They had taken rendezvous with De Gollyer for noon of the next
day. By eleven Inga had the studio in order, arranging it with
solicitous eye, hastening out to add the pleasant touch of a few
clusters of gold and red poppies with the instinct of the woman
who felt that she too, and her work, were on trial. When she
returned she found Dangerfield in a fever of restlessness tramping
the room. She came in quietly, arranging the brilliant notes of
fragile petals so as to lighten up the somberness of the great
renaissance table, watching meanwhile the furrowed moods which fell
rapidly over the face of the artist. For the moment he was the
Dangerfield of the first days, creature of wavering temperament and
undisciplined impulses. The meeting with De Gollyer had come to
him as a cry in the wilderness. The old life, the old traditions,
the old habits, deep as the deepest instincts, came thronging back
to him, reclaiming him in this dark continent of the sixth floor
back of Teagan’s Arcade. Passions little and great pass away but
the comradeship of man to man abides through failure and disaster.
One word from De Gollyer had loosened a thousand voices calling him
back.
Beyond all this social atavism was an impending test. De Gollyer
was not simply a facile-lipped critic but one who knew. A profound
discouragement seized him, a weakening sense of despair. He turned
suddenly and his hand trembled a little.
“Wish I’d never met him; wish I’d never told him to come,” he
blurted out.
Inga, watching him, understood him better.
“You have nothing to fear,” she said with a touch of pride.
Dangerfield did not seem to have heard her for he whipped about the
room a score of times, before stopping suddenly.
“Inga,” he said nervously, “what would you show him? Just the
things I did lately, that bit of Grand Street and the Italian
wedding? They’re the best, I think. Or would you show the sketches
at the seashore also? Or what would you do?”
Womanlike, she resented this sudden timidity before the judgment
of another, resenting that the masculine authority which she had
herself built up should yield, if only momentarily, before the
personality of another man.
“Begin with the beginning. Show him all just as you did it. It’s
that that’s wonderful; to follow each step, to realize how you have
grown to what you are doing now.”
“You think so?” he said doubtfully.
“Why do you care so much what one man thinks?” she said with a
flash of anger. “It’s you who have done the big thing. I am not
afraid.”
“It’s not entirely what he will say,” he answered slowly. “It’s the
criticism I shall pass on myself when I look at them through his
eyes. So you would begin with the beginning. Yes, I think you’re
right.”
He gave a sigh of relief, as though this were a difficult point
settled, and began to rummage among the records of the year,
sorting the canvases as he wished to have them presented.
She moved over to the open window and waited, her arm on the sill,
looking out, listening for a footstep in the hall with a little
frightened tremulous leap of the heart, feeling the imminence of a
new phase in the life of this man whose every hour she had shared,
a phase that held something ominous for her, the rushing in of
the outer world, the return of old friends, the thronging in of
admiring acquaintances, the multitude pouring in to separate them
and claim its right in the life which had been wholly hers.
De Gollyer arrived even before the hour set, an eagerness in his
eyes, an expectancy in the rapid prying glances which scoured the
studio, delving into the darkest corner, divining what lay behind
each concealing screen. He was surprised--plainly surprised--at the
exquisite harmony of the studio. Man of the world, connoisseur of
the human drama strongly blended with the militant honesty of the
genuine critic, he had a sure instinct of the right word and the
right action. He felt in Inga a strong antagonism and a certain
unease before his intruding attitude.
“My dear Mrs. Dangerfield,” he said, going to her instantly. “I
congratulate the wife. Everything is perfect, absolutely,--just
so, even to that little touch of red poppies against the carved
wood--beautiful, beautiful--just in its place, adds just the note,
just the right value. Mr. John Sargent couldn’t have done better.
Dan, if you’ve painted anything half as good as this room I shall
be satisfied.”
Despite herself, Inga began to laugh. There was something about the
little man in his twinkling eyes and shooting eyebrows, his easy
adaptability and winning friendliness which could not be resisted.
“The place is in good tone,” said Dangerfield, pleased.
“Yes, my boy,” said De Gollyer, moving from right to left, nodding
his head in appreciative contemplation, “and I’ve known you long
enough to know that you don’t deserve the slightest credit for it.
Charming, absolutely charming. Mrs. Dangerfield, may I count on
you to decorate the new apartment which I am taking this winter?”
“Indeed, Mr. De Gollyer,” said Inga, laughing, “you’re quite wrong.
I had very little to do with it.”
