BERTHA'S PORTRAIT IS DISCUSSED
Joe Moss was delighted with the Haneys, for they talked of their native
West as people should talk. They were as absolute in their convictions
as a Kentuckian. For them there was no other "God's country," and as it
was his latest dream to go West and "do a big thing on a cliff or
something" he put off every other engagement to enjoy their racy speech.
He said at the first sitting: "I've had an idea of working the
Thorwaldsen trick: find some fine site out there, some wall of rock
close to the railway, and hew out a monster grizzly or mountain lion.
The railway could then advertise it, you see; trains could stop there
'five minutes to permit a view of Moss's Lion'; they could use a cut of
it on all their folders. If there was a spring near by they could
advertise the water and bottle it, a picture of my lion on the label.
Ah, it is a fine scheme!"
"'Tis so," said Haney. "I wonder nobody thought of it before."
"It takes a Yankee, after all, to plan new suspender buttons," the
sculptor replied. And all the time he talked his hands were dabbling,
his thumbs gouging, his dibble cutting and smoothing.
Haney watched him with amused glance. "Sure, I didn't know ye went at it
so. I thought ye chipped each picture out o' stone." And when the
process of molding in plaster was explained to him, he said: "'Tis like
McArdle's trade entirely. He takes a rise in the world since I know he's
an artist like yourself."
"What is his 'line'?"
"Pattern-maker for a stove foundry."
Moss beamed. "Just what I'd like to be if they'd only pay a little more
wages and furnish a better place to work."
Bertha never knew when he was in earnest, so habitually mocking was his
tone. But she grew towards a perception of his ideal, and dimly
apprehended in him a mind far beyond any she had ever known. Mrs. Moss,
almost as reticent as Mrs. Haney herself, came and went about the studio
brightly, briskly, keeping vigilant eye on her husband's mail,
moistening his "mud ladies," and defending him from inopportune callers,
insistent beggars, and wandering models. Bertha, though sitting with the
stolid patience of a Mississippi clam-fisher, was thinking at express
speed. Her mind was of that highly developed type where a hint sets in
motion a score of related cognitions, and a word here and there in
Moss's rambling remarks instructed her like a flash of light. She was at
school, in a high sense, and improving her time. The sketch was
expanding into a carefully studied portrait bust and Moss was happy.
One day a fellow-artist came in casually, and they both squinted,
measured, and compared the portrait and herself with the calm absorption
of a couple of prize-pig committeemen at a cattle-show. "You see, this
line is shorter," the stranger said, almost laying his finger on
Bertha's neck. "Not so straight, as you've got it. That's a fine line--"
"I know it is!"
"And you don't want to spoil it. I don't like your fad for cutting down
the bust. The neck is nothing but a connecting link between the head and
the bust. Now here you have a charming and youthful head and face--let
the neck at least suggest the woman below."
"Oh yes, that's good logic, provided you're after that. But what I want
here is spring-time--just a fresh, alert, lovely fragment. This pure
line must be kept free from any earthiness."
"I suppose you know what you want; I won't say you don't. But if I were
painting her, I'd get that sweeping line there that ends by suggesting
the summer."
They talked disjointedly, elliptically, and of course mainly of the
clay; and yet Bertha grew each moment more clearly aware that they
considered her not merely interesting but beautiful, and this was a most
momentous and developing assurance. She had hoped to be called
"good-looking," but no one thus far (excepting Ben Fordyce) had ever
called her beautiful; and these judgments on the part of Joe Moss and
his brother artist were made the more moving by reason of their
precision of knowledge and their professional candor. They spoke as
freely in discussion of her charm as if she were deaf and dumb.
The painter, who had been introduced in a careless way as "Mr. Humiston,
of New York," turned to Bertha at last, and, assuming the ordinary
politeness of a human being, said: "I'd like to make a study of you,
too, Mrs. Haney, if you'll permit. I can bring my canvas in here and
work with Joe, so that it needn't be any trouble to you."
Bertha, her wealth still new upon her, had no suspicion of the motives
of those who addressed her, was deeply flattered by this request, and as
Moss made no objection, she consented.
