Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “A student of art,” said Ludlow, with the effect of uncovering himself in a presence.

  The mother did not know what to make of it apparently; she said blankly, “Oh!” and then added impressively, to her daughter: “Why don’t you show them to him, Cornelia?”

  “I should think it a great favor,” said Ludlow, intending to be profoundly respectful. But he must have overdone it. The girl majestically gave her drawings to her mother, and marched out of the aisle.

  Ludlow ignored her behavior, as if it had nothing to do with the question, and began to look at the drawings, one after another, with various inarticulate notes of comment imitated from a great French master, and with various foreign phrases, such as “Bon! Bon! Pas mauvais! Joli! Chic!” He seemed to waken from them to a consciousness of the mother, and returned to English. “They are very interesting. Has she had instruction?”

  “Only in the High School, here. And she didn’t seem to care any for that. She seems to want to work more by herself.”

  “That’s wrong,” said Ludlow, “though she’s probably right about the High School.”

  The mother made bold to ask, “Where are you taking lessons?”

  “I?” said Ludlow, dreamily. “Oh! everywhere.”

  “I thought, perhaps,” the mother began, and she stopped, and then resumed, “How many lessons do you expect to take?”

  IV.

  Ludlow descended from the high horse which he saw it was really useless for him to ride in that simple presence. “I didn’t mean that I was a student of art in that sense, exactly. I suppose I’m a painter of some sort. I studied in Paris, and I’m working in New York — if that’s what you mean.”

  “Yes,” said the lady, as if she did not know quite what she meant.

  Ludlow still remained in possession of the sketches, and he now looked at them with a new knot between his eyebrows. He had known at the first glance, with the perception of one who has done things in any art, that here was the possibility of things in his art, and he had spoken from a generous and compassionate impulse, from his recognition of the possibility, and from his sympathy with the girl in her defeat. Now his conscience began to prick him. He asked himself whether he had any right to encourage her, whether he ought not rather to warn her. He asked her mother: “Has she been doing this sort of thing long?”

  “Ever since she was a little bit of a thing,” said the mother. “You might say she’s been doing it ever since she could do anything; and she ain’t but about fifteen, now. Well, she’s going on sixteen,” the mother added, scrupulously. “She was born the third of July, and now it’s the beginning of September. So she’s just fifteen years and a little over two months. I suppose she’s too young to commence taking lessons regularly?”

  “No one would be too young for that,” said Ludlow, austerely, with his eyes on the sketch. He lifted them, and bent them frankly and kindly on the mother’s face. “And were you thinking of her going on?” The mother questioned him for his exact meaning with the sweet unwisdom of her smile. “Did you think of her becoming an artist, a painter?”

  “Well,” she returned, “I presume she would have as good a chance as anybody, if she had the talent for it.”

  “She has the talent for it,” said Ludlow, “and she would have a better chance than most — that’s very little to say — but it’s a terribly rough road.”

  “Yes,” the mother faltered, smiling.

  “Yes. It’s a hard road for a man, and it’s doubly hard for a woman. It means work that breaks the back and wrings the brain. It means for a woman, tears, and hysterics, and nervous prostration, and insanity — some of them go wild over it. The conditions are bad air, and long hours, and pitiless criticism; and the rewards are slight and uncertain. One out of a hundred comes to anything at all; one out of a thousand to anything worth while. New York is swarming with girl art-students. They mostly live in poor boarding-houses, and some of them actually suffer from hunger and cold. For men the profession is hazardous, arduous; for women it’s a slow anguish of endeavor and disappointment. Most shop-girls earn more than most fairly successful art-students for years; most servant-girls fare better. If you are rich, and your daughter wishes to amuse herself by studying art, it’s all very well; but even then I wouldn’t recommend it as an amusement. If you’re poor — —”

  “I presume,” the mother interrupted, “that she would be self-supporting by the time she had taken six months’ lessons, and I guess she could get along till then.”

  Ludlow stared at the amiably smiling creature. From her unruffled composure his warning had apparently fallen like water from the back of a goose. He saw that it would be idle to go on, and he stopped short and waited for her to speak again.

