After Wilbur’s departure for Chicago on his quest for two fortunes,
Miss Anthon came to see much of Simeon Erard; she accepted him more
easily, now that the young business man’s normal humour was not present
to supply a good-natured criticism. Erard was training her, she told
Mrs. Anthon when she was in a provoking mood. He was teaching her what
to see and how to see it. More subtly, he was training her in values.
Erard had shown her the famous new picture by Degas; what was more
exciting, had presented the painter himself. One clear day he had
taken her out to a quiet studio at Passy, where she had seen a great
master at work on a fresco for an American building. Again, they had
visited old Sader at work on his marvellous gates, which had been on
the way for a dozen years. Sader seemed to her a very undistinguished
person,--thickset, with a long grizzled beard, and like a tradesman in
his cotton blouse. The sculptor shut the door after them and locked it;
and, as if to waive commonplaces, pointed to the famous gates. While
she was speculating over these huge clay panels, which seemed to her
roughly broken by scrolls and dashes, Sader mumbled, “One is Fire; the
other Water--Dante.” Then Erard pointed here and there to strange
little figures, flung on, stuck on carelessly, as if attached to the
panels by chance when finished. Each figure, part worm, part man,
seemed to writhe in agony. When her eyes wandered over the gates, they
presented the blur she had first caught. She felt disappointed with
herself and ashamed of her feeble imagination.
Erard and Sader came to her rescue by calling her attention to other
pieces of work,--heads of children, fauns, half-completed allegories.
In an adjoining room a young man, who looked like an intelligent
workman, was slowly chiselling at the curls of a head. Erard pointed
out another subject, which she thought was half-finished,--a delicate
head emerging, as from a lake, out of the hard white block. The pure
bold outline of the face, the features scraped to an ascetic thinness,
were accentuated by the roughness of the unfinished marble. Near by was
a group, a man and a woman in a convulsive embrace, half caught in the
marble, half emergent, as if struggling in all their tense limbs to
escape from the bondage of the stone.
“That’s his trick,” whispered Erard, when Sader had withdrawn to the
gates. “A kind of impressionism in marble. He does a lot of these
little things. You can call ’em what you like,--Adam and Eve, Paolo and
Francesca, Life and Death.”
Miss Anthon looked puzzled and hopeless at his blasphemy. Authority
still counted for much in her mind. The sculptor returned to bow them
out, with the same fat, complacent smile with which he had welcomed
them.
“The old fool will live to see his stuff despised,” Erard remarked
carelessly, when they were on the street again. “They are all trying
to tell their story in another language, straining to utter the
impossible. But Matthews isn’t. He’s the American you made so much of
in New York and Chicago. _He_ doesn’t try any experiments,--he knows
too much finance for that,--but he tells the whole story. Dancing girls
and little boys and Venuses,--the usual outfit, as Wilbur would say.”
Then they crossed the Quarter to Matthews’ studio, which was a much
more habitable place than Sader’s chilly shed. They found the sculptor
entertaining a fashionably dressed woman and her escort. This Mrs.
Warmister, whom Erard seemed to know rather intimately, was poking
about the studio in a nervous manner, emitting now and then admiring
exclamations. The young man with an impressive manner--Erard called
him Salters--tried clumsily to follow her inconsequential chatter.
The sculptor smoked a cigarette with a bored air, while engaging in
the elusive talk. “This kind of person infests the studios,” Erard
whispered to his companion, indicating the voluble Mrs. Warmister. “She
booms Matthews, socially, and all that.”
After a short chat with Matthews, who made Miss Anthon feel that she
was at an afternoon tea, they drove back towards the busy avenues along
the river.
“He makes his ten thousand a year,” Erard commented. “Nothing there you
couldn’t take in at a glance. The glorification of the obvious.” In the
intervals of street-racket Erard’s phrases dropped like little pieces
of hail. “But he is on a safer road than old Sader. He has stuck to
the tradition of his art, not tried to paint with a chisel or to tell
stories with a brush.”
Miss Anthon was depressed and silent. The conflict of theories and
ideals, instead of exciting her, as at first, was subduing. “There’s
something suggestive to me in Sader’s place, though,” she remonstrated
at last. “We are all striving for some kind of freedom, for some
escape, and his figures make you feel that impulse.”
When the cab stopped at her hotel, she remembered gratefully that Mrs.
Anthon had sallied forth with an acquaintance for the afternoon.
“So you are searching for the means to express an unutterable longing?”
Erard questioned mischievously, when they were alone.
She looked at him restlessly before replying, then said impulsively,--
“Shall I ever do anything? Tell me--what is there for me?”
She was leaning on her folded arms, her short coat thrown open
negligently, her hat laid aside. Her black eyes gleamed with the
intense interest of her appeal. Erard measured her face before he
replied. Her hair waved back over her head in thick, rich brown masses.