The only thing that troubled Moss was her growing tendency to lapse into
troubled thought. "Remember, now, you're the crocus, the first violet,
or something like that--not the last rose of summer. Don't think, don't
droop! There, that's right! What have you to think or droop about? When
you're as old and blasé as Humiston there, you'll have a right to ponder
the mysteries, but not now. You and I are young, thank God!"
Humiston was dabbling at his small canvas swiftly, lightly, as unmoved
by his fellow-artist as if his voice were the wind in the casement. He
was a tall, sickly looking man with grizzled hair, and pale, deeply
lined face. He was fresh from Paris with a small exhibition of his
pictures, which were very advanced, as Mrs. Moss privately explained to
Bertha. "And he's rather bitter against Americans because they don't
appreciate his work. But Joe asks: 'Why should they?' They're
undemocratic--little high-keyed 'precious' bits; pictures for other
artists, not real paintings, or they are unacceptable otherwise. He's a
wonderful technician, though, and he'll make an exquisite sketch of
you."
The Western girl-wife was completely fascinated by this small, dusky,
dim, and richly colored heart of the fierce and terrible city whose
material bulk alone is known to the world. To go from the crash and roar
of the savage streets into this studio was like climbing from the level
of the water in the Black Cañon to the sunlit, grassy peaks where the
Indian pink blossoms in silence. She was of the aspiring nature. She had
commonly played with children older than herself. She had read books she
could not understand. She had always reached upward, and here she found
herself surrounded by men and women who excited her imagination as
Congdon had done. They helped her forget the doubt of herself and her
future, which was gnawing almost ceaselessly in her brain, and she was
sorry when Moss said to her: "Come in once more, to-morrow, and see me
do the real sculptor's act. No, don't look at it" (he flung a cloth over
his work); "you may look at it to-morrow."
"May I see my picture?" she asked of Humiston.
He turned the easel towards her without a word.
"Good work!" cried Moss.
Mrs. Moss came from her dark corner. "I knew you'd do something
exquisite."
Bertha looked at it in silence. It was as lovely in color as a flower, a
dream-girl, not Bertha Haney. And at last she said: "It's fine, but it
isn't me."
Humiston broke forth almost violently. "Of course it isn't you; it's the
way you look to me. I never paint people as they look to themselves nor
to their friends. I am painting my impression of you."
"Do you really see me like that?" she both asked and exclaimed. And at
the moment she was more moving than she had ever been before, and
Humiston, in a voice of anguish, cried:
"My God, why didn't I do her like that?" And he fell to coughing so
violently that Bertha shuddered.
Moss defended himself. "I couldn't do her in _all_ her fine poses," he
complained. "I had to select. Why didn't you do her that way yourself?"
The painter put his short-hand sketch away with a sigh. "If you venture
as far as New York, I hope you and the Captain will visit my studio," he
said.
With no suspicion of being passed from hand to hand, she promised to
send him her address, and said: "I'd like to see the pictures you have
here."
Moss became abusive. "Now see here, Jerry, I can't let you take Mrs.
Haney to that show of yours. I'll go myself to point out their weak
points."
"I know their weak points a bloody sight better than you do," answered
Humiston, readily.
"If you do you don't speak of 'em."
"Why should I? You don't call out the defects of your 'hardware,' do
you?"
Mrs. Moss interposed. "That's just what he does do, and it hurts trade.
I think I'll take Mrs. Haney over to see the pictures myself."
Humiston brightened. "Very well; but you must all lunch with me. You're
about the only civilized people I know in this crazy town, and I need
you."
"No," said Bertha. "It's our treat. You all come over and eat with us."
Haney, who had been keeping in the background, now came forward. "I
second that motion," he heartily said. "We don't get a chance every day
to feed a bunch of artists."
"You can have that pleasure any day here," said Moss. "Our noses are
always over the bars, waiting."