  “If she was to go to New York to take lessons, how do you think she’d better — —” She seemed not to know enough of the situation to formulate her question farther. He had pity on her ignorance, though he doubted whether he ought to have.

  “Oh, go into the Synthesis,” he said briefly.

  “The Synthesis?”

  “Yes; the Synthesis of Art Studies; it’s the only thing. The work is hard, but it’s thorough; the training’s excellent, if you live through it.”

  “Oh, I guess she’d live through it,” said the mother with a laugh. She added, “I don’t know as I know just what you mean by the Synthesis of Art Studies.”

  “It’s a society that the art-students have formed. They have their own building, and casts, and models; the principal artists have classes among them. You submit a sketch, and if you get in you work away till you drop, if you’re in earnest, or till you’re bored, if you’re amusing yourself.”

  “And should you think,” said the mother gesturing toward him with the sketches in her hand, “that she could get in?”

  “I think she could,” said Ludlow, and he acted upon a sudden impulse. He took a card from his pocketbook, and gave it to the mother. “If you’ll look me up when you come to New York, or let me know, I may be of use to you, and I shall be very glad to put you in the way of getting at the Synthesis.”

  “Thanks,” the mother drawled with her eyes on the card. She probably had no clear sense of the favor done her. She lifted her eyes and smiled on Ludlow with another kind of intelligence. “You’re visiting at Mrs. Burton’s.”

  “Yes,” said Ludlow, remembering after a moment of surprise how pervasive the fact of a stranger’s presence in a village is. “Mr. Burton can tell you who I am,” he added in some impatience with her renewed scrutiny of his card.

  “Oh, it’s all right,” she said, and she put it in her pocket, and then she began to drift away a little. “Well, I’m sure I’m much obliged to you.” She hesitated a moment, and then she said, “Well, good afternoon.”

  “Good-by,” said Ludlow, and he lifted his hat and stood bowing her out of the Fine Arts Department, while she kept her eyes on him to the last with admiration and approval.

  “Well, I declare, Cornelia,” she burst out to her daughter, whom she found glowering at the agricultural implements, “that is about the nicest fellow! Do you know what he’s done?” She stopped and began a search for her pocket, which ended successfully. “He’s given me his name, and told me just what you’re to do. And when you get to New York, if you ever do, you can go right straight to him.”

  She handed Ludlow’s card to the girl, who instantly tore it to pieces without looking at it. “I’ll never go to him — horrid, mean, cross old thing! And you go and talk about me to a perfect stranger as if I were a baby. And now he’ll go and laugh at you with the Burtons, and they’ll say it’s just like you to say everything that comes into your head, that way, and think everybody’s as nice as they seem. But he isn’t nice! He’s horrid, and conceited, and — and — hateful. And I shall never study art anywhere. And I’d die before I asked him to help me. He was just making fun of you all the time, and anybody but you would see it, mother! Comparing me to a hired girl!”

  “No, I don
’t think he did that, Cornelia,” said the mother with some misgiving. “I presume he may have been a little touched up by your pictures, and wanted to put me down about them — —”

  “Oh, mother, mother, mother!” The girl broke into tears over the agricultural implements. “They were the dust under his feet.”

  “Why, Cornelia, how you talk!”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk, mother! I’ve asked you a thousand times, if I’ve asked you once, not to talk about me with anybody, and here you go and tell everything that you can think of to a person that you never saw before.”

  “What did I tell him about you?” asked her mother, with the uncertainty of ladies who say a great deal.

  “You told him how old I was almost to a day!”

  “Oh, well, that wasn’t anything! I saw he’d got to know if he was to give any opinion about your going on that was worth having.”

  “It’ll be all over town, to-morrow. Well, never mind! It’s the last time you’ll ever have a chance to do it. I’ll never, never, never touch a pencil to draw with again! Never! You’ve done it now, mother! I don’t care! I’ll help you with your work, all you want, but don’t ever ask me to draw a single thing after this. I guess he wouldn’t have much to say about the style of a bonnet, or set of a dress, if it was wrong!”

