flat brush and charged it with gray paint to obliterate the caricature. A few vigorous strokes would suffice. But he could not bring himself to do what he intended. He started back as if he had hurt himself. Or had young hands pushed him back? Surely there was something in that quaint, brilliant, impudent creature smiling on him—some hint or vestige of that which was once Amouretta—Amouretta who threw a kiss to the world, and was gone. And what was he, successful Maurice Price, that he should go about with brutal paint to hush up forever young Pietro’s jest? No, no, he could not do that. It was not fair, not sportsmanlike. Live and let live!
He examined all the other panels, but their shapes and sizes were not right. “Oh, well, I don’t give a damn,” lied Maurice to himself. He lit a cigarette, but the landscape came between him and his smoke. He picked up a frayed copy of “La Reine Margot,” but the landscape shut out Saint Bartholomew. He sat a moment in Anthony’s Venetian chair, and covered his eyes with his hands, but between his eyes and his hands he saw only the miracle landscape. So he rose resolutely, took up the panelof his choice, the Amouretta panel, and began to paint on its untouched side. A beautifully primed surface lent itself at once to the artist’s will.
“In the midst of death we are in life,” he murmured. Below, in the orchard, his wife was carolling old French songs with the children. “On y danse, on y danse!” Even Maury junior, a boy to the backbone, and little given to self-expression in song, especially foreign-language song, boomed out a mighty “Tout en ronde!” Half an hour before, Maurice senior had stood hand-in-hand with his wife, looking up into the flowery dome of a magnificent pear tree, all aglow with golden-white blossoms, all perfumed with their incense, and musical with legions of bees. He knew just where to find those magic boughs in his landscape; he recognized their golden-veiled whiteness, their garance rose. Left and right the spendthrift river was pouring out its silver in a royal progress, mile after mile in the May sunlight. Ascutney, the great mountain that all the people thereabouts knew as their tutelary deity, had chosen from his myriad mantles the one he might wear for an hour or so,of an entrancing blue to mock the heavens themselves. Smilingly yet warningly he confronted Maurice, singling him out from other persons, to tell him in a secret, consoling way, of the generations of men, those who had gone and those who were yet to come; yes, Ascutney spoke very seriously with Maurice, reminding him of everything, whatever it might be, that he, Maurice Price, in his great good fortune in art and life, owed to those generations, and must joyfully repay, by painting as best he might that lyric scene.
“Generation after generation,” thought Maurice, “but no longer Pietro or little Amouretta.” Quivering with emotion as he was, he saw that the passion and skill of that far-away Maurice of the twenties had not vanished. Now, as then, he had in large measure the artist’s gift of multiplying his personality when he was at work; his consciousness as an artist rose many-mansioned toward the skies. With heart and mind swelling from the scene he conned and created, he was at once the Maurice who did not need a pearl palette to capture the glory of that violet-edged puff of golden cloud over the meadow, who could hear the bees in the orchard, who could see ajewelled indigo bird flaming out from the locust bush; a Maurice whose whole being overflowed with returning health, with rapture in painting, with pride in Maury junior, with love for the wife of his delight, with affection for good old Jimmy Anthony, and yet a Maurice with sharp remembrance of those vanished children of joy, Pietro and Amouretta.
As he painted, he smiled often, because many persons, both living and dead, came and ranged themselves beside him, and it was pleasant to be talking with them, on that flowery hillside. Oh, Lionardo, of course, and Père Corot; Monet and Pissarro; his own namesake, Maurice Denis, dear Thayer of Monadnock, and John Sargent, since he too could do landscapes and portraits and murals! And Whistler, certainly, though at times he talked too much, interrupting quite scornfully while Maurice was explaining to Lionardo how our American goldfinch beats his wings as he sings; or else breaking in with a prickly jest when Maurice was giving M. Monet his reasons why (with due respect, Monsieur!) he meant to paint all day on that one landscape, instead of beginning another as soon as the light should change.
