BERTHA BECOMES A PATRON OF ART
Bertha, deeply engrossed in the conceptions called up by this visit, did
not feel like calling upon the Mosses, even though they were almost next
door. She was troubled, too, with a feeling of helplessness in the use
of a pen. She wanted to write to Fordyce, but was afraid to do so,
knowing that a letter would disclose her ignorance of polite forms; but
this, instead of discouraging her, roused her to a determination to
learn. This was the saving clause in her character. She acknowledged
shortcomings, but not defeats. Here again she was of the spirit that
lifts the self-made man.
The Congdons had been most generous of letters of introduction, and in
addition to those to Mrs. Brent and the Mosses, Bertha was in possession
of two or three envelopes addressed to people in New York City,
presumably artists also, as they bore the names of certain studios. The
note to Moss was unaffected and simple in itself, quite innocent of any
qualification, but the letter which had privately preceded it was in the
true Congdon vein, and Moss, like Mrs. Brent, did not delay his call.
His card was in the Haney box when they returned. "Sorry to miss you.
Come into my studio at five if you can," he had pencilled on the back.
"Your artistic bunch," Congdon had written, "won't mind meeting one of
the most successful and picturesque of our gamblers, Marshall Haney,
especially as the walls of his big house are bare and his wife is
pretty. They are ripping types, old man; not in the 'best society,' you
understand, but I know you'll like 'em. Be as good to 'em as you can
without involving anybody. Little Mrs. Haney is a corker. Good start on
a self-made career. They're both unsophisticated in a way, and a little
real sympathy will drag their secret history to the light. Do a sketch
of her for me. She's likely to be famous. Haney is rolling in dough
these days--(miner)--and she's bound for some whooping big thing, I
don't know what, but she's like a country boy with a stirring ambition.
It wouldn't surprise me to see her on Fifth Avenue one of these days.
With these few burning words I commend them into your plastic hands.
Don't let Sammy paint her, for God's sake. Oh yes, I worked 'em for a
couple of canvases. What do you think. In this buoyant climate we all
move. Yours in the velvet."
With such a letter before him Joe Moss awaited his amazing guests with
impatience, cautioning the few who were in the secret not to dodge when
the Captain reached for his pocket-handkerchief. "And, above all, you
are to praise Colorado and condemn the East as a place of residence."
Joe prided himself on his _savoir faire_ and on his apparel, which had
nothing about it to distinguish the sculptor. "In fact," he often said,
"there _are_ people who say I'm not a sculptor. Be that as it may, I
manage by daily care to look like a clerk in a hardware store."
And he did. He customarily wore a suit of pepper and salt, neat and
trig, a "bowler hat" (as they say in London), a ready-made four-in-hand
tie, and a small pearl scarf-pin. "No more fuzzy hair for me, no red
tie, no dandruff," he had said on his return from Paris. "Right here we
melt into the undistinguishable ocean of the millions, unless we can be
distinguished by reason of our sculpture." He always included Julia, his
wife, in this way (although she never "modelled a lick"), for she wrote
all his letters, made out all his checks, and took charge of him
generally. Some said his success was due to her management. She was a
dark-eyed, smiling little woman, exquisite in her dress and brisk in her
manner.
Their studio occupied the whole north side of the attic of a big office
building in the heart of the city's traffic. "We want to be in the midst
of trade, but above it," Moss explained to those who wondered at his
choice of location. "Sculpture, as I see it, is a part of architecture.
I'm not above modelling a door-knocker if they'll only let me do it my
way. Sculpture was a part of life in the old days, and we don't want to
make it a thing too 'precious' now. I want to get close to the business
men, not to avoid them. I like the roar of trade."
The Haneys, therefore, led by the sagacious Lucius, soon found
themselves in the Wisconsin Block, and shooting aloft in a bronze
elevator that seemed fired from a cannon ("express to the 10th floor"),
with nothing to suggest art in the men or in the signs about them. On
the thirteenth story they alighted, and, walking up one flight of
stairs, found themselves at the end of a bright hall, before a door
which bore, in simple gold letters, "Jos. Moss, Sculptor." Bertha heard
laughter within, and her heart misgave her. It was not easy for her to
meet these artist folk. Of business men, miners, railway managers she
was unafraid, but these people who joke and bully-rag each other and
talk high philosophy one minute and gossip the next, like the Congdons,
were "pretty swift" for her. After a moment's pause she said to the
Captain, "They can't kill us; here goes!" and knocked gently.
Moss himself opened the door, and his cordial, "How de do, Mrs. Haney,"
established him in her mind at once as a good fellow. He was quite as
direct as Congdon. "I'm glad to see you," he said to the Captain. "Come
in." He looked keenly at Lucius, who composedly explained himself. "The
Captain is a little lame, and I just came along to see that he got here
all right. I'll be back at 5.30."
The door opened into a big room, which was darkened at the windows and
lighted by shaded electric globes. It was cool and bare in effect.