  The girl swept out of the building with tragedy-queen strides that refused to adjust themselves to the lazy, lounging pace of her mother, and carried her homeward so swiftly that she had time to bang the front gate and the front door, and her own room door and lock it, and be crying on the bed with her face in the pillow, long before her mother reached the house. The mother wore a face of unruffled serenity, and as there was no one near to see, she relaxed her vigilance, and smiled with luxurious indifference to the teeth she had lost.

  V.

  Ludlow found his friend Burton smoking on his porch when he came back from the fair, and watching with half-shut eyes the dust that overhung the street. Some of the farmers were already beginning to drive home, and their wheels sent up the pulverous clouds which the western sun just tinged with red; Burton got the color under the lower boughs of the maple grove of his deep door-yard.

  “Well,” he called out, in a voice expressive of the temperament which kept him content with his modest fortune and his village circumstance, when he might have made so much more and spent so much more in the world outside, “did you get your picture?”

  Ludlow was only half-way up the walk from the street when the question met him, and he waited to reach the piazza steps before he answered.

  “Oh, yes, I think I’ve got it.” By this time Mrs. Burton had appeared at the hall door-way, and stood as if to let him decide whether he would come into the house, or join her husband outside. He turned aside to take a chair near Burton’s, tilted against the wall, but he addressed himself to her.

  “Mrs. Burton, who is rather a long-strung, easy-going, good-looking, middle-aged lady, with a daughter about fifteen years old, extremely pretty and rather peppery, who draws?”

  Mrs. Burton at once came out, and sat sidewise in the hammock, facing the two men.

  “How were they dressed?”

  Ludlow told as well as he could; he reserved his fancy of the girl’s being like a hollyhock.

  “Was the daughter pretty?”

  “Very pretty.”

  “Dark?”

  “Yes, ‘all that’s best of dark and bright.’”

  “Were they both very graceful?”

  “Very graceful indeed.”

  “Why it must be Mrs. Saunders. Where did you see them?”

  “In the Art Department.”

  “Yes. She came to ask me whether I would exhibit some of Cornelia’s drawings, if I were she.”

  “And you told her you would?” her husband asked, taking his pipe out for the purpose.

  “Of course I did. That was what she wished me to tell her.”

  Burton turned to Ludlow. “Had they taken many premiums?”

  “No; the premiums had been bestowed on the crazy quilts and the medley pictures — what extraordinarily idiotic inventions! — and Miss Saunders was tearing down her sketches in the next section. One of them slipped through on the floor, and they came round after it to where I was.”

  “And so you got acquainted with Mrs. Saunders?” said Mrs. Burton.

  “No. But I got intimate,” said Ludlow. “I sympathized with her, and she advised with me about her daughter’s art-education.”

  “What did you advise her to do?” asked Burton.

  “Not to have her art-educated.”

  “Why, don’t you think she has talent?” Mrs. Burton demanded, with a touch of resentment.

  “Oh, yes. She has beauty, too. Nothing is commoner than the talent and beauty of American girls. But they’d better trust to their beauty.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Burton, with spirit.

  “You can see how she’s advised Mrs. Saunders,” said Burton, winking the eye next Ludlow.

  “Well, you mustn’t be vexed with me, Mrs. Burton,” Ludlow replied to her. “I don’t think she’ll take my advice, especially as I put it in the form of warning. I told her how hard the girl would have to work: but I don’t think she quite understood. I told her she had talent, too; and she did understand that; there was something uncommon in the child’s work; something — different. Who are they, Mrs. Burton?”

  “Isn’t there!” cried Mrs. Burton. “I’m glad you told the poor thing that. I thought they’d take the premium. I was going to tell you about her daughter. Mrs. Saunders must have been awfully disappointed.”

  “She didn’t seem to suffer much,” Ludlow suggested.

