"Ah, but it's splendidly furnished!"
"With rejected pictures, you mean?"
"With ideals!" she exclaimed in a tone caught from her brother, and
which would have been irritating to Stanwell if it had not been moving.
He gave a slight shrug and took up his hat; but she interposed to say
that if it didn't make any difference she would prefer to have him go
and sit with poor Caspar, while she ran for the doctor and did some
household errands by the way. Stanwell divined in her request the need
for a brief respite from Caspar, and though he shivered at the thought
of her facing the cold in the scant jacket which had been her only wear
since he had known her, he let her go without a protest, and betook
himself to Arran's studio.
He found the little sculptor dressed and roaming fretfully about the
melancholy room in which he and his plastic off-spring lodged together.
In one corner, where Kate's chair and work-table stood, a scrupulous
order prevailed; but the rest of the apartment had the dreary
untidiness, the damp grey look, which the worker in clay usually
creates about him. In the centre of this desert stood the shrouded
image of Caspar's disappointment: the colossal rejected group as to
which his friends could seldom remember whether it represented Jove
hurling a Titan from Olympus or Science Subjugating Religion. Caspar
was the sworn foe of religion, which he appeared to regard as
indirectly connected with his inability to sell his statues.
The sculptor was too ill to work, and Stanwell's appearance loosed the
pent-up springs of his talk.
"Hullo! What are you doing here? I thought Kate had gone over to sit to
you. She wanted a little fresh air? I should say enough of it came in
through these windows. How like a woman, when she's agreed to do a
certain thing, to make up her mind at once that she's got to do
another! They don't call it caprice--it's always duty: that's the
humour of it. I'll be bound Kate alleged a pressing engagement. Sorry
she should waste your time so, my dear fellow. Here am I with plenty of
it to burn--look at my hand shake; I can't do a thing! Well, luckily
nobody wants me to--posterity may suffer, but the present generation
isn't worrying. The present generation wants to be carved in
sugar-candy, or painted in maple syrup. It doesn't want to be told the
truth about itself or about anything in the universe. The prophets have
always lived in a garret, my dear fellow--only the ravens don't always
find out their address! Speaking of ravens, though, Kate told me she
saw old Shepson coming out of your place--I say, old man, you're not
meditating an apostasy? You're not doing the kind of thing that Shepson
would look at?"
Stanwell laughed. "Oh, he looked at them--but only to confirm his
reasons for rejecting them."
"Ha! ha! That's right--he wanted to refresh his memory with their
badness. But how on earth did he happen to have any doubts on the
subject? I should as soon have thought of his coming in here!"
Stanwell winced at the analogy, but replied in Caspar's key: "Oh, he's
not as sure of any of us as he is of you!"
The sculptor received this tribute with a joyous expletive. "By God,
no, he's sure of me, as you say! He and his tribe know that I'll starve
in my tracks sooner than make a concession--a single concession. A
fellow came after me once to do an angel on a tombstone--an angel
leaning against a broken column, and looking as if it was waiting for
the elevator and wondering why in hell it didn't come. He said he
wanted me to show that the deceased was pining to get to heaven. As she
was his wife I didn't dispute the proposition, but when I asked him
what he understood by _heaven_ he grabbed his hat and walked out of the
studio. _He_ didn't wait for the elevator."
Stanwell listened with a practised smile. The story of the man who had
come to order the angel was so familiar to Arran's friends that its
only interest consisted in waiting to see what variation he would give
to the retort which had put the mourner to flight. It was generally
supposed that this visit represented the sculptor's nearest approach to
an order, and one of his fellow-craftsmen had been heard to remark that
if Caspar _had_ made the tombstone, the lady under it would have tried
harder than ever to get to heaven. To Stanwell's present mood, however,
there was something more than usually irritating in the gratuitous
assumption that Arran had only to derogate from his altitude to have a
press of purchasers at his door.
"Well--what did you gain by kicking your widower out?" he objected.
"Why can't a man do two kinds of work--one to please himself and the
other to boil the pot?"
Caspar stopped in his jerky walk--the stride of a tall man attempted
with short legs (it sometimes appeared to Stanwell to symbolize his
artistic endeavour).
"Why can't a man--why can't he? You ask me that, Stanwell?" he blazed
out.
"Yes; and what's more, I'll answer you: it isn't everybody who can
adapt his art as he wants to!"
Caspar stood before him, gasping with incredulous scorn. "Adapt his
art? As he wants to? Unhappy wretch, what lingo are you talking? If you
mean that it isn't every honest man who can be a renegade--"
"That's just what I do mean: he can't unless he's clever enough to see
the other side."
The deep groan with which Caspar met this casuistry was cut short by a
knock at the studio door, which thereupon opened to admit a small
dapperly-dressed man with a silky moustache and mildly-bulging eyes.
"Ah, Mungold," exclaimed Stanwell, to cover the gloomy silence with
which Arran received the new-comer; whereat the latter, with the air of
a man who does not easily believe himself unwelcome, bestowed a
sympathetic pressure on the sculptor's hand.