The upper part of the face was thin, mobile, but he noticed for the
first time that the chin and jaw over-balanced the other features.
“Why are you anxious to get more than the phrases? to talk ‘art’
fluently when you are over there?”--he pointed vaguely across the
boulevard. “You can do that now pretty well. When you are married, and
have your palace in St. Louis or Chicago, you can pay ten times what
it’s worth for the truck you buy of us. You can become the patroness.”
Miss Anthon drew back, hurt, vexed at her childish confidence. “At
least I shall know what to look for in those I patronize. And I am not
as simple as you seem to think.”
The sting pleased Erard. “You have come into the procession too late
to do anything,” he continued more seriously. “You should have begun
with your parents and your grandparents; they became unfortunately
prosperous and lived where their senses were dulled.”
“Can I not make up for them?”
“Only in part. We Americans like to think, as your friend Wilbur does,
that we can get anything on earth we want. Europe is our Sphinx; we
never penetrate the riddle. While we are making toys, up springs some
offspring of these ‘effete’ nations and accomplishes like a giant.”
“Some American women do succeed. There is Mrs. Ralston Brown,” Miss
Anthon retorted defiantly. She had gone to the master for confession,
and he dealt her out sneers. “And why were the salons last spring full
of foreign work? Why do the French critics howl for protection for
French artists?”
“Do you want to paint jaunty, slap-dash portraits like Mrs. Brown’s ‘A
Poet’? Because if you do, I will promise you a picture in the Champ de
Mars in five years.”
The bewildered expression settled down on her face again. Mrs. Ralston
Brown was an instance of feminine ability of which she was proud.
“No, no,” Erard continued, sipping at his tea. “Don’t believe the
journalists of life. Really we Americans have done nothing but
journalism in the arts. Certainly many of the ‘smart’ things in the
salons this season, every season, are signed with American names.”
He continued to lecture her in his bitter strain. Her head ached over
conflicting thoughts, and she wished he would leave her. “Not that we
shouldn’t try!” he threw out, at last, as a sop to her prejudices. “But
try, my young lady, in a way that our lordly race is too impatient to
suffer.”
“What do you mean?” She fancied that he had a new theory of training to
suggest.
“Learn something. Not pose in the ridiculous belief that our genius
will create a universe all for ourselves. New experiments, new
inventions in education and art,--we patent ’em by hundreds,--as if one
could invent the strands of a cable that anchors the ship.”
Miss Anthon followed him eagerly; now the comforting definite word
was to be spoken. “And I personally? what am I to do?” she asked
insistently.
“You are an ignorant young person.”
She nodded humbly.
“After learning a little French and German, less Latin, in some place
where they have lectures and go about in caps and gowns, you went to an
art-school for a year or two. In the place you called a college, you
were taught a little advanced algebra and a survey of European history;
perhaps some lackadaisical young man taught you to ‘love’ Tennyson and
Browning. Now, chance having brought you to Europe, you undertake ‘art’
in the same fashion of godlike heedlessness.”
Miss Anthon winced and then laughed. “That’s about so,” she admitted.
“And really all you want out of ‘art’ or anything else is amusement,
and--gratification for your vanity.”
“You think that is all? Well, you have taken the--the--”
She could have cried. Erard suggested another topic.
“Why do our Amazons despise the other _rôle_! Isn’t it enough to be
clever and charming and a woman?”
She looked at his ungainly figure, and curled her lip haughtily. If
_that_ were her inevitable career, she would not spend herself on him.
“You mean something between a politician in petticoats and a dabbler in
art!”
“Well, one of these days we shall see you, running your little piece
of the world over there, like our friend Wilbur. An ‘authority’ on
‘art,’ a great reader of papers before clubs, and an ‘organizer,’ and
a ‘power.’ A gracious, energetic woman, who knows how to make good
looks imposing, to order a large house and make herself felt in her
neighbourhood,--an important career I am sketching for you. _Voilà!_”
He rose with a disagreeable, high-pitched laugh. Irony was his keenest
weapon. It rendered him invulnerable, because it placed “the others” in
a category by themselves--deluded simpletons, who had his sympathy.
Miss Anthon felt the mortification of being included among “the others.”
“You have been very good to take me about,” she said simply, with
reserves of dignity, “and to tell me so plainly that I am a--fool. I
shall have to leave you now to dress for dinner.”
When Erard had gone, she struggled to support her pride. How deluded
she had been to think that he could find anything important in her,
or could be interested in her abilities! Like a silly country girl,
she had been dreaming of--well, making a noise in the world. She could
never endure to see him again, for he had read her character too
easily. And he was right in thinking her ridiculous. She was crude:
how the work she had seen at the studios had puzzled her! Finally she
resolved to see him again, to show him that she had sense enough left
to laugh at her own folly.