  “No,” Mrs. Burton admitted, “she doesn’t suffer much about anything. If she did she would have been dead long ago. First, her husband blown up by his saw-mill boiler, and then one son killed in a railroad accident, and another taken down with pneumonia almost the same day! And she goes on, smiling in the face of death — —”

  “And looking out that he doesn’t see how many teeth she’s lost,” Burton prompted.

  Ludlow laughed at the accuracy of the touch.

  Mrs. Burton retorted, “Why shouldn’t she? Her good looks and her good nature are about all she has left in the world, except this daughter.”

  “Are they very poor?” asked Ludlow, gently.

  “Oh, nobody’s very poor in Pymantoning,” said Mrs. Burton. “And Mrs. Saunders has her business, — when she’s a mind to work at it.”

  “I suppose she has it, even when she hasn’t a mind to work at it,” said Burton, making his pipe purr with a long, deep inspiration of satisfaction. “I know I have mine.”

  “What is her business?” asked Ludlow.

  “Well, she’s a dressmaker and milliner — when she is.” Mrs. Burton stated the fact with the effect of admitting it. “You mustn’t suppose that makes any difference. In a place like Pymantoning, she’s ‘as good as anybody,’ and her daughter has as high social standing. You can’t imagine how Arcadian we are out here.”

  “Oh, yes, I can; I’ve lived in a village,” said Ludlow.

  “A New England village, yes; but the lines are drawn just as hard and fast there as they are in a city. You have to live in the West to understand what equality is, and in a purely American population, like this. You’ve got plenty of independence, in New England, but you haven’t got equality, and we have, — or used to have.” Mrs. Burton added the final words with apparent conscience.

  “Just saved your distance, Polly,” said her husband. “We haven’t got equality now, any more than we’ve got buffalo. I don’t believe we ever had buffalo in this section; but we did have deer once; and when I was a boy here, venison was three cents a pound, and equality cheaper yet. When they cut off the woods the venison and the equality disappeared; they always do when the woods are cut off.”

  “There’s enough of it left for all practical purposes, and Mrs. Saunders moves in the first circles
of Pymantoning,” said Mrs. Burton.

  “When she does move,” said Burton. “She doesn’t like to move.”

  “Well, she has the greatest taste, and if you can get her to do anything for you your fortune’s made. But it’s a favor. She’ll take a thing that you’ve got home from the city, and that you’re frantic about, it’s so bad, and smile over it a little, and touch it here and there, and it comes out a miracle of style and becomingness. It’s like magic.”

  “She was charming,” said Ludlow, in dreamy reminiscence.

  “Isn’t she?” Mrs. Burton demanded. “And her daughter gets all her artistic talent from her. Mrs. Saunders is an artist, though I don’t suppose you like to admit it of a dressmaker.”

  “Oh, yes, I do,” said Ludlow. “I don’t see why a man or woman who drapes the human figure in stuffs, isn’t an artist as well as the man or woman who drapes it in paint or clay.”

  “Well, that’s sense,” Mrs. Burton began.

  “She didn’t know you had any, Ludlow,” her husband explained.

  Mrs. Burton did not regard him. “If she had any ambition she would be anything — just like some other lazy-boots,” and now she gave the large, dangling congress gaiter of her husband a little push with the point of her slipper, for purposes of identification, as the newspapers say. “But the only ambition she’s got is for her daughter, and she is proud of her, and she would spoil her if she could get up the energy. She dotes on her, and Nie is fond of her mother, too. Do you think she can ever do anything in art?”

  “If she were a boy, I should say yes; as she’s a girl, I don’t know,” said Ludlow. “The chances are against her.”

  “Nature’s against her, too,” said Burton.

  “Human nature ought to be for her, then,” said Mrs. Burton. “If she were your sister what should you wish her to be?” she asked Ludlow.

  “I should wish her to be” — Ludlow thought a moment and then concluded— “happily married.”

  “Well, that’s a shame!” cried Mrs. Burton.

  Her husband laughed, while he knocked the ashes out of his pipe against the edge of his chair-seat. “Rough on the holy estate of matrimony, Polly.”