Around a small table in a far corner a half-dozen people were sitting.
Mrs. Moss, who was pouring tea, rose in her place at the tea-urn as her
husband approached, and cordially shook hands with her guests. "I'm very
glad you came. Please tell me how you'll have your tea," she said.
Bertha was accustomed to take her tea "any old way," and said so, being
influenced by Mrs. Moss' candid eyes and merry smile. Haney, with a
queer feeling of being on the stage as a character in a play, sank
heavily into the chair at his hostess' right hand and said: "I never
took tea in my life, but I'm not dodgin' anything you mix."
Joe earnestly protested. "Don't do it, Captain, there's some Scotch down
cellar."
Mrs. Moss indicated one or two other dimly seen faces about her and
introduced their owners in a most casual manner while she compounded a
hot drink for her Western guest.
"How long have you been in our horrible town, Mr. Haney?" she asked,
heedful of Joe's warning.
"One day, ma'am."
"You're just 'passing through,' I presume--that's the way all Colorado
people do."
Haney smiled. He was getting the drift of her remarks. "'Tis natural,
ma'am; for, you see, 'tis a long run and a heavy grade, and hard to
side-track on the way."
Bertha, to whom Moss addressed himself, was candidly looking about
her--profoundly interested in what she saw. Dim forms in bronze and
plaster stood on shelves, brackets, and pedestals, and at the end of the
long room a big group of figures writhed as if in mortal combat. It was
a work-shop--that was evident even to her--with one small nook devoted
to tea and talk.
"Would you like to poke about?" he asked, anticipating her request.
"Yes, I would," she bluntly replied.
"There isn't much to see," he said. "I'm the kind of sculptor who works
on order. I believe in the 'art for service' idea, and when I get an
order I fill it as well as I can, make it as beautiful as I can, and
send it out on its mission. I'd like to model mantel-pieces and
andirons, because they are seen and actually influence people's lives.
What I started to say was this: my stuff all goes out--my real stuff; my
fool failures stay by me--this thing, for instance." He indicated the
big clump of nude forms. "I had an 'idea' when I started, but it was too
ambitious and too literary. Moreover, it isn't democratic. It don't gibe
with the present. I'd be a wild-animal sculptor if I knew enough about
them."
It was a profoundly moving experience for this raw mountain-bred girl to
stand there beside that colossal group while the man who had modelled it
took her into his confidence. There was no affectation in Moss's candor.
He had come to a swift conclusion that Congdon had attempted to let him
into a trap, for Bertha's reticence and dignity quite reassured him. If
she had uttered a single one of the banal compliments with which
visitors "kill" artists he would have stopped short; but she didn't, she
only looked, and something in her face profoundly interested him.
Suddenly she turned and said:
"Tell me what it means."
"It don't mean anything--now. Originally I intended it to mean 'The
Conquest of Art by the Spirit of Business,' or something like that. I
started it when I was fresh from Paris, and wore a red tie and a pointed
beard. I keep it as a record of the folly into which exotic instruction
will lead a man. If I were to go at it now I'd turn the whole thing
around--I'd make it 'Art Inspiring Business.'"
Bertha did not follow his thought entirely, but she felt herself in the
presence of a serious problem and listening to something deep down in
the heart of a strong man. Here was another world--not an altogether
strange world, for Congdon had also talked to her of his work--but a
world so far removed from her own life that it seemed some other planet.
"How well he talks," she thought. "Like a book."
"How charming she is," he was thinking. And the alert, aspiring pose of
her head made his thumb nervously munch at the bit of clay he had picked
up.
They wandered up and down the long room while he showed her tiles for
mantel decoration, bronze cats' heads for door-knobs, and curious and
lovely figures for lamps and ash-trays. "I take a shy at 'most
everything," he explained.
"Do you sell these?" she asked, indicating some designs for electric
desk-lamps.
He smiled. "Sometimes--not as often as I'd like to."
"How much are they?"
"Fifty dollars each."
"I'll take them both," she said, and her pulse leaped with the pride of
being a patron of art.
"Now see here, Mrs. Haney, I'm not displaying these to you as a
salesman--not that I'm so very delicate about offering my things, but I
try to wait till a second visit." He really did feel mean about it.
"Don't take 'em--wait till to-morrow. They're pretty middling bad
anyway. They're supposed to be mountain lions, but as a matter of fact I
never saw a mountain lion outside the Zoo."
"They're lions, all right. I want 'em, and I know the Captain will like
'em." She stepped back to call Haney. But finding him surrounded by all
of the other callers (they had "got him going" telling stories of his
wild life in the West), she turned to the sculptor with a smile, saying:
"Never mind, _I_ know they're what he needs--if he don't." And Moss,
recalling Congdon's description of the Haneys' material condition,
answered: "Very well, if you insist; but I really feel as though I had
played a confidence game on you."
"Can you fix 'em up with lights?" she asked, eager as a child. "I mean
right now."