Some of his younger friends came also. One would have said that half the American Camouflage trooped in; little Robert, so strangely saved that black night at Beaumetz-les-Cambrai; young Harry, born at the foot of Ascutney—smiling Harry the sculptor, beside whom he himself had stood unharmed, in the field by Reims, when a shell came, striking Harry to nothingness; and Anthony’s nephew too, that portrait-painter whom the papers had called brilliant-futured—debonair Charlie Anthony whom he himself, merely Captain Price, under orders, had unknowingly despatched to his doom. Maurice was used to that boy’s presence by now; the harsh realities of dreams had often brought them together. Such things could not be, and men remain dumb. All this and much more must be told in the miracle landscape he was creating; it would be dishonest, otherwise. In spirit, smiling Harry and his mates belonged to that scene. Even M. Monet admitted that without doubt there is also this point of view. Not one of those companions failed to understand why our painter had not blotted out Pietro’s Amouretta. Not one of them was surprised when all of a sudden he looked up from his own painting, to make surethat Pietro’s was right side up, and uninjured by contact with the easel; Maurice laughing to himself the while, and saying aloud, “I should worry!”
The critics declared later that this canvas was Price’s masterpiece. They wrote of the monumental purple dignity of his mountain, the self-contained inwardness of his middle distance, the happy audacity of his flowery foreground. They might have found out, to be sure, just by looking, that the painting was on wood, not canvas! But they could not know how much of Reims and Beaumetz-les-Cambrai were playing hide-and-seek among the shadows of Maurice’s mind when he set down Ascutney in the mantle of the hour. They would have been startled out of a day’s omniscience had they been aware of everything that Pietro and Amouretta had contributed of their brave young substance to that smiling foreground. So excuse them, please, for whatever was wrong in their writings; they could not know, exactly, about Maurice; and after all, they made a very good guess.
That summer, Maurice painted many other landscapes. There were falls, brooks, and rocksin that glamorous country, and these he showed in their beauty as he saw it. There was also an enchanted road under enchanted pines, where he once beheld Paolo and Francesca walking at twilight; this too became matter of record, to be taken up later and played with for heart’s delight. Rumors of his latest work reached the art galleries. New Yorkers know those galleries, dotting the Avenue from the Library to the Plaza, and even blossoming out into side streets of lower rental. And the merry war between artist and dealer, as eternal and various (and perhaps as little reasonable) as the war between the sexes, would be taken up with renewed vigor in the autumn. Price had received letters from the Abingdon, the Buckminster, the Clarendon; from As You Like It, even, as well as from Farintosh and from MacDuff. The letters were similar in content; their writers had heard of his landscapes—a new line for him, was it not? The buying public would be interested, of course, and would he care to exhibit in their well-appointed galleries? They would be glad to hear from him at his early convenience. Price smiled, and answered, declining.
In fact, he was interested, not financially butsympathetically, in a gallery from which he had received no letters;—an out-of-the-way little gallery, a modest ground-floor-and-mezzanine affair slowly becoming better known and liked as the Court of New Departures. He was interested because this fantastically named refuge for originality in art was a business venture (a venture that must bemadeto succeed!) undertaken by Hal Wrayne, a madcap young cousin. Hal Wrayne’s father had always kept this only son of his well-supplied with means for cutting up harmless capers, at school and in college; and Hal himself, both by nature and by training the perfect comedian in life, had hardly stopped to ask where he was going, all so joyous, until, on his father’s sudden death, he found himself almost penniless, with a wife and baby daughter to support, and with a mother and sister who needed his help.
But Hal did not wholly forswear the Comic Spirit even when he surveyed the clouds on his horizon. The War had cut short his last year at law school, but he knew enough to know that in his young hands the law would be but a sorry staff of life for five persons, four of them in petticoats. He had studied art, too, having been veryfond of Cousin Maurice, who had let him play about in the studio, one summer; indeed, being clever and versatile, Hal had painted, under Maurice’s criticism, a series of gay-garlanded borders to temper the austerity of certain court-house decorations, and so had once really earned money as a painter’s assistant. But a month among murals does not constitute a career, Hal Wrayne saw. Art was even less likely than law to provide, all at once, for his “little quartette of skirts,” as he cheerily called his dependents, who varied in age from five months to fifty-five years. What to do? It suddenly occurred to Hal that he might strike a happy medium by running an art gallery.