When she emerged from the gallery an hour later Bertha enjoyed an
exalted sense of having been carried through some upper, serener world,
where business, politics, and fashion had little place. It was "only a
dip," as Mrs. Moss said--just to show the way; but it set the girl's
brain astir with half-formed, disconnected aspirations. Only as she
re-entered the hotel (the centre of obsequious servants) did she become
again the wife of Marshall Haney, and Mrs. Moss, noting the eager
attention of the waiters, was amazed and delighted at the look of calm
command which came over the girl's face.
"Art is fine and sweet as a side issue," said Julia to her husband, as
they were going in, "but money makes the porters jump."
Bertha, composed and serious, seated her guests at a table which had
been reserved for her near a window and charmingly decorated with
flowers. She put Moss at her left hand and Humiston at her right, and as
the Eastern man settled into place, he said: "Really, now, this isn't so
bad." His experienced eye had noted the swift flocking of the waiters,
and with cynical amusement he commented upon it. "These people must
_smell_ of money!" and in his heart acknowledged that he and Moss were
not so very different from the servitors, after all. "They're out for
tens, we're after thousands; that's the main point of difference."
Bertha, once the cutlets were served, was able to give attention to the
talk--Humiston's talk (he was celebrated as a monologist), for he had
resumed the discussion into which he and Moss had fallen. "I don't
believe in helping people to study art. I don't believe in charity. This
interfering with the laws of the universe that kill off the crippled and
the weakly is pure sentimentalism that will fill the world with
deformed, diseased, and incapable persons."
"You're a vile reactionary!" cried Moss.
"I am not--I'm for the future. I want to see the world full of beauty."
"Physical beauty?"
"Yes, physical beauty. I want to see vice and crime and crooked limbs
and low brows die out--not perpetuated. I believe in educating the
people to the lovely in line and color."
As he pursued this line of inexorable argument Bertha looked at him in
wonder. Did he mean what he said? His burning eyes seemed sincere--and
yet he did not fail to accept a second helping of the mushrooms. There
was power in the man. He pushed the walls of her intellectual world very
wide apart. He came from a strange, chaotic region--from a land where
ordinary modes and motives seemed lost or perverted. He took a delight
in shocking them all. Morality was a convention--a hypocritic agreement
on the part of the few to reserve freedom to themselves at the expense
of the many. "Art is impossible to little people, to those who starve
the big side of their nature, for fear of Mrs. Grundy. Look at the real
people--Rachel, Wagner, Turner, Bernhardt, and a thousand others. Were
they bound by the marriage laws? What will these crowds of tiny men and
petty women do who come from the country parlors and corn-shocks of the
West? They will puddle around a little while, paint and muddle a few
petty things, then marry and go back to the ironing-board and the furrow
where they belong. What's the matter with American art? It's too cursed
normal, that's what. It's too neat and sweet and restrained--no license,
no "go" to it. What's the matter with you, to be personal?"
"Too well balanced."
"Precisely. You _talk_ like a man of power, but model like a cursed
niggling prude. You're bitten with the new madness. You're the Bryan of
art. 'The dear people' is your cry. Damn the people! They don't know a
good thing when they see it. Why consider the millions? Consider the
few, those who have the taste and the dollars. That's the way all the
big men of the past had to do. Look at Rubens and Michael Angelo and
Titian--all the big bunch; they were all frank, gross feeders, lovers of
beauty, defiant of conventions."
He had forgotten where he sat, but he was not neglecting his hostess. He
took a satanic satisfaction in seeing her lovely eyes widen and glow as
he went on. Subtly flattering her by including her among the very few
who could understand his ideals, he seemed to draw her apart to his
side--appealing to her for support against the coarse and foolish hosts
represented by the Mosses, while Marshall Haney sat in a kind of stupor,
his eyes alone speaking, as if to ask: "What the divil is the little man
with the cough so hot about?"
Moss, accustomed to Humiston's savage diatribes, roared out objections
or laughed him to scorn, while Mrs. Moss tried her best to turn the mad
artist's mind upon more suitable subjects. He had been deeply hurt and
financially distressed by the failure of his exhibits in Pittsburg and
Chicago, and was now taking it out on his friends. His passion, his
bitter, vengeful cry against the ignorant masses of the world was
something Bertha had read about, but never felt; but she quivered now
with the half-disclosed fury of the disappointed austere soul.
