CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VI

AfterWilbur’s departure for Chicago on his quest for two fortunes, Miss Anthon came to see much of Simeon Erard; she accepted him more easily, now that the young business man’s normal humour was not present to supply a good-natured criticism. Erard was training her, she told Mrs. Anthon when she was in a provoking mood. He was teaching her what to see and how to see it. More subtly, he was training her in values.

Erard had shown her the famous new picture by Degas; what was more exciting, had presented the painter himself. One clear day he had taken her out to a quiet studio at Passy, where she had seen a great master at work on a fresco for an American building. Again, they had visited old Sader at work on his marvellous gates, which had been on the way for a dozen years. Sader seemed to her a very undistinguished person,—thickset, with a long grizzled beard, and like a tradesman in his cotton blouse. The sculptor shut the door after them and locked it; and, as if to waive commonplaces, pointed to the famous gates. While she was speculating over these huge clay panels, which seemed to her roughly broken by scrolls and dashes, Sader mumbled, “One is Fire; the other Water—Dante.” Then Erard pointed here and there to strangelittle figures, flung on, stuck on carelessly, as if attached to the panels by chance when finished. Each figure, part worm, part man, seemed to writhe in agony. When her eyes wandered over the gates, they presented the blur she had first caught. She felt disappointed with herself and ashamed of her feeble imagination.

Erard and Sader came to her rescue by calling her attention to other pieces of work,—heads of children, fauns, half-completed allegories. In an adjoining room a young man, who looked like an intelligent workman, was slowly chiselling at the curls of a head. Erard pointed out another subject, which she thought was half-finished,—a delicate head emerging, as from a lake, out of the hard white block. The pure bold outline of the face, the features scraped to an ascetic thinness, were accentuated by the roughness of the unfinished marble. Near by was a group, a man and a woman in a convulsive embrace, half caught in the marble, half emergent, as if struggling in all their tense limbs to escape from the bondage of the stone.

“That’s his trick,” whispered Erard, when Sader had withdrawn to the gates. “A kind of impressionism in marble. He does a lot of these little things. You can call ’em what you like,—Adam and Eve, Paolo and Francesca, Life and Death.”

Miss Anthon looked puzzled and hopeless at his blasphemy. Authority still counted for much in her mind. The sculptor returned to bow them out, with the same fat, complacent smile with which he had welcomed them.

“The old fool will live to see his stuff despised,” Erard remarked carelessly, when they were on the street again. “They are all trying to tell their story in another language, straining to utter the impossible. But Matthews isn’t. He’s the American you made so much of in New York and Chicago.Hedoesn’t try any experiments,—he knows too much finance for that,—but he tells the whole story. Dancing girls and little boys and Venuses,—the usual outfit, as Wilbur would say.”

Then they crossed the Quarter to Matthews’ studio, which was a much more habitable place than Sader’s chilly shed. They found the sculptor entertaining a fashionably dressed woman and her escort. This Mrs. Warmister, whom Erard seemed to know rather intimately, was poking about the studio in a nervous manner, emitting now and then admiring exclamations. The young man with an impressive manner—Erard called him Salters—tried clumsily to follow her inconsequential chatter. The sculptor smoked a cigarette with a bored air, while engaging in the elusive talk. “This kind of person infests the studios,” Erard whispered to his companion, indicating the voluble Mrs. Warmister. “She booms Matthews, socially, and all that.”

After a short chat with Matthews, who made Miss Anthon feel that she was at an afternoon tea, they drove back towards the busy avenues along the river.

“He makes his ten thousand a year,” Erard commented. “Nothing there you couldn’t take in at a glance. The glorification of the obvious.” In the intervals of street-racket Erard’s phrases dropped likelittle pieces of hail. “But he is on a safer road than old Sader. He has stuck to the tradition of his art, not tried to paint with a chisel or to tell stories with a brush.”

Miss Anthon was depressed and silent. The conflict of theories and ideals, instead of exciting her, as at first, was subduing. “There’s something suggestive to me in Sader’s place, though,” she remonstrated at last. “We are all striving for some kind of freedom, for some escape, and his figures make you feel that impulse.”

When the cab stopped at her hotel, she remembered gratefully that Mrs. Anthon had sallied forth with an acquaintance for the afternoon.

“So you are searching for the means to express an unutterable longing?” Erard questioned mischievously, when they were alone.

She looked at him restlessly before replying, then said impulsively,—

“Shall I ever do anything? Tell me—what is there for me?”

She was leaning on her folded arms, her short coat thrown open negligently, her hat laid aside. Her black eyes gleamed with the intense interest of her appeal. Erard measured her face before he replied. Her hair waved back over her head in thick, rich brown masses. The upper part of the face was thin, mobile, but he noticed for the first time that the chin and jaw over-balanced the other features.