“Art galleries nowadays,” said young Hal, “have got to have a punch to ’em. At least, the new ones have. You know—element of surprise, variety the spice of life, thedernier crisort of thing. What little I know about law will show me how far I can go, without being arrested for speeding; and what little I know about art, if I spread it out thin enough, ought to carry me along quite a ways.”
Maurice Price shook his head. Frankly, he saw nothing in it at all, for Hal and his quartette.Nevertheless, Hal looked about manfully, head up, early and late. He found an old stable with a loft, in the East Fifties, and vigorously remodelled the building into a court with tiny upstairs galleries, decorating court, staircase, and rooms in a somewhat slapdash style, with results that were reminiscent both of his own room at college and his cousin’s studio. As a nucleus for his first show, he had several enigmatic Lithuanian sketches, painted with that fierce peasant coloring which attracts jaded civilizations. There were also some rather unusual unpublished posters by a needy French friend of Hal’s; and by great good luck, he had obtained a whole sequence of Harriet Higsbee’s famous landscape compositions in cut-up linoleum. (You remember Harriet in Paris? How she never washed a paint-brush, or anything?) Between the posters, the Lithuanian things and the linoleum, the Court of New Departures was modestly beginning to keep its promises, even before Hal, in a burst of inspiration, had arranged upon the staircase his own private collection of humorous sculptures in the baser metals, among them a certain ironic green elephant warranted to make the saddest mortal smile again.
“You see,” he explained to the bewildered Maurice, “I want the tone of this dive to be at once romantic, realistic, humorous, and ironic. I guess I’ve captured it all, now.” Maurice sighed as he helped his cousin to hang a pair of fine tapestries, begged from Hal’s trusting mother. “To draw the dowagers,” Hal said.
Odd as it seemed to the elder man, the dowagers were really drawn. After all, you never can tell; dowagers are not exempt. Through a judicious one-by-one exposition (a Japanese idea, borrowed by Hal from The Book of Tea), many valuable objects salvaged from the wreck of the Wrayne fortunes were disposed of at excellent prices; and before the year was out, the boy had succeeded in selling to his college friends, and their friends, a goodly number of little pictures, studies and sketches, mostly in the new manner, whatever that happened to be. His “quartette of skirts,” far from being an encumbrance, were, so he stoutly declared, “a high-class asset.” His sister Dodo was a wonder in throwing a bit of bargain-counter drapery over a mission stool, so as to make you think of a Doge’s palace. She and his wife organized those charming teas, which, when presided over by his lady-mother, with herauthentic air ofbelle Marquise, made everything look thoroughly salable and artistic, from those queer Lithuanian sketches to Hal’s own models for stage sets. Prosperity was just around the corner; and the only singular circumstance was, Hal began to have ideals. “No junk, girlie,” he would warn the enterprising Dodo. “No Greenwich Village in mine! I mean to run a gallery fit for a refined limousine trade, and I don’t want my clients to think they’re slumming, just because I keep ’em in touch with the grand new movements in art.”
Maurice Price looked on, fascinated by the spectacle of his young relative’s start in a career that was neither law nor art, yet had been suggested to Hal by his slender knowledge of both.
“Why don’t you send me up some ofyourthings?” the boy boldly asked Maurice. “They would sell like hot cakes, mixed in with my regular stuff.”
And Maurice, full of good-will, had replied, “Perhaps I may, if I can look up some inexpensive little bits your customers might like.”
“Not on your tintype!” retorted Hal. “Can’t you see, old Price-of-Great-Pearls, my quartette and I have toliveon my thirty per cent?Idon’twant your inexpensive little bits! I want your masterpieces, the costlier the better. Bet I can sell ’em for you, too, as easy as Farintosh, or MacDuff. Your being an Academician doesn’t stand inmyway!”