"Certainly." He unscrewed a couple of small bulbs from a near-by
bracket, and, putting them into place on the lamps, turned on the
current. She laughed out in delight. One of the lions was playing with
the stem which supported the light. As if rising from a sleep, he lay
upholding the globe on one high-raised paw. The other--a counterpart, or
nearly so in pose--had a different expression. The cub was snarling and
clutching at the light, as if it were a bird about to escape.
"I had an idea of putting them on the corners of a mantel to light a
piece of low relief," he explained, "but I never got at the relief. It
ought to be characteristic Western scenery, and I've never seen the
West. Shameful, isn't it?"
"I want you to do that mantel for me," she said. "I don't know what you
mean by 'low relief,' but I know it would be up to these, and they are
_right_!"
"Your trust in me is beautiful, Mrs. Haney, and maybe I'll come out this
summer and try to meet it."
"I wish you would," she said, and she meant it. "I'll show you
Colorado."
"If you're starting to be a patron of art, Mrs. Haney, don't overlook
Congdon; he's a first-class man." He became humorous again. "We're
moving swiftly, but I'm going to tell you that he wanted me to make a
sketch of you. If you'll be so good as to give me two or three sittings,
I'll do something we can send out to him--if you wish."
"What do you mean by a sketch?"
"Something like this." And, leading her before a curious, half-human,
veiled object, he began to unwind damp yellow cloths till at last the
head of a young woman appeared on a small revolving stand. It was very
dainty, very sweet, and smiling.
Bertha was puzzled. "It ain't your wife, and yet it looks like her."
"It is my wife's sister--a quick study from life--just the kind of thing
Frank wants. Will you sit for me A couple of mornings will answer." He
was eager to do her now. Her profile, so clear, so firm, so strangely
boyish, pleased him. He could feel the "snap" that the sketch would have
when it was done.
Bertha considered. She owed a great deal to the Congdons, and she liked
this man. Her homesickness at the moment was abated, and to stay two, or
even three, days in Chicago promised at the moment to be not so
dreadful, after all.
"Yes, I'll do it," she decided. "I don't know what Mr. Congdon will do
with a picture of me, but that's his funeral." And her laughing lip made
her seem again the untaught girl she really was.
As they went back to the group around the Captain, Julia Moss treated
her husband to a glance of commiseration, thinking him a bored and
defeated man. "You've missed the Captain's racy talk," she whispered.
Haney was enjoying himself very well in the "centre of the stage," and
doing himself credit. Never in his life had he known a keener audience
than these artists, who studied him from every point of view.
"Yes," Haney was saying, "'tis possible to bust a bank if the game is
straight--that is, at faro; but most machine games are built so that
'the house'--that is, the bank--is protected. My machines was always
straight. I'd as soon turn a sausage-grinder as run a wheel that was
'fixed' in me favor."
Bertha did not like this talk of his abandoned trade, and her cheeks
burned as she put her hand on his shoulder. "I reckon we'd better be
going."
He recovered himself. "Of course I quit all that when I married," he
explained, and dutifully rose.
"Oh, Mrs. Haney," pleaded Mrs. Moss, "don't take him away! We were just
getting light on the game of faro. Please sit down again."
Bertha resented this tone. "No, we've got to go. Glad to have met you."
She nodded towards the men who had risen. "Much obliged," she said again
to Moss. "I'll send for them things to-morrow."
Mrs. Moss cordially insisted on their coming again.
"She's going to pose for me," reported Moss. "To-morrow morning at ten?"
he inquired.
"Ten suits me as well as any time," Bertha replied.
Mrs. Moss beamed at Haney. "You come, too, Captain. I want to know more
about those delightful games of chance."
Bertha went back to her hotel with throbbing brain. The day had been so
full of experience! She was tired out and fairly bewildered by it all.
As her excitement ebbed and she had time to recover her own point of
view, Colorado, her home, the Springs, and the memory of her own people
came rushing back upon her, making the city and all it contained but a
handful of east wind. Ben's kiss burned vividly again upon her lips.
"Was it wrong of him to say what he did?" she began to ask herself. A
good-bye kiss would not have so deeply stirred her; it was his face, his
voice, his intensely uttered words which deeply thrilled her, even now,
as she recalled them one by one. "You are beautiful and I love you."
These were the most important words to a woman, and they had come at
last to her.
Then her cheek flushed with shame of her husband as she remembered his
gambling talk at the studio. "Why _must_ he always go back to that?" she
asked, hotly.
They ate their dinner in the big dining-room surrounded by waiters,
while the Captain discussed his sister and her family. "I'll do
something for Fan," he said. "She's a different sort from Charles.
McArdle seems a hard-workin' chap, the kind that a little help wouldn't
spile. What do you think of buyin' them a bit of a house somewhere?"
Bertha listened with a languor of interest new to her, and when he
repeated his question and asked her if she were tired, she answered:
"Yes; and I think I'll go to bed early to-night. It's been a hard day."