II
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?