Maurice flushed, not so much on account of being an Academician, as because he suddenly saw himself self-convicted of a lack of imagination in regard to his cousin.
“Say, Maury, think it over! What do you take me for, anyway? Do you suppose I want to carry on a queer joint like this, always? It isn’t merely my commission I’m thinking of when I’m asking you for your best stuff! My littlest skirt will be growing up, and there’ll be others, perhaps. Pants, too,—who knows? I wouldn’t like to have him, and them, see me spend my days in a frisky, risky side-show like this!” His gesture included the emerald-green elephant, as yet unbought, and beginning to flake off a little at the tip of the trunk. “I like this art business—I like it fine. But I want to carry it on in a way a fellow like you would approve of, and respect, and be enthusiastic about!”
“Do you know,” answered Maurice, reflectively, “I begin to think that’s just what youare doing, as fast as you can!” He spilled some cigar-ash on the rug, and ground it in carefully with his foot, always a sign of emotion in Price-of-Great-Pearls. And the two had parted, well pleased with each other and with themselves.
Hence it was that Maurice, in reviewing the work of that good summer, had decided, Academician though he was, to send to the Court of New Departures his best-loved landscape. Farintosh was to have the rest. They were all of them good stuff, too; he knew that. But not one of them, either for his artist friends or for himself, surpassed in charm and amplitude that southern picture of Ascutney, painted with Anthony’s materials, too. At first blush, it seemed a high-keyed, ecstatic picture, but a second glance revealed a multitude of lovely, lively grays; dew-spangled or tear-touched, who could say? Maurice knew that he had never before put so much of himself into any picture. It was dyed-in-the-wool Price, by Jove it was! He told himself so, in a passion of certainty. He knew, he knew, that beyond anything he had ever before painted, it showed him at his best, intellectually and emotionally; it revealed the man, and whatever mastery he had over his life and times; andincidentally, his technique, too, a thing not to be despised in the midst of larger considerations. Yes, the pearl among his pictures! He smiled, remembering his nickname.
And the jewel had a suitable setting. To his joy, he had discovered among the hills an old Frenchman, cultivating his garden—a frame-maker who had long been with Chartier. Think of it, a man who not only could carve to perfection the delicately reserved mouldings Maurice Price desired, but who also really knew how to gild, in the reliable old manner! Such finds as these make life worth living. The Frenchman’s frame was a masterpiece, Maurice declared. He sent it, in advance, to the Court of New Departures; he felt that it might have an elevating influence there. But he kept the landscape by him, for pure joy in its presence, until the last moment. Sometimes, when he put it away at night, out of the reach of thieves and other insects, he looked at Amouretta, on the back of the panel, and wondered. But he had no wish to blot out that strange likeness. It was part and parcel—there was something about it, too—He left it there, just as Pietro of the merry heart had left it, until a later jester had wreaked himselfupon the signature, sparing only the name Price.
In the Court of New Departures, Hal Wrayne was expecting that picture. Maurice had laconically written of his fresh adventures in painting, that summer; he had added that what he was about to send was “the gem of the whole outfit.” All of his new pictures were new departures, according to Maurice. However, he honestly believed that this one, the gem! had in its inspiration something at once deeper and fresher than the others could boast. No need to mention that fact to Farintosh, of course; for he had decided to let Farintosh exhibit all but the gem. Thus Maurice, half in jest and all in earnest. Hal was jubilant. He did not know whether the gem was a portrait, or a fragment of a decoration. What did that matter? A gem is a gem. When the frame arrived, he recognized its beauty, and danced for joy. He commissioned Dodo to keep her weather eye out for a harmonizing remnant.
