The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

  “Hullo, Shepson—I should say I was yelling. Did you ever feel such cold? That fool has forgotten to light the stove. Come in, but for heaven’s sake don’t take off your coat.”

  Mr. Shepson glanced about the studio with a look which seemed to say that, where so much else was lacking, the absence of a fire hardly added to the general sense of destitution.

  “Vell, you ain’t as vell fixed as Mr. Mungold—ever been to his studio, Mr. Sdanwell? De most exquisite blush hangings, and a gas-fire, shoost as natural—”

  “Oh, hang it, Shepson, do you call that a studio? It’s like a manicure’s parlor—or a beauty-doctor’s. By George,” broke off Stanwell, “and that’s just what he is!”

  “A peauty-doctor?”

  “Yes—oh, well, you wouldn’t see,” murmured Stanwell, mentally storing his epigram for more appreciative ears. “But you didn’t come just to make me envious of Mungold’s studio, did you?” And he pushed forward a chair for his visitor.

  The latter, however, declined it with a friendly motion. “Of gourse not, of gourse not—but Mr. Mungold is a sensible man. He makes a lot of money, you know.”

  “Is that what you came to tell me?” said Stanwell, still humorously.

  “My gootness, no—I was down stairs looking at Holbrook’s sdained class, and I shoost thought I’d sdep up a minute and take a beep at your vork.”

  “Much obliged, I’m sure—especially as I assume that you don’t want any of it.” Try as he would, Stanwell could not keep a note of eagerness from his voice. Mr. Shepson caught the note, and eyed him shrewdly through gold-rimmed glasses.

  “Vell, vell, vell—I’m not prepared to commit myself. Shoost let me take a look round, vill you?”

  “With the greatest pleasure—and I’ll give another shout for the coal.”

  Stanwell went out on the landing, and Mr. Shepson, left to himself, began a meditative progress about the room. On an easel facing the improvised dais stood a canvas on which a young woman’s head had been blocked in. It was just in that state of semi-evocation when a picture seems to detach itself from the grossness of its medium and live a wondrous moment in the actual; and the quality of the head—a vigorous dusky youthfulness, a kind of virgin majesty—lent itself to this illusion of life. Stanwell, who had re-entered the studio, could not help drawing a sharp breath as he saw the picture-dealer pausing with tilted head before this portrait: it seemed, at one moment, so impossible that he should not be struck with it, at the next so incredible that he should be.

  Shepson cocked his parrot-eye at the canvas with a desultory “Vat’s dat?” which sent a twinge through the young man.

  “That? Oh—a sketch of a young lady,” stammered Stanwell, flushing at the imbecility of his reply. “It’s Miss Arran, you know,” he added, “the sister of my neighbor here, the sculptor.”

  “Sgulpture? There’s no market for modern sgulpture except dombstones,” said Shepson disparagingly, passing on as if he included the sister’s portrait in his condemnation of her brother’s trade.

  Stanwell smiled, but more at himself than Shepson. How could he have supposed that the gross fool would see anything in his sketch of Kate Arran? He stood aside, straining after detachment, while the dealer continued his round of exploration, waddling up to the canvases on the walls, prodding with his stick at those stacked in corners, prying and peering sideways like a great bird rummaging for seed. He seemed to find little nutriment in the course of his search, for the sounds he emitted expressed a weary distaste for misdirected effort, and he completed his round without having thought it worth-while to draw a single canvas from its obscurity.

  As his visits always had the same result, Stanwell was reduced to wondering why he had come again; but Shepson was not the man to indulge in vague roamings through the field of art, and it was safe to conclude that his purpose would in due course reveal itself. His tour brought him at length face to face with the painter, where he paused, clasping his plump gloved hands behind him, and shaking an admonitory head.

  “Gleffer—very gleffer, of course—I suppose you’ll let me know when you want to sell anything?”

  “Let you know?” gasped Stanwell, to whom the room grew so suddenly hot that he thought for a moment the janitor must have made up the fire.

  Shepson gave a dry laugh. “Vell, it doesn’t sdrike me that you want to now—doing this kind of thing, you know!” And he swept a disparaging hand about the studio.

  “Ah,” said Stanwell, who could not keep a note of flatness out of his laugh.

  “See here, Mr. Sdanwell, vot you do it for? If you do it for yourself and the other fellows, vell and good—only don’t ask me round. I sell pictures, I don’t theorize about them. Ven you vant to sell, gome to me with what my gustomers vant. You can do it—you’re smart enough. You can do most anything. Vere’s dat bortrait of Gladys Glyde dat you showed at the Fake Club last autumn? Dat little thing in de Romney style? Dat vas a little shem, now,” exclaimed Mr. Shepson, whose pronunciation grew increasingly Semitic in moments of excitement.

  Stanwell stared. Called on a few months previously to contribute to an exhibition of skits on well-known artists, he had used the photograph of a favorite music-hall “star” as the basis of a picture in the pseudo-historical style affected by the fashionable portrait-painters of the day.

  “That thing?” he said contemptuously. “How on earth did you happen to see it?”

  “I see everything,” returned the dealer with an oracular smile. “If you’ve got it here let me look at it, please.”