“And that note of red poppies?” said De Gollyer triumphantly. “Ah,
what about that? No, no, I refuse to believe anything but what I
want to believe.” And as Dangerfield had turned from the easel and
was searching among the stacked canvases making his choice, De
Gollyer, holding out his hand to Inga, looked her steadily in the
eyes and added: “Mrs. Dangerfield, you are a wonderful woman. Allow
me to thank you in the name of American art.”
She understood him beneath his jest and smiled back her serious
smile--yet a little uneasy, feeling a new and strange world which
had come in with his entrance.
“I’m so glad you have come to see what he has done,” she said
shyly. She looked covertly at her husband and added with a glance
of subtle warning, almost imploring: “You’re the first he has shown
anything to. Your opinion will mean everything to him.”
“Madame, I am a friend before I am a critic.”
He gave her a reassuring nod and this moment of friendly treachery
seemed to bring them into an intimate alliance.
He had indeed made up his mind to adjust his criticism to the
evident exigencies of his friend’s situation, but this benevolent
attitude disappeared with his first inspection. De Gollyer, as
Dangerfield had said, had more than erudition and the compilation
of technique at his finger tips. His instinct was keen and his
judgment seldom erred. He had expected to witness a measure of
growth along the lines of the polite and rather dramatic talent
which his friend had shown in the past. He was quite unprepared
for the revolution which had been wrought.
“Going to show you what I have been at from month to month,” said
Dangerfield nervously. “I think it will interest you. At any rate
that is Inga’s advice and I am going to follow it.”
De Gollyer immediately bowed to Inga and said in a sharp staccato
which marked the passage of the man of the world and the arrival of
the critic: “Quite so, quite so, and now, my boy, let’s go to it. I
want to see everything, good, bad and indifferent. We’ll go through
everything once--without any phrases, sans phrases, sans phrases!
The eagle’s point of view first--_le coup d’œil_!”
“That suits me,” said Dangerfield, by the easel. “Well, here are
some of the first things, a few sketches I made last Spring when
this young lady was getting hold of me.”
He brought out a half dozen of the rapid, powerful, incisive
sketches which had marked even to his own surprise the complete and
unpremeditated revolution in his art.
“Eh, what?” said De Gollyer with an exclamation of astonishment,
“one moment, one moment.” He took a few quick steps forward, pursed
his lips, drew his eyebrows together and stared at the canvases.
Then he looked up suddenly at Dangerfield with an astonishment so
complete that a great wave of happiness came into the soul of the
artist. “Um-um, is it so? Well, well, indeed?--Suppose we go a
little slow. Last Spring, hey? You did that last Spring? My boy, my
boy, you should have warned me. Well, well, is it possible?”
A sudden excitement caught him. On that instant, he divined what
was ahead and with it came a certain possessive joy of discovery,
that he, De Gollyer, would have it within his power to announce a
new phenomenon to an interested world. He became transformed into
a veritable dynamo of human curiosity, excited as a connoisseur
who in a casual rummaging suddenly stumbles upon a treasure of the
past. He wished to see everything, even the hurried fragments,
details of arms and shoulders, suggestions of profiles and figures
blocked in with a few rapid fertile lines. In his excitement he
seemed to forget their presence, or rather to have suddenly assumed
command of the situation by right of a superior authority, giving
his orders in quick, nervous staccato, insisting on recalling
canvases which had pleased him, discarding a few with peremptory
directness.
“Not bad, not bad for last year but no place here, my boy. You’ve
gone beyond that. Burn them up or, better still, send them to that
ass Carvallo; that’s just what he would understand. He could sell
a dozen of those to his moving-picture aristocracy. Put it aside,
Dan, it doesn’t belong. No American sentimentalism, no Hudson River
school! We’ve gone beyond Queen Victoria!”
The rejections which the little Czar of criticism ordered into the
scrap heap with intolerant finger were few and, to tell the truth,
quite merited. Dangerfield himself admitted their justice with a
curt nod of his head while the canvas went shying across the floor,
like a discarded rag.
They came to the first impressionistic water colors of the
summer, rapid notes of vagrant flitting moods of nature seized in
unconscious rapture of the moment. De Gollyer was plainly puzzled.
“It’s the same and yet not the same,” he said, staring at them.
“It’s more personal. Beautiful, brilliant,--you waste nothing;
right to the mark; you’re after the essential thing and you’ve
got it, but it’s personal. It’s your mood. Mind you, I don’t say
they’re not astonishing; they are. Don’t know any one else who
could have done it just the same way. We must exhibit them all
together--a riot of sensations. By Jove, yes, sensations, that’s
just the word,” he said, delighted to have found the exact term.