At that time, he had in his employ a long lean German, straight as a die, body and soul; a man whose services were really worth more than Hal could afford to pay, but who nevertheless had begged to remain, because he was happy in the Court of New Departures, and had been unhappyelsewhere. He called himself the famulus, and had made himself well liked as such. Hal decided that when the pearl among pictures should at last arrive, the famulus, who was perfect in such duties, should unpack it, set it into its frame, and hang it in the place of honor, so that he himself might view it unexpectedly, from across the room. He carefully explained to the famulus that this picture, coming down from the mountains, was a new departure by a very great artist, and that he himself wanted to see it just as a buyer might see it; with a fresh eye, don’t you know? Just for the big impression, so to speak, and to avoid letting his mind get confused by a lot of little impressions, as would surely happen if he took it out of the box himself, and fussed around with the hanging. There was something of the boy and the comedian still left in Hal, you observe. The famulus, who had seen and heard strange things in art and from men, both here and abroad, nodded sagely. He understood.
Even so, after he had unpacked the panel, he scarcely knew which of the two sides it were best to show, in that frame whose workmanship he had already lovingly examined. In his honestconceit, he did not wish to seek counsel from his employer. To him, the landscape looked more beautiful than the lady! On the other hand, Mr. Wrayne had spoken of the great artist’s work as a new departure; surely the lady, rather than the landscape, fitted that specification! Ach, it was a turvy-tipsy world, these days. No one knew what was beauty, any more. Turning the lady’s bright image this way and that, he noted a signature, Price. Yes, that settled it; Price was the name Mr. Wrayne had spoken, many times already. With a sigh for the passing of the old régime in art as in life, the German famulus fitted the Italian boy’s “fake” study of the Irish girl within the Frenchman’s faultless frame, and set the picture in the place of honor, for rich Americans to see.
Not even to his “quartette of skirts” has Hal Wrayne ever disclosed his real feelings on seating himself in the buyer’s seat, to take in suddenly, “in one big impression,” the effect of Maurice’s new departure. He himself did not know what his real feelings were. He had once had some little taste, he told himself, some little training; but these had been set at naught by certain of his recent exploits in salesmanship. More thanonce, of late, he had experienced the acute distress of a frank soul that does not know whether it is lying or not.
“That’s what a joint like this brings a man to,” mused Hal. “First, intellectual dishonesty, in other words, blinking; and next, total blindness of the mind’s eye.” Amouretta’s lively blue glance dismayed him. Was that girl with pearls really a Price—a Price of deeper and fresher inspiration than was to be discerned in those Prices the great Farintosh was soon to show, on the Avenue? He could not believe his eyes. Yet there was the signature. It did not look like Maurice’s usual signature; but then, there was nothing like Maurice, in the whole thing. A new departure indeed! Hal’s spirit quailed.
“They always said Maurice Price could paint anything, in any way; but this stumps me. And it sure does give me a pain all over when I try to like it. Perhaps there’s something in one of those eyes that gets me, somehow. Is there, or isn’t there? If there is, hanged if I know whether it’s the near eye or the off eye!” Still playing the part of a buyer, Hal writhed in the buyer’s seat, a spurious Renaissance antique discarded by Maurice.
Hal was always immaculately dressed. Through thick and thin, he had kept his air of purple and fine linen about him. Never a morning without a white flower in his buttonhole; and day after day, his eternally crumpled bright blond hair was all that saved him from the dandiacal. But now! You would have been sorry for him had you found him humped in his counterfeit throne, his cigarette awry on his lip, and his carnation lying all forlorn on the parquet. Had fate allowed him but ten seconds more, he would have set himself right. Too late! Mr. William Saltonstall had just entered the gallery. The ruler of the Court of New Departures had hard work to pull himself together, and recapture his pleasant alertness. It must be done, however; Mr. Saltonstall was too good a client to lose. Hal sprang to his feet, kicked the carnation under the throne, and with it cast aside for the moment his problem of the true and the false in art, as if it were an entangling garment that would burden him in a race....
The next day, Maurice Price, packing up his belongings to return to the city in time for theNovember elections, was puzzled by a telegram from his helter-skelter cousin. Just what could it mean? In telegrams, if in no other form of composition, the youth resorted to punctuation; he felt that periods gave clearness, an idea he had picked up while doing war work for the Government.