  It cost Stanwell a few minutes’ search to unearth his skit—a clever blending of dash and sentimentality, in just the right proportion to create the impression of a powerful brush subdued to mildness by the charms of the sitter. Stanwell had thrown it off in a burst of imitative frenzy, beginning for the mere joy of the satire, but gradually fascinated by the problem of producing the requisite mingling of attributes. He was surprised now to see how well he had mixed the brew, and Shepson’s face reflected his approval.

  “By George! Dat’s something like,” the dealer ejaculated.

  “Like what? Like Mungold?”

  “Like business! Like a big order for a bortrait, Mr. Sdanwell —dat’s what it’s like!” cried Shepson, swinging round on him.

  Stanwell’s stare widened. “An order for me?”

  “Vy not? Accidents vill happen,” said Shepson jocosely. “De fact is, Mrs. Archer Millington wants to be bainted—you know her sdyle? Well, she prides herself on her likeness to little Gladys. And so ven she saw dat bicture of yours at de Fake Show she made a note of your name, and de udder day she sent for me and she says: ‘Mr. Shepson, I’m tired of Mungold—all my friends are done by Mungold. I vant to break away and be orishinal—I vant to be done by the bainter that did Gladys Glyde.’”

  Shepson waited to observe the result of this overwhelming announcement, and Stanwell, after a momentary halt of surprise, brought out laughingly: “But this is a Mungold. Is that what she calls being original?”

  “Shoost exactly,” said Shepson with unexpected acuteness. “That’s vat dey all want—something different from vat all deir friends have got, but shoost like it all de same. Dat’s de public all over! Mrs. Millington don’t want a Mungold, because everybody’s got a Mungold, but she wants a picture that’s in the same sdyle, because dat’s de sdyle, and she’s afraid of any oder!”

  Stanwell was listening with real enjoyment. “Ah, you know your public,” he murmured.

  “Vell, you do too, or you couldn’t have painted dat,” the dealer retorted. “And I don’t say dey’re wrong—mind dat. I like a bretty picture myself. And I understand the way dey feel. Dey’re villing to let Sargent take liberties vid them, because it’s like being punched in de ribs by a King; but if anybody else baints them, they vant to look as sweet as an obituary.” He turned earnestly to Stanwell. “The thing is to attract their notice. Vonce you got it they von’t gif you dime to sleep. And dat’s why I’m here to-d
ay—you’ve attracted Mrs. Millington’s notice, and vonce you’re hung in dat new ball-room—dat’s vere she vants you, in a big gold panel—vonce you’re dere, vy, you’ll be like the Pianola—no home gompleat without you. And I ain’t going to charge you any commission on the first job!”

  He stood before the painter, exuding a mixture of deference and patronage in which either element might prevail as events developed; but Stanwell could see in the incident only the stuff for a good story.

  “My dear Shepson,” he said, “what are you talking about? This is no picture of mine. Why don’t you ask me to do you a Corot? I hear there’s a great demand for them still in the West. Or an Arthur Schracker—I can do Schracker as well as Mungold,” he added, turning around a small canvas at which a paint-pot seemed to have been hurled with violence from a considerable distance.

  Shepson ignored the allusion to Corot, but screwed his eyes at the picture. “Ah, Schracker—vell, the Schracker sdyle would take first rate if you were a foreigner—but for goodness sake don’t try it on Mrs. Millington!”

  Stanwell pushed the two skits aside. “Oh, you can trust me,” he cried humorously. “The pearls and the eyes very large—the hands and feet very small. Isn’t that about the size of it?”

  “Dat’s it—dat’s it. And the check as big as you vant to make it! Mrs. Millington vants the picture finished in time for her first barty in the new ball-room, and if you rush the job she won’t sdickle at an extra thousand. Vill you come along with me now and arrange for your first zitting?”

  He stood before the young man, urgent, paternal, and so imbued with the importance of his mission that his face stretched to a ludicrous length of dismay when Stanwell, giving him a good-humored push, cried gaily: “My dear fellow, it will make my price rise still higher when the lady hears I’m too busy to take any orders at present—and that I’m actually obliged to turn you out now because I’m expecting a sitter!”

  It was part of Shepson’s business to have a quick ear for the note of finality, and he offered no resistance to Stanwell’s push; but on the threshold he paused to murmur, with a regretful glance at the denuded studio: “You could half done it, Mr. Sdanwell—you could haf done it!”

  II

  Kate Arran was Stanwell’s sitter; but the janitor had hardly filled the stove when she came in to say 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 to-day 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 of 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 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 offspring lodged. 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 gray look, which the worker in clay usually creates about him. In the center 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.

  “Hallo! 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 humor 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. “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 comparison, 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 practiced 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 descend 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 endeavor).

  “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 mustache and mildly-bulging eyes.

  “Ah, Mungold,” exclaimed Stanwell, to cover the gloomy silence with which Arran received the newcomer; 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.”

  He looked about him with a smile evidently intended as the first act in his beneficent program.

  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 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 back-ground 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 rumor 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 colors. 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 footing in her brother’s studio.