“But we’re looking for bigger things, Dan--_le coup d’œil_, the big
vision. Um-um, very fine, very fine, bewildering but sensations. My
boy, they’re _your_ moods. If I must pass a criticism, pass a very
captious criticism, you were too much in love, that’s it, too much
in love. Mrs. Dangerfield, as a man of the world I am altogether
charming; as a critic I am merciless. Dan was too much in love
with you when he did these. A captious criticism, a very captious
criticism--but go on, go on--I feel something coming.”
De Gollyer’s remarks spread a certain embarrassment which he was
too keen not to notice and too clever to seem to observe. Inga sat
down, clasping her hands over her knee, staring at the speaker with
a sudden alarmed perception that beneath the apparent lightness of
his phrases, there was a man who saw with a clarity which left her
with a sudden sense of impending danger. Dangerfield, to cover his
confusion, for he himself recognized instantly the subtlety of his
friend’s criticism, hastened across the studio to return with a new
batch, the record of their sojourn along the broken coasts of the
sea. Then he stepped back, moved over to the chair where Inga sat
staring ahead and laid his hand on her shoulder with a premonition
of what must lie in her mind before this inspection of De Gollyer’s
which divined those things beneath the surface of the paint--which
they themselves had never faced in complete honesty to themselves.
When De Gollyer had reached that period which had been the crisis
of Dangerfield’s internal conflict, those weeks in which he had won
a final dispassionate independence, the little man sprang forward
eagerly as a falcon sighting its prey.
“At last! I knew it, my boy, I knew it,” he cried in a fever of
excitement. “I’ve hunches--prophetic hunches and I knew this was
coming. I knew it from the moment you showed me that first sketch.
My boy, this _is_ it! By Jove, this is fine! You’ve gone far,
you’ve gone beyond yourself. By Jove, this is a smasher!” He turned
and held out his hand, aglow with enthusiasm. “Dan, your hand;
criticism ends here, you amaze me. I didn’t think you could do it.
By Jove, no, I didn’t!”
Inga forgot all her alarmed resentment at one sight of
Dangerfield’s face.
“It is good,” said Dangerfield reverently, staring beyond the
canvas.
“Let’s go on, let’s go on,” said De Gollyer, impatiently.
As canvas succeeded canvas his amazement and delight increased.
When they came to the record of the winter; to those clear,
powerful revelations of the hidden treasures of the great
metropolis which later furnished New York with the artistic
sensation of years, De Gollyer suddenly sat down as though weakened
under the powerful stress of discovery, absorbed in a mood of
complete silence which might have deceived any one but the friend
who knew the value of this rare tribute of profound amazement.
At the end, instead of a new outburst of enthusiasm which Inga
had expected, he got up, walked over to the table, picked up a
cigarette absent-mindedly and went to the window, looking out
without bothering himself to phrase a compliment. She felt a sudden
sinking of the heart, a brief transitory emotion which took flight
on the instant that Dangerfield turned towards her with a glow in
his eyes such as she had never seen. She went to him, raised his
hand to her lips, turned aside to hide a sudden rush of tears to
her eyes, and feeling the need of the two friends to be alone in
their emotion, nodded and went out.
When De Gollyer turned at last and came back down the room,
Dangerfield, catching his eye, said quietly:
“Yes, I know what I’ve done but I wondered if you--others would see
it.”
“My boy, it will be a riot,” said De Gollyer solemnly. “You’ve
given me a thrill, you have, and that’s a fact. How the devil did
it happen?”
Dangerfield silently extended his hand toward the door through
which Inga had passed.
“It was sink or swim. Kismet, that’s the answer.”
“We gave you six months down at the club,” said De Gollyer.
“Remember the last night you were there?”
“I remember.”
“We expected anything then--any moment.”
“And you were right.”
“We lost track of you. We heard you’d dropped out. How in thunder
did she ever do it?”
“There are some women, very few, in this world,” said Dangerfield
slowly, “who were put here to do just such things, who are only
happy when they are giving everything, pulling some poor devil
out of the gutter and putting him on his feet again,--some one of
course worth the saving.”
“My boy,” said De Gollyer, “I know you’ll understand my curiosity.
You and I have gone shoulder and shoulder through too many things
to beat about the bush. Tell me about your wife. I confess to you
that I cannot make her out. As you know, I rather pride myself on
reading human nature.”
