The Hermit and the Wild Woman

KATE ARRAN was Stanwell’s sitter; but the janitor had hardly filled the stove when she came in to say that she could not sit.  Caspar had had a bad night:  he was depressed and feverish, and in spite of his protests she had resolved to fetch the doctor.  Care sat on her usually tranquil features, and Stanwell, as he offered to go for the doctor, wished he could have caught in his picture the wide gloom of her brow.  There was always a kind of Biblical breadth in the expression of her emotions, and today she suggested a text from Isaiah.

“But you’re not busy?” she hesitated; in the full voice which seemed tuned to a solemn rhetoric.

“I meant to be—­with you.  But since that’s off I’m quite unemployed.”

She smiled interrogatively.  “I thought perhaps you had an order.  I met Mr. Shepson rubbing his hands on the landing.”

“Was he rubbing his hands?  Well, it was not over me.  He says that from the style of my pictures he doesn’t suppose I want to sell.”

She looked at him superbly.  “Well, do you?”

He embraced his bleak walls in a circular gesture.  “Judge for yourself!”

“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?