Can sell picture periodTop price cash down periodOn condition immediate withdrawal from gallery periodBuyer buyer waits your wire periodWrayne
Can sell picture period
Top price cash down period
On condition immediate withdrawal from gallery period
Buyer buyer waits your wire period
Wrayne
As Maurice motored down to the station, the maple and beech leaves spurned by his tires rose up in their passing glory and sang Hal’s message, over and over, with variations; and on the night train, the wheels took up the refrain, with grinding insistence. “Buyer buyer waits your wire,” though probably due in part to a mistake at the office, sounded a little like the new poetry; Maurice hoped there might be truth as well as poetry in it. “Top price cash down” had its own music, of course; but “immediate withdrawal from gallery” was less pleasing to the ear. It had implications. That part of the message, reverberated in the too sonorous breathing of lower nine,just opposite, really annoyed our painter. As he afterward told Hal, adapting his language to his hearer, “it got his goat.” “Immediate withdrawal,” indeed! Such words were not to be addressed to a Price.
Emerging from the sordid practicalities of the Pullman, he sought his Club for breakfast; he felt that the morning air on his face, even in the few steps from the Grand Central to the Century, might supplement the sketchy passes he had made before the shiny Pullman basin, while lower nine, perspiring in purple pajamas, awaited his turn; lower nine, in waking as in sleeping hours, still suggesting “immediate withdrawal.” The offending phrase followed Maurice into the breakfast-room. He had eaten it in his grapefruit and was thoughtfully stirring it into his coffee, when Mr. William Saltonstall, that early bird among collectors, sauntered in, and after a moment’s hesitation, hastened to grasp his hand.
Maurice in his absorption did not associate his enigmatic “buyer buyer” with Mr. Saltonstall. Indeed, that gentleman was known everywhere as a connoisseur in figure-pieces; he never bought landscapes. Yet there was something unusualin his manner; his dark melancholy eyes, usually very gentle, were smouldering with a kind of suppressed excitement, in which both joy and pain were suggested.
“Surely I have the right explanation, haven’t I?” he began, with anxious courtesy.
“If you have,” replied Maurice, “I wish you’d share it with me, along with breakfast.”
Acting on a fantastic impulse to match another man’s perplexities with his own, he pushed the crumpled telegram across the table.
Mr. Saltonstall smiled. “Oh, yes, I asked Wrayne to wire you.”
A glimmer of light broke over Maurice. “Are you—by any chance—this ‘buyer buyer’?”
His friend nodded nervously. “Still waiting your wire! But I don’t ask immediate withdrawal, now. That is, if the truth is what I think it is.”
“But whatisthe truth?” cried the bewildered painter.
“You should know,” returned the other. “I have my belief, my strong belief!—but you, you have the knowledge! For God’s sake, man, was it a landscape or—a lady—that you sent down to that cousin of yours?”
Maurice could see that Saltonstall was trembling with emotion. In a flash, he remembered Amouretta. “Oh,” he cried out, in a shocked voice, “a landscape, a thousand times a landscape! Did you think Icouldhave meant the other, the one on the back?Amouretta?”
Mr. Saltonstall looked relieved, triumphant, ashamed. “Yes, I did, at first! And why not, when it was just that ribald portrait, and nothing else, that Wrayne showed me there, in an exquisite frame, in his confounded Court of New Departures? I tell you, Maurice Price, I was wild when I saw it. In my heart I vowed vengeance on you and all your tribe. I couldn’t believe it of you—you, of all men; yet there it was before my eyes. I couldn’t let that thing stay there! No man, who felt as I did about Amouretta, could let it stay, to be gaped at by the multitude looking for new sensations in art, and to be written up in the art column of the Sunday papers! Oh, I admit, of course, there was something captivating about it, too; captivating as well as desecrating, yes. Well, I made Wrayne take an oath to put it away, away, out of the world’s sight, and send you a wire.”