Dangerfield was silent a moment, then he installed himself in the
chair opposite his friend, drew out his pipe and began to smoke.
Between the two had been one of those rare intimacies only
privileged to men of the world who have early reached that stage in
their intellectual development when they have rejected shams and
take a mutual delight in the recognition of life as it is in its
profound varieties and inexplicable turns of fate. When they spoke
to each other it was always in absolute confidence and without
attempt at masking their thoughts.
“Bob,” said Dangerfield, “I will be quite frank with you. My wife
is as great a mystery to me to-day as the first time she came
into my life. I know nothing of her past or what she may do in
the future. And I don’t want to know. She came into my life by
chance, if you wish to call it so. She saw me as you remember me,
down and out! That was enough for her. She had to attach herself
to me, to cling to me, to fight for the spark that was still left
flickering. She is of a different race, different instincts, than
we are. There is something of the strange forbidding reticence of
the north countries about her. I’ve tried in the moments when I
loved her most to force myself beyond this barrier. I have never
succeeded. Now I don’t want to. Sometimes I try to understand her
and I think, in a way, that the time when I was wildest, the most
helpless, I brought her the keenest happiness. It’s a curious thing
to say, and you are perhaps the only man who will understand it,
but sometimes I think she misses that. Now that the battle has been
won, you may not believe it, but I think the rest will count for
very little,--the success and the public and all that. When that
comes she will be very lonely, poor child.”
He drew a long puff, gazed dreamily into the recesses of the studio
and said:
“Did you ever, when you were a boy, catch a bird, imprison it in a
cage, feed it and make a friend of it till it would sing whenever
you came near and then feel an irresistible impulse to throw open
the bars and give it liberty?” He stopped, looked down at the floor
and added: “Understand?”
“Yes, by Jove, I do understand,” said De Gollyer. “The Slav women
are like that. I’ve seen them. There is something imprisoned about
her, something unfinished. I think that is what struck me, what
puzzled me. Dan, she won’t like what’s ahead, the going back, the
following you into your world. For of course you will go back now,
you can’t help it.”
“I am very proud of her,” said Dangerfield loyally. “Will I go
back? I don’t know. It depends on many things--on her happiness
principally. I have loved her passionately and I have suffered, as
I never thought I could suffer, out of the blindest jealousy, at
the very thought that another man could have meant anything to her
in her past. I suffered and that is perhaps what I needed the most.”
De Gollyer smiled and with a quick movement of his hand indicated
the canvases arranged against the wall.
“I saw all that, I saw what you had been through. I shouldn’t have
said what I did about your being too much in love, my boy, but I
didn’t say what I saw afterward.”
“Understand me,” said Dangerfield loyally; “I love her.”
“I understand the distinction.”
“What I mean is that the great madness has passed. If it had not I
should have been consumed by it. The feeling that has succeeded,
the feeling that has given me the power to look out of myself--the
thing you feel there in my work, is the feeling of absolute
tranquillity with all the world. I have made the harbor. As for
Inga, she has a right to everything in my life, nothing could ever
make me give her up. I am bound to her by gratitude which nothing
can ever shake and at the bottom, Bob, I know that the best thing
for me would be to live her life, to stay out of all the old life,
keep out of the society rigmarole and the parade.”
“My boy, you are quite right,” said De Gollyer with a smile. “But
will you do it? You’ve been a man of the world and when you once
get that point of view it’s in the blood. It calls you whether
you’re in Timbuctoo or buried in a shanty in Harlem. Things like
that are in the blood, Dan, and then it’s something to come back,
to feel the joy of the fight and, damn it, it’s your right to feel
that.”
The door opened and Inga came in, hesitating a moment on the
threshold with an inquiring glance at the two men who were relaxed
in their moment of intimacy.
“We’ve been talking over plans for the exhibition,” said De Gollyer
glibly. “It must be a smasher, the biggest thing of the season. I’m
going to bring up a couple of men to-morrow, Mrs. Dangerfield. We
are going to make Dan the sensation of the town.”
“I am very glad,” she said, with a nod of her head. She looked at
them a moment and then took a seat quietly. She knew that they had
not been discussing what he had said.
Dangerfield arose and coming over to her put his hand lightly
over her head. She looked up quickly and smiled, but into her
heart again there crept a sense of something undecipherable and
threatening, the end of something, the beginning of a new confusing
phase, a new world which came crowding against her.