That summer, Maurice painted many other landscapes. There were falls,
brooks, and rocks in 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 but sympathetically, 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 be _made_ to 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 very fond 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, the _dernier cri_ sort 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 her authentic air of _belle
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 of _your_ things?” 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 to _live_ on my thirty
per cent? _I_ don’t want 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
in _my_ way!”
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 you are 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;
and incidentally, 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 himself upon 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 unhappy elsewhere.
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 honest conceit, 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
than once, 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....