Maurice of the compassionate eyes saw thedrops of sweat gather on Saltonstall’s lean temples.
“You must know,” said the artist gently, “it was never I who painted that portrait of Amouretta. It was Anthony’s studio assistant; you remember, the lad that died just before our Roman Prize was awarded. If you’ve looked at the painting, you know, of course, there’s diabolically clever work in it. Those pearls—Icouldn’t surpass them! But if you saw only that portrait (and right there, if you please, there’s something that Master Hal will have to explain off the map!) how on earth did you happen to find my landscape?”
Saltonstall smiled in his sad way. “Well, I wanted to be sure Wrayne had kept his word about hiding the picture, so I dropped in on him unexpectedly, yesterday afternoon. Wrayne was all right! The thing was swathed and roped and even sealed. In fact, he had insisted on calling in that famulus of his the day before, when I was there, and having him do all that in my very presence, while he and I sat back and watched.”
“Perfectly good gesture,” laughed Maurice.
“Oh, yes, and in the grand style, I assure you! Queer chap, Wrayne, but he’ll succeed, eventhough he doesn’t yet know the rudiments of his trade. Can you believe it, he had not observed that the painting was on wood instead of canvas! I was wild to see it again; I made him uncover it and show it to me. My wrath hadn’t gone down with the sun, I can tell you, but I had sense enough left to see that the frame was quite out of the common; good as the Stanford White frames, but different. So I stepped behind to find the maker’s name, if I could; and behold, a landscape of great Price! Wrayne never even knew it was there. Mistake of that famulus, I believe.”
“You liked it?” Maurice put the question almost timidly. The landscape he loved seemed to him suddenly to lose importance, in the presence of his friend’s deep feeling.
“You’ve surpassed your best self in it! I can’t tell why, but there’s something in it that assuages for me the grief of things; something of yourself that you’ve put into it, I suppose,—some beauty or solemnity that was not there, really, until you yourself brought it there, with your own two hands. Perhaps I never knew, till now, why men buy landscapes—” Saltonstall spoke dreamily. His recollective eyes, looking far beyond hislistener, seemed to peer into some Paradise not wholly lost.
Both men were moved. They had more to say to each other, things not to be told over egg-shells and coffee-stains.
“I suppose,” hesitated Maurice, as they took their hats, “you wonder why I never painted out that figure on the back, at any rate, before I sent off the landscape?”
“Oh, no,” answered the other, simply. “I know how you felt, I do, indeed! You couldn’t quite bring yourself to do it, could you, even though you tried? Neither could I, I am sure. Something keeps me from wanting to destroy it; I don’t yet know whether it’s the person or the painting! Though, of course, I never saw any picture of Amouretta that was really right, except that one little thing of yours you showed last winter in the Vanderbilt Gallery; and what’s-his-name, the man at the desk, said very emphatically it wasn’t for sale—”
“No,” interrupted Maurice, “it wasn’t for sale, and never will be. It is one of the few things I couldn’t take money for! My wife and I intended to give it as a wedding-present to Amouretta. We both of us loved that child; we felt herroseleaf exquisiteness! Helen was so happy, tying up that little portrait in white paper. And afterwards,—well, I boxed it up and addressed it to you, with a note explaining it and begging you to keep it. But it was overlooked and forgotten, during my illness; and when I got up, I found I had lost my nerve about sending it to you. I feared you might not like it, or worse yet, might think I was trying to sell you something—”
“Oh, Maurice Price,” sighed the collector, “then evenyoudidn’t know how much IneededAmouretta, and anything that would recall her truly, just as she was, and not as those who didn’t know her imagined her to be? We Saltonstalls—” But the rest was lost in the roar of the traffic, as the men crossed the avenue, and walked rapidly together toward the Court of New Departures. It was not too late in the day to read the morning lesson to young Hal; it would do him good. After all, though, he was a plucky chap; the sooner he had whatever per cent was coming to him, the better. An amicable three-cornered arrangement could be made, about that. Certainly, where there’s a quartette of skirts, somebody must pay the piper!