"My dear chap, I've just met Miss Arran, and she told me you were laid
up with a bad cold, so I thought I'd pop in and cheer you up a little."
He looked about him with a smile evidently intended as the first act in
his beneficent programme.
Mr. Mungold, freshly soaped and scented, with a neat glaze of gentility
extending from his varnished boot-tips to his glossy hat, looked like
the "flattered" portrait of a common man--just such an idealized
presentment as his own brush might have produced. As a rule, however,
he devoted himself to the portrayal of the other sex, painting ladies
in syrup, as Arran said, with marsh-mallow children leaning against
their knees. He was as quick as a dressmaker at catching new ideas, and
the style of his pictures changed as rapidly as that of the
fashion-plates. One year all his sitters were done on oval canvases,
with gauzy draperies and a background of clouds; the next they were
seated under an immemorial elm, caressing enormous dogs obviously
constructed out of door-mats. Whatever their occupation they always
looked straight out of the canvas, giving the impression that their
eyes were fixed on an invisible camera. This gave rise to the rumour
that Mungold "did" his portraits from photographs; it was even said
that he had invented a way of transferring an enlarged photograph to
the canvas, so that all that remained was to fill in the colours. If he
heard of this charge he took it calmly, but probably it had not reached
the high spheres in which he moved, and in which he was esteemed for
painting pearls better, and making unsuggestive children look lovelier,
than any of his fellow-craftsmen. Mr. Mungold, in fact, deemed it a
part of his professional duty to study his sitters in their home-life;
and as this life was chiefly led in the homes of others, he was too
busy dining out and going to the opera to mingle much with his
colleagues. But as no one is wholly consistent, Mr. Mungold had lately
belied his ambitions by falling in love with Kate Arran; and with that
gentle persistency which made him so wonderful in managing obstreperous
infantile sitters, he had contrived to establish a precarious footing
in her brother's studio.
Part of his success was due to the fact that he could not easily think
himself the object of a rebuff. If it seemed to hit him he regarded it
as deflected from its aim, and brushed it aside with a discreet
gesture. A touch of comedy was lent to the situation by the fact that,
till Kate Arran's coming, Mungold had always served as her brother's
Awful Example. It was a mark of Arran's lack of humour that he
persisted in regarding the little man as a conscious apostate, instead
of perceiving that he painted as he could, in a world which really
looked to him like a vast confectioner's window. Stanwell had never
quite divined how Mungold had won over the sister, to whom her
brother's prejudices were a religion; but he suspected the painter of
having united a deep belief in Caspar's gifts with the occasional offer
of opportune delicacies--the port-wine or game which Kate had no other
means of procuring for her patient.
Stanwell, persuaded that Mungold would stick to his post till Miss
Arran's return, felt himself freed from his promise to the latter and
left the incongruous pair to themselves. There had been a time when it
amused him to see Caspar submerge the painter in a torrent of turbid
eloquence, and to watch poor Mungold sputtering under the rush of
denunciation, yet emitting little bland phrases of assent, like a
gentleman drowning correctly, in gloves and eye-glasses. But Stanwell
was beginning to find less food for gaiety than for envy in the
contemplation of his colleague. After all, Mungold held his ground, he
did not go under. Spite of his manifest absurdity he had succeeded in
propitiating the sister, in making himself tolerated by the brother;
and the fact that his success was due to the ability to purchase
port-wine and game was not in this case a mitigating circumstance.
Stanwell knew that the Arrans really preferred him to Mungold, but the
knowledge only sharpened his envy of the latter, whose friendship could
command visible tokens of expression, while poor Stanwell's remained
gloomily inarticulate. As he returned to his over-populated studio and
surveyed anew the pictures of which Shepson had not offered to relieve
him, he found himself wishing, not for Mungold's lack of scruples, for
he believed him to be the most scrupulous of men, but for that happy
mean of talent which so completely satisfied the artistic requirements
of the inartistic. Mungold was not to be despised as an apostate--he
was to be congratulated as a man whose aptitudes were exactly in line
with the taste of the persons he liked to dine with.
At this point in his meditations, Stanwell's eye fell on the portrait
of Miss Gladys Glyde. It was really, as Shepson said, as good as a
Mungold; yet it could never be made to serve the same purpose, because
it was the work of a man who knew it was bad art. That at least would
have been Caspar Arran's contention--poor Caspar, who produced as bad
art in the service of the loftiest convictions! The distinction began
to look like mere casuistry to Stanwell. He had never been very proud
of his own adaptability. It had seemed to him to indicate the lack of
an individual stand-point, and he had tried to counteract it by the
cultivation of an aggressively personal style. But the cursed knack was
in his fingers--he was always at the mercy of some other man's
sensations, and there were moments when he blushed to remember that his
grandfather had spent a laborious life-time in Rome, copying the Old
Masters for a generation which lacked the facile resource of the
camera. Now, however, it struck him that the ancestral versatility
might be a useful inheritance. In art, after all, the greatest of them
did what they could; and if a man could do several things instead of
one, why should he not profit by the multiplicity of his gifts? If one
had two talents why not serve two masters?