Could it be possible that this savage man, so worn and ill, had painted
those dim, vague pictures of flower-like girls whose limbs were involved
in blossoming vines?
He concluded at last: "The only place in the world to-day for an artist
is Paris. In no other city can he live his own life in frank fulness,
and find patrons who see the subtlest meaning of a line."
Bertha was tired of all this--mentally weary and confused; and she felt
very grateful to Mrs. Moss, who came to the rescue the moment Humiston
paused.
"There, Mrs. Haney, that is the end of Professor Jerry Spoopendyke's
lecture on the undesirability of America as a place of residence--_for
him_. Of course, he don't mind selling his pictures just to enlighten
our night of ignorance, but as for going to Sunday-school or keeping the
decalogue, that's our job."
Humiston had the grace to smile. "I beg your pardon, Mrs. Haney, I have
been a fool. But that monkey over there--Joe Moss--provoked me with his
accursed heresies about the democracy of art. Art has no democracy, and
democracy will never have an art--"
"There, there!" warned Moss, "you said all that before."
The painter wrenched himself away and turned to Bertha. "You _are_
coming to New York, Mrs. Haney?"
"I don't know," she said. "We may."
"If you do, don't fail to let me know. I would like to see you."
"All right," said Bertha, "I'll send you a line." And her frank smile
made him sorry to say good-bye even for the day.
As Mart was going up the elevator he sighed and said: "It takes all
kinds of people to make up a world--Mr. Hummockstone is wan of the
t'others. He has a grouch agin the universe. Sure but he's been housin'
a gnawin' serpent. How 'twill all end I dunno."
When alone in her room, Bertha's mind again reverted to Ben Fordyce. As
she compared him with Humiston, he seemed handsomer and more boyishly
frank than ever. What did Joe Moss mean by calling Mr. Humiston "blasé."
She had seen that word in novels and it always meant something wicked.
How could this weary, sick man be wicked? She pitied him and wished to
help him. "Why should he take so much interest in me? He don't have to.
Of course the Mosses are nice to me on Congdon's account, but why does
this great artist want me to come to his studio in New York? He talks
poor, so maybe he wants me to buy some of his pictures." That her money
was a lure for wasps she did not yet realize. That the waiters and
clerks buzzed round her because she was rich, she knew; but that these
men, who talked of beauty and the higher life, could flatter her with
attentions with a base motive was incredible.
She was shrewd as her Yankee forbears, but she was also an idealist, and
these artist folk now seemed to her the highest types she had ever known
or was likely to know. She felt the mystery and the power in Humiston's
personality, and his bitter and rebellious, almost blasphemous, words
were counterpoised by his paintings, which she acknowledged to be
beautiful--too beautiful for her to comprehend. He looked like a man of
sorrow and weary of battle, and she longed to know more about him. When
he was not fierce he was melancholy; evidently his life had been a
failure. "Why shouldn't I buy some of his pictures?" she asked herself.
Hitherto the answer to any such question had been, "Can we afford it?"
but now another and deeper query came in answer, like an echo: "Is it
right to spend Mart Haney's money? I am only his trained nurse, not his
wife," and she now knew that she could not be his wife. She shrank from
the weight of his hand, and each day made clearer the wide spaces of
years, of family, of ideals, which lay between them. The kiss Ben
Fordyce had pressed upon her lips had brought this revelation. But of
this she was not yet aware; she was only conscious of a growing dread of
the future. Her duties as his nurse were lightening. Lucius, indeed, now
took many of her tasks upon himself, and she no longer helped him with
his shoes or coat, and, what was still more significant, she could not
calmly think of going back to these wifely services.
She dwelt treacherously on Haney's own admission: that she had been in a
sense entrapped. He had believed himself a dying man at the time, and
she had been too excited, too exalted by the lurid romance of the scene
to be clear about anything save the wish and the will to save him; and
now she knew that at bottom of all her willingness to serve him lay the
consciousness that he was on his death-bed. Afterwards he had been to
her only a big-hearted, generous friend, in need of love and
companionship. This understanding had made it easy for her to prepare
his meals, to help him, as a nurse would help him, to dress and undress.
She had lost all of the fear and much of the admiration in which she
used to greet him as he swung into the office of her little hotel. He
had become to her an invalid, a child to be jollied and humored, and yet
respected; for no one could have been kinder or more scrupulously just
than he. And it was the recollection of all his acts of self-sacrifice
and loving patience which gave her assurance that he would never require
obedience, though he might sue for it.
Her danger lay in herself. "If he _does_ ask me to be his real
wife--then I must either agree or leave. It won't be right for me to
take all these benefits unless--"
And with this thought, the big house in the Springs, the sleek horses,
their shining carriages, the auto-car, her dresses, the service of the
big hotel, and the consideration her husband's money gave to her, all
assumed a new and corrupting lustre. She was growing accustomed to
luxury and the thought of giving it up made her shiver like one who
faces a plunge into a dark night and an icy river. Besides, her
sacrifice would involve others. Her mother, her brother, were already
roundly ensnared in Mart's bounty.
Her head was aching with it all, when a comforting thought came to her.
It was not necessary to decide it at that moment, and with a sigh of
relief she threw it aside and sat down to write a letter to her mother.
"I ought to have written before, but I've been jumped right into the
middle of things here. The letters Frank Congdon gave me took me into an
artistic bunch about as gay and queer as Frank is, but they've been
mighty nice to me. I've been setting for my bust to Mr. Moss, who is a
sculptor. He has a big studio clear on the top of one of the tallest
blocks here and has some dandy lamps and things. I've bought some to
bring back. I met a Mr. Humiston there from New York, and he made a
sketch of me--wants me to see his studio in New York. I don't know
whether I'll go on or let Mart go with Lucius. Lucius is all right--I
don't see how I got on without him. He knows everything. I wish I had
half the education he's got. He's up on all the society ways and puts me
on. For instance, he told me the nice thing would be to give a dinner to
this artist push and to the people that Dorothy give me a letter to, and
I'm going to do it. Lucius will look out for the whole thing. You should
see the way the waiters tend. I reckon Lucius has told 'em we're made of
money. I'm afraid we're getting spoilt, Muzz. It would be pretty tough
to go back to the hotel now, wouldn't it?
"We went to see Mart's sister, Fanny. Her house was a sight. It was
clean enough, but littered--well, litter is no name for it--but she's a
good old thing and so is McArdle. He sat and looked at us the whole time
like a turkey blind in one eye--never said a word the whole time but
'pass the p-taties.' I liked him though. He's a kind of sculptor,
too--makes patterns for all these little acorns and leaves and
do-funnies on stoves. They've got forty-'leven children and need help
and I'm perfectly willing Mart should help 'em. We're looking up houses
now. He's going to buy a place for 'em on the west side. Wednesday night
I went to see the Doctor Brents, Dorothy's friends. They had a
dinner--very nice, but they all kind o' sat 'round and waited for us to
perform. I guess they thought we were mountain lions. But they didn't
make much out o' me. They was one chap there with goggles who looked at
Mart like an undertaker. He's a scientific doctor--one of these fellers
that invent new ways of doing things. His name is Halliday. I liked Dr.
Brent pretty well--but Mrs. Brent only so-so. The doctor wants to
'dagnose' Mart's case--says it won't cost a cent. We all went to a show
at night and the Captain was just about petered to a point. He's better
though. The lower altitude helps his circulation. I guess his heart _is_
affected. He's afraid now he won't ever be able to go back to the mines.
He wants to slide on to New York and see his father and wants me to
go--but I'd rather come home--I'm homesick for the hills. They're nice
to me here--but I want to see the old Peak once more. Tell" (here she
wrote "Ben" and blotted it) "tell Mr. Fordyce that we're all right and
to keep us posted every day. We see by the papers that the mine-owners
are going to throw the unions out of business. If they try that they'll
be war again. We'll be home soon--or at least I will. I'm getting
home-sicker every minute as I write."
She added a postscript. "Don't show my letters to _any one_. I wish I'd
'a' had a little more schooling."