“Why are you anxious to get more than the phrases? to talk ‘art’ fluently when you are over there?”—hepointed vaguely across the boulevard. “You can do that now pretty well. When you are married, and have your palace in St. Louis or Chicago, you can pay ten times what it’s worth for the truck you buy of us. You can become the patroness.”

Miss Anthon drew back, hurt, vexed at her childish confidence. “At least I shall know what to look for in those I patronize. And I am not as simple as you seem to think.”

The sting pleased Erard. “You have come into the procession too late to do anything,” he continued more seriously. “You should have begun with your parents and your grandparents; they became unfortunately prosperous and lived where their senses were dulled.”

“Can I not make up for them?”

“Only in part. We Americans like to think, as your friend Wilbur does, that we can get anything on earth we want. Europe is our Sphinx; we never penetrate the riddle. While we are making toys, up springs some offspring of these ‘effete’ nations and accomplishes like a giant.”

“Some American women do succeed. There is Mrs. Ralston Brown,” Miss Anthon retorted defiantly. She had gone to the master for confession, and he dealt her out sneers. “And why were the salons last spring full of foreign work? Why do the French critics howl for protection for French artists?”

“Do you want to paint jaunty, slap-dash portraits like Mrs. Brown’s ‘A Poet’? Because if you do, I will promise you a picture in the Champ de Mars in five years.”

The bewildered expression settled down on her face again. Mrs. Ralston Brown was an instance of feminine ability of which she was proud.

“No, no,” Erard continued, sipping at his tea. “Don’t believe the journalists of life. Really we Americans have done nothing but journalism in the arts. Certainly many of the ‘smart’ things in the salons this season, every season, are signed with American names.”

He continued to lecture her in his bitter strain. Her head ached over conflicting thoughts, and she wished he would leave her. “Not that we shouldn’t try!” he threw out, at last, as a sop to her prejudices. “But try, my young lady, in a way that our lordly race is too impatient to suffer.”

“What do you mean?” She fancied that he had a new theory of training to suggest.

“Learn something. Not pose in the ridiculous belief that our genius will create a universe all for ourselves. New experiments, new inventions in education and art,—we patent ’em by hundreds,—as if one could invent the strands of a cable that anchors the ship.”

Miss Anthon followed him eagerly; now the comforting definite word was to be spoken. “And I personally? what am I to do?” she asked insistently.

“You are an ignorant young person.”

She nodded humbly.

“After learning a little French and German, less Latin, in some place where they have lectures and go about in caps and gowns, you went to an art-school for a year or two. In the place you called a college, youwere taught a little advanced algebra and a survey of European history; perhaps some lackadaisical young man taught you to ‘love’ Tennyson and Browning. Now, chance having brought you to Europe, you undertake ‘art’ in the same fashion of godlike heedlessness.”

Miss Anthon winced and then laughed. “That’s about so,” she admitted.

“And really all you want out of ‘art’ or anything else is amusement, and—gratification for your vanity.”

“You think that is all? Well, you have taken the—the—”

She could have cried. Erard suggested another topic.

“Why do our Amazons despise the otherrôle! Isn’t it enough to be clever and charming and a woman?”

She looked at his ungainly figure, and curled her lip haughtily. Ifthatwere her inevitable career, she would not spend herself on him. “You mean something between a politician in petticoats and a dabbler in art!”

“Well, one of these days we shall see you, running your little piece of the world over there, like our friend Wilbur. An ‘authority’ on ‘art,’ a great reader of papers before clubs, and an ‘organizer,’ and a ‘power.’ A gracious, energetic woman, who knows how to make good looks imposing, to order a large house and make herself felt in her neighbourhood,—an important career I am sketching for you.Voilà!”

He rose with a disagreeable, high-pitched laugh. Irony was his keenest weapon. It rendered him invulnerable, because it placed “the others” in a category by themselves—deluded simpletons, who had hissympathy. Miss Anthon felt the mortification of being included among “the others.”

“You have been very good to take me about,” she said simply, with reserves of dignity, “and to tell me so plainly that I am a—fool. I shall have to leave you now to dress for dinner.”

When Erard had gone, she struggled to support her pride. How deluded she had been to think that he could find anything important in her, or could be interested in her abilities! Like a silly country girl, she had been dreaming of—well, making a noise in the world. She could never endure to see him again, for he had read her character too easily. And he was right in thinking her ridiculous. She was crude: how the work she had seen at the studios had puzzled her! Finally she resolved to see him again, to show him that she had sense enough left to laugh at her own folly.

